With Humanitarian News and Travel Stories, I hope to go beyond the news, to offer cultural insights and if possible, contact information for humanitarian groups working to right the wrongs of highlighted human rights abuses. For example, the following article from BBC News, 'Nigeria 'baby farm' girls rescued by Abia state,' is another example of the downside of patriarchy, when social norms, tradition, politics and economics are controlled by men. Here, pregnant young girls are allegedly being used as 'baby machines' and their offspring sold for adoption or for purposes of witchcraft.
Why Witchcraft? The young girls in the article were supposedly paid the equivalent of USD $170 for their newborns, a huge sum for a desperate, poor, socially ostracized unwed mother. Greedy people in less developed countries selling infants for illegal adoptions is not a new story. On the other hand, selling newborns for witchcraft rituals is less common and far more difficult to comprehend, particularly in the West.
Stepping Stones Nigeria has produced an informative overview of witchcraft in Nigeria entitled, "Witchcraft Accusations: A Protection Concern for UNHCR and the Wider Humanitarian Community?" This paper was presented by Gary Foxcroft, Programme Director of Stepping Stones Nigeria to the UNHCR on April 6, 2009, and can be found in its' entirety on their website. Briefly, the document explains how a belief in witchcraft is part of peoples' mentality - it is real. However, there are certain conditions under which a belief in the power of witches to cause harm accelerates and leads to the torture and even death of the most vulnerable members of a community - children, women and the elderly. According to the report:
Belief in witchcraft can be conceptualized as an attempt by people to rationalize the misfortunes occurring in their life; it shapes perceptions and provides an answer to ‘why me?’ when disaster strikes. Put simply it provides an explanation for what would be otherwise unexplainable. Witchcraft accusations can therefore be seen to follow the patterns of tension and conflict in societies. Indeed the UK Ambassador to the Democratic Republic of Congo, Andy Sparks, when speaking about the child witch crisis in DRC purported that:
“Accusations of sorcery are a convenient excuse for a particularly cruel way of dealing with poverty, and religion is used as its pretext. Cruelty like this should be punished, regardless of whether it is executed in the name of religion or not. It is not natural for Congolese to behave in this way. It is a recent phenomenon. The consequences of war and the subsequent massive aggravation of poverty are being exploited by a small number of pastors from private, revivalist churches who use vulnerable children as a platform upon which to exploit families that are struggling to feed themselves”.
In short, as social unrest, conflict and economic stress increase, people need a scapegoat and it is the poor and least powerful who bear the awful brunt of other peoples misfortune. Moreover, in Nigeria, accused child witches suffer severe violence at the hands of those who should be concerned for their social and spiritual welfare, evangelical pastors.
Nigeria 'baby farm' girls rescued by Abia state police
Nigerian police have raided a hospital in the south-eastern city of Aba, rescuing 32 pregnant girls allegedly held by a human-trafficking ring. Aged between 15 and 17 years, the girls were locked up and used to produce babies, said Abia state's police chief. These were then allegedly sold for ritual witchcraft purposes or adoption. But the hospital's owner denied running a "baby farm", saying it was a foundation to help teenagers with unwanted pregnancies.
The following article on child brides is from the June, 2011 issue of National Geographic. The author, Cynthia Gorney, teaches at the University of California Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Child marriage is a complicated issue comprised of economics, values and social tradition and the interviews and photos in this article are (sadly) illuminating.
In the course of teaching about 'other peoples' worlds,' I use two very good ethnographies from Iraq and Egypt that provide an insider's perspective on these arranged partnerships between adolescent girls and, most often, their cousins. Indeed, it is the women/mothers themselves who know too well the importance of marriage, good or not, to the well-being of girls who, if they remain unattached, may face ridicule, pity, violence or economic hardship. The first is Writing Women's Worlds by Lila Abu Lughood. Giving us the voices of Bedouin women of many generations, Lila Abu Lughood aims to show that the value attached to piety, chastity, to being a good wife/daughter/woman in Muslim society is not just determined by tradition but contested by the context of everyday life.
The second, Guests of the Sheik: an ethnography of an Iraqi village by Elizabeth Fernea, also provides a woman's view of family, religion, piety, chastity and marriage. In the village of El Nahra, thoughts on and talk of getting married are part of every young girl's every day reality. Living in rural Iraq, Elizabeth Fernea became friends with the women of the Sheik's harem and the tribal settlement who strictly followed traditional Muslims norms. Girls in this area were often engaged to their male cousins at birth and married in their early teens, bearing children before their first wedding anniversary. Those without a male cousin readied themselves early for a spinster's life devoted to taking care of their natal families. However, the lives of the women in El Nahra, as with those of the women in Writing Women's World's, were filled with humor, laughter, close friendships and loving children.
