[UNFPA] February is a busy month for retailers marketing the promise of "happily ever after" to girls around the world. But for tens of millions of girls, this is just a fairytale. Their girlhoods are ending, not with storybook romance but with harmful rites of passage such as child marriage and female genital mutilation - practices believed to be increasing as the COVID-19 pandemic forces girls out of school and drags their families into poverty.
