Heartbreaking and Beautiful: #15Girls Tell ‘The Hardest Thing About Being 15’
This is a link to the whole gallery of submissions: tintup.com
It’s important not to lose sight of what these political elections are really all about.
The modern GOP is all about controlling women, and punishing them when they dare to act as though they had any rights, or indeed, were human beings at all.
The anti-Planned Parenthood hysteria, the insistence on cutbacks to AFDC, screeching over payments for birth control, denial that there’s even a problem with equal pay … these all boil down to a coordinated campaign by old white male religious fanatics.
In this regard, yes, they are the American Taliban. Their fear and hatred of strong, independent women manifests itself as sick, sadistic glee in constructing a system that forces women to get pregnant and bear children, and then denies them any sort of assistance once those children come into the world. No daycare. No preschool. No school lunches. No decent education. Nothing. Nothing but endless humiliation, shame and pain.
Read these stories to get a window into the resilient souls of these 15-year-old girls around the world. It is a remedy for all the ugliness of the modern GOP.
The question came as we launched a series of radio and digital stories looking at 15-year-old girls around the world. We profiled girls in El Salvador living in fear of gangs, a Syrian refugee who had to give up high school to work as a potato picker, a teenager in Nepal who has to sleep in a shed when she has her period, and a child bride in India who can delay going to live with her husband if she gets good grades in school.
Girls and women from the U.S. to Yemen rose to the challenge, digging deep to share their own poignant, personal stories of life at 15.