While child marriage is indeed emotionally, physically and psychologically unhealthy, especially for pre-adolescent girls, and should be universally abolished, it is important to understand the roots and traditions of the practice in order to examine ways to hasten its end. By listening to their conversations and participating in the tributes and tribulations of everyday life, these authors give depth and texture to the stories that follow in Cynthia Gorney's "Child Brides."
Too Young to Wed: The secret world of child brides
By Cynthia Gorney
Because the wedding was illegal and a secret, except to the invited guests, and because marriage rites in Rajasthan are often conducted late at night, it was well into the afternoon before the three girl brides in this dry farm settlement in the north of India began to prepare themselves for their sacred vows. They squatted side by side on the dirt, a crowd of village women holding sari cloth around them as a makeshift curtain, and poured soapy water from a metal pan over their heads. Two of the brides, the sisters Radha and Gora, were 15 and 13, old enough to understand what was happening. The third, their niece Rajani, was 5. She wore a pink T-shirt with a butterfly design on the shoulder. A grown-up helped her pull it off to bathe.
The grooms were en route from their own village, many miles away. No one could afford an elephant or the lavishly saddled horses that would have been ceremonially correct for the grooms' entrance to the wedding, so they were coming by car and were expected to arrive high-spirited and drunk. The only local person to have met the grooms was the father of the two oldest girls, a slender gray-haired farmer with a straight back and a drooping mustache. This farmer, whom I will call Mr. M, was both proud and wary as he surveyed guests funneling up the rocky path toward the bright silks draped over poles for shade; he knew that if a nonbribable police officer found out what was under way, the wedding might be interrupted mid-ceremony, bringing criminal arrests and lingering shame to his family.
Rajani was Mr. M's granddaughter, the child of his oldest married daughter. She had round brown eyes, a broad little nose, and skin the color of milk chocolate. She lived with her grandparents. Her mother had moved to her husband's village, as rural married Indian women are expected to do, and this husband, Rajani's father, was rumored to be a drinker and a bad farmer. The villagers said it was the grandfather, Mr. M, who loved Rajani most; you could see this in the way he had arranged a groom for her from the respectable family into which her aunt Radha was also being married. This way she would not be lonely after her gauna, the Indian ceremony that marks the physical transfer of a bride from her childhood family to her husband's. When Indian girls are married as children, the gauna is supposed to take place after puberty, so Rajani would live for a few more years with her grandparents—and Mr. M had done well to protect this child in the meantime, the villagers said, by marking her publicly as married.
These were things we learned in a Rajasthan village during Akha Teej, a festival that takes place during the hottest months of spring, just before the monsoon rains, and that is considered an auspicious time for weddings. We stared miserably at the 5-year-old Rajani as it became clear that the small girl in the T-shirt, padding around barefoot and holding the pink plastic sunglasses someone had given her, was also to be one of the midnight ceremony's brides. The man who had led us to the village, a cousin to Mr. M, had advised us only that a wedding was planned for two teenage sisters. That in itself was risky to disclose, as in India girls may not legally marry before age 18. But the techniques used to encourage the overlooking of illegal weddings—neighborly conspiracy, appeals to family honor—are more easily managed when the betrothed girls have at least reached puberty. The littlest daughters tend to be added on discreetly, their names kept off the invitations, the unannounced second or third bride at their own weddings. Rajani fell asleep before the ceremonials began. An uncle lifted her gently from her cot, hoisted her over one of his shoulders, and carried her in the moonlight toward the Hindu priest and the smoke of the sacred fire and the guests on plastic chairs and her future husband, a ten-year-old boy with a golden turban on his head.
The outsider's impulse toward child bride rescue scenarios can be overwhelming: Snatch up the girl, punch out the nearby adults, and run. Just make it stop. Above my desk, I have taped to the wall a photograph of Rajani on her wedding night. In the picture it's dusk, six hours before the marriage ceremony, and her face is turned toward the camera, her eyes wide and untroubled, with the beginnings of a smile. I remember my own rescue fantasies roiling that night—not solely for Rajani, whom I could have slung over my own shoulder and carried away alone, but also for the 13- and the 15-year-old sisters who were being transferred like requisitioned goods, one family to another, because a group of adult males had arranged their futures for them.
