An inspiring message - by Nicole Pope, Today's Zaman, 7 October 2013

This week marks the anniversary of the attack on Malala Yousafzai, the young Pakistani girl from the Swat Valley who was shot by the Taliban for defying their campaign to prevent girls from attending school and publicly defending their right to education.

Malala, who survived the brutal assault with serious head injuries, has become a powerful symbol inspiring many young girls around the world to fight for their rights. Her impassioned speech at the UN on July 12, 2013, on her 16th birthday, clearly established her as a global role model. The young woman, brave and wise beyond her years, will remain influential for years to come. She is now even talked about as a possible recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. Malala's courage and determination are clearly exemplary, as the Taliban continue to say they want to kill her. Supported by her father, an educator who believed early on in his daughter's abilities, she first expressed publicly what education meant for her in 2009, at the tender age of 11, when she wrote an anonymous and moving blog for the BBC website, which revealed her dreams and aspirations. "I didn't want my future to be sitting in a room, imprisoned in my four walls and just cooking and giving birth,” she recently told the BBC. Now living with her family in Birmingham in the United Kingdom, where she underwent medical treatment, the young Pakistani activist is still fired by a desire to learn and to fulfill her potential. She carefully balances the demands created by her newfound fame with her school work and her life as a teenager. Her resistance to extremist policies imposed by armed radicals has raised awareness of the importance of education in the empowerment of women. But the focus on this strong teenager and her extraordinary story should not obscure the more mundane obstacles that many other young girls of her age face around the world. In her misfortune, Malala has been fortunate to have supportive parents who believed in educating their daughter. For many of her peers, in Pakistan and elsewhere in the world, the main obstacles are at home and in the community, where traditional perceptions of gender roles curb young girls' ambitions. In Turkey, the gender gap in primary education has largely been closed in the past decade, thanks to dedicated government campaigns supported by international institutions and the private sector. But the battle hasn't yet entirely been won. Too many young girls still attend school irregularly or have their education curtailed when they are married off before reaching the age of 18. The NGO Flying Broom, which has been working on this issue for years, has collected numerous tragic stories of violence, suicide and depression involving young women married off at an early age. While the rate of early marriages has decreased from 14.6 to 7.6 percent in the past decade, according to statistics quoted earlier this year by Family and Social Policy Minister Fatma Şahin, it still means that one in 13 marriages involves a child. In such cases, it is community or family pressure to conform that imposes constraints. Resisting is made all the more difficult by the fact that emotional ties, and a desire to please the family, are involved. Poverty is another factor robbing many children of their right to education. Child labor remains a serious issue in Turkey, and every year, tens of thousands of children, boys as well as girls, travel across the country in the summer, following their families in search of seasonal agricultural work. In most cases, this means compromising their chances of educational success by missing significant periods at the beginning and end of the school year. Malala Yousafzai's story of survival is one that took place against an extreme backdrop. Her message in favor of girls' education is, however, a universal one that should resonate well beyond places where this right can be taken away at gunpoint. Courtesy: Today's Zaman, 7 October 2013