Girl babies don't count - Gendercide Part II

Xinran Xue, a Chinese writer, described a gruesome visit to a peasant family in the Shandong province. The peasant's wife gave birth to baby girl in the home and to Xinran's horror the baby was thrown in a slop pail like roadside dirt by the midwife. The mother was crying as the husband was cursing her out. Xinran tried to save the baby but was stopped by the two police men who had accompanied her. "Don't move," they said. "You can't save it, it's too late." An older woman in the home justified what had happened explained that the baby was not a child. "It's a girl baby, and we can't keep it. Around these parts, you can't get by without a son. Girl babies don't count."

Genocide in China is usually seen as a consequence of the one-child policy or as a product of poverty or ignorance. But it has become clear that there is more to it than these assumed factors. Research shows that between 1990 and 2005 there was surplus of bachelors, known in China as guanggun (bare branches). This increase was not linked to the one child policy. It was a direct result of the war against baby girls.

Like India, China's gender ratio is totally skewed. According to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), the ratio in 2011 is 123 boy per 100 girls. These rates are biologically impossible without human intervention.  Nick Eberstadt, a demographer at the American Enterprise Institute, describes it as "the fateful collision between overweening son preference, the use of rapidly spreading prenatal sex-determination technology and declining fertility.

Other countries that show a skewed sex-ratio included Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Serbia, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, Cyprus and Bosnia. The surprising thing is seeing countries as rich and well educated as South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore with high sex-ratio slanted towards males.

 In South Korea, the surplus of bachelors has sucked in brides from abroad. In 2008, 11% of marriages were "mixed" mostly between a Korean man and a foreign woman. South Koreans are known to be hostile to children of mixed marriages and this new trend of importing brides is causing tensions in this homogenous society. This trend is being seen particularly in the rural areas and the government predicts that half the children from these areas will be mixed by 2020. The population of mixed children has grown enough to have produced a new word: "Kosians" the short form of Korean-Asians.



Sources: The Economist

Because I am a girl

In my previous blog series I focused on the power of a First Lady and highlighted the wasted opportunities by some of these First Wives. In this next set of blogs I want to share the reality of gender inequality. This is an issue First Ladies around the world should rally around considering some of these atrocities are happening in their own backyards.

We are thinkers from an early age

Gender inequality is not a new issue but it is taking a long time to get traction and attention around the world. The reality is that across the world, girls face double-barreled discrimination due to their gender and age placing them at the bottom of the social strata.

Research shows that girls are more likely to suffer from malnutrition,  forced early marriage, violence and/or intimidation, trafficking, sold or coerced into sex trade or become infected with HIV.

It is only the girl-child that is subject to infanticide while still in the womb.

Plan International, a UK based, children's development organization, began a campaign called "Because I am a girl" in 2007. The purpose of the campaign is to fight gender inequality, promote girls' rights and lift millions of girls out of poverty. In their quest, Plan is producing one girl report each year in the run up to 2015, the target year for the Millennium Development Goals. Each report provides tangible proof of the inequalities that still exist between boys and girls. Their latest success was the United Nations declaration October 11 as the Day of the Girl.

Here are the sobering facts from one of the reports:

• I have the same rights as my brothers, yet I am discriminated against even before I am born.
• I and 68,000 teenage girls will die from unsafe abortions this year.
• I and 62 million other girls are not in primary school.
• I and 2 million other girls will undergo female genital cutting this year.
• I and more than 100 million girls under 18, some as young as 12, are expected to marry over the next decade.

Below is a moving video based on the campaign.