Fewer Girls = A More Violent World
In light of the horrific news that came out of India during New Zealand’s summer holidays, I want to share with you all an impassioned article from the Sydney Morning Herald about the terrible plight of women around the world, and particularly in China and India. The authors, V Rukmini Rao and Lynette Dumble, are from the Gramya Resource Centre for Women in India, a “group of women who are development activists and from the women’s movement for equality”. In this article they argue that fewer girls will lead to a more dangerous, violent world: an argument that we ran at the beginning of 2011 on this blog.
The authors question the optimism of institutions like the World Bank, which claim that the child sex ratios skewed towards males in China and India are peaking and that the “missing girls” phenomenon can be addressed in Asia with “continuing vigorous efforts to reduce son preference”. Instead of solely blaming “patrilinear mindsets”, the authors recognise that those mindsets only brought about the current crisis in female numbers by:
“…acting in tandem with imposed population control programs, increasingly cheap technologies that identify an unborn child’s sex, and the availability of abortion that stretches beyond the rule of law…”
As we have seen so recently, a shortage of young women does not “empower” women, or make them more “valuable in their scarcity”. Instead:
“a masculinised sex ratio has instead amounted to the increased likelihood of girls and women contending with rape, abduction, bride-sharing, trafficking, forced marriage, and various other forms of violence and discrimination.”
This can be seen in both India and China:
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