With International Day of the Girl on 11 October fast approaching, World Vision France has published a report setting out the current situation, the figures of which are truly staggering: 12 million girls are married before the age of 18 every year, more than 230 million women and girls are living with the consequences of female genital mutilation, and conflict-related sexual violence continues to rise.
Perhaps the most terrible thing about these figures is that, through constant repetition, they risk becoming abstract. Twelve million. Two hundred and thirty million. Thousands of victims recorded in war zones. Numbers so vast that they almost end up shielding us from what they reveal. Yet behind each one lies a real childhood, a real body, a life that could have taken a completely different course.
Child marriage is one of the most widespread examples of this. World Vision points out that 12 million girls are married before the age of 18 every year. This figure is also cited by UNICEF, which estimates that a girl is married in this way roughly every three seconds. In World Vision’s press release, the phenomenon is described as closely linked to poverty and crises: when a family loses its income, a school closes or a conflict disrupts a community, early marriage can be seen as an immediate economic solution. For the girl concerned, it often means dropping out of school, an early pregnancy and increased dependence.
The same is true of female genital mutilation. More than 230 million girls and women alive today have undergone the procedure, according to UNICEF estimates. The organisation also highlights that several million girls remain at risk of this practice every year. World Vision estimates that 4.5 million girls will still be at risk by 2026, many of them before the age of five, with consequences ranging from infections and haemorrhages to psychological trauma and complications during childbirth.
But it is perhaps in times of war that this control over girls’ bodies takes its most terrifying form. The latest United Nations report on conflict-related sexual violence verified 9,788 cases in 2025 alone – more than double the figure for the previous year. The UN emphasises a key point: these are only the cases it has been able to verify, in areas where access to victims is often extremely difficult. The actual number is therefore likely to be much higher.
In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, World Vision describes a situation where rape is used as a weapon of war and where girls account for a significant proportion of the recorded victims. The press release reports 1,534 victims of conflict-related sexual violence in 2025, including 672 young girls, mainly in North and South Kivu. This violence is not limited to the act itself: it can be followed by social exclusion, forced pregnancy, lasting trauma and, in areas where medical facilities have disappeared, an almost total inability to obtain prompt medical care.
And then there is Afghanistan, an almost caricatural example of what it means to gradually deprive half the population of the ability to make decisions about their own lives. Since the Taliban returned to power in 2021, girls have been excluded from secondary education and women from universities. In August 2026, UNESCO estimated that 2.4 million girls were being denied secondary education and pointed out that Afghanistan remains the only country in the world where girls’ and women’s access to education beyond primary level is formally prohibited.
School, of course, is not just a classroom. It offers the chance to one day earn a living, to understand one’s rights, to meet other people, and to choose one’s own future. World Vision describes a cycle in which school closures increase economic and family dependence and further reduce the autonomy of young Afghan women. The NGO states that it has maintained health, nutrition, protection and education programmes in the country and reports having reached 1.5 million people in 2025, including 808,000 children, notably through learning initiatives organised within communities.
One might view all this as a collection of distant tragedies. That would be precisely the trap. These situations do not share the same history or the same causes, and to conflate them would be absurd. But they do have one thing in common: when a society is beset by poverty, war, the collapse of the state or the tightening of authoritarian norms, girls’ rights can be among the first to be sacrificed.
The solutions, however, are far less mysterious than the problem: keeping girls in school, protecting victims, funding healthcare, combating early marriage and female genital mutilation, ensuring humanitarian organisations have access to affected populations, and upholding fundamental rights. World Vision France calls in particular on governments and donors to maintain the budgets allocated to these policies and to strengthen the protection of girls in conflict zones.
Above all, one troubling question remains. Why, in 2026, do we still need an ‘International Day of the Girl’ to remind us of something that should be self-evident? A girl should not have to be brave simply to go to school. She should not have to become a survivor before she has even reached adulthood. Her body should not belong to a family, a tradition, an armed group or a government.
Being born a girl should be neither a sentence nor a struggle. It should simply be the beginning of a life.