The people who work full-time trying to prevent child marriage, and to improve women's lives in societies of rigid tradition, are the first to smack down the impertinent notion that anything about this endeavor is simple. Forced early marriage thrives to this day in many regions of the world—arranged by parents for their own children, often in defiance of national laws, and understood by whole communities as an appropriate way for a young woman to grow up when the alternatives, especially if they carry a risk of her losing her virginity to someone besides her husband, are unacceptable.
Child marriage spans continents, language, religion, caste. In India the girls will typically be attached to boys four or five years older; in Yemen, Afghanistan, and other countries with high early marriage rates, the husbands may be young men or middle-aged widowers or abductors who rape first and claim their victims as wives afterward, as is the practice in certain regions of Ethiopia. Some of these marriages are business transactions, barely adorned with additional rationale: a debt cleared in exchange for an 8-year-old bride; a family feud resolved by the delivery of a virginal 12-year-old cousin. Those, when they happen to surface publicly, make for clear and outrage-inducing news fodder from great distances away. The 2008 drama of Nujood Ali, the 10-year-old Yemeni girl who found her way alone to an urban courthouse to request a divorce from the man in his 30s her father had forced her to marry, generated worldwide headlines and more recently a book, translated into 30 languages: I am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced.
But inside a few of the communities in which parent-arranged early marriage is common practice—amid the women of Rajani's settlement, for example, listening to the mournful sound of their songs to the bathing brides—it feels infinitely more difficult to isolate the nature of the wrongs being perpetrated against these girls. Their educations will be truncated not only by marriage but also by rural school systems, which may offer a nearby school only through fifth grade; beyond that, there's the daily bus ride to town, amid crowded-in, predatory men. The middle school at the end of the bus ride may have no private indoor bathroom in which an adolescent girl can attend to her sanitary needs. And schooling costs money, which a practical family is surely guarding most carefully for sons, with their more readily measurable worth. In India, where by long-standing practice most new wives leave home to move in with their husbands' families, the Hindi term paraya dhan refers to daughters still living with their own parents. Its literal meaning is "someone else's wealth."
Remember this too: The very idea that young women have a right to select their own partners—that choosing whom to marry and where to live ought to be personal decisions, based on love and individual will—is still regarded in some parts of the world as misguided foolishness. Throughout much of India, for example, a majority of marriages are still arranged by parents. Strong marriage is regarded as the union of two families, not two individuals. This calls for careful negotiation by multiple elders, it is believed, not by young people following transient impulses of the heart.
So in communities of pressing poverty, where nonvirgins are considered ruined for marriage and generations of ancestors have proceeded in exactly this fashion—where grandmothers and great-aunts are urging the marriages forward, in fact, insisting, I did it this way and so shall she—it's possible to see how the most dedicated anti-child-marriage campaigner might hesitate, trying to fathom where to begin. "One of our workers had a father turn to him, in frustration," says Sreela Das Gupta, a New Delhi health specialist who previously worked for the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW), one of several global nonprofits working actively against early marriage. "This father said, 'If I am willing to get my daughter married late, will you take responsibility for her protection?' The worker came back to us and said, 'What am I supposed to tell him if she gets raped at 14?' These are questions we don't have answers to."
I heard the story of the rat and the elephant one day in early summer, some weeks into my time among girls who are expected to marry very young. I was in the backseat of a small car in remote western Yemen, traveling along with a man named Mohammed, who had offered to bring us to a particular village down the road. "What happened in this village has given me strong feelings," he said. "There was a girl here. Ayesha is her name." The Prophet Muhammad's youngest wife was also named Ayesha, but this was not of interest to our Mohammed just now. He was extremely angry. "She is 10 years old," he said. "Very tiny. The man she married is 50 years old, with a big belly, like so." Spreading his arm around him, he indicated massive girth. "Like a rat getting married to an elephant."
Mohammed described the arrangement called shighar, in which two men provide each other with new brides by exchanging female relatives. "These men married each other's daughters," Mohammed said. "If the ages had been proper between the husbands and new wives, I don't think anyone would have reported it. But girls should not marry when they are 9 or 10. Maybe 15 or 16." Fifty families live in the rock and concrete houses of the village we visited, between cactus stands and dry furrowed farm plots. The local leader, or sheikh, was short and red-bearded, with a mobile phone jammed under his belt beside his traditional Yemeni dagger. He showed us to a low-ceilinged house crowded with women, babies, and girls. They sat on the carpeted floors and beds, and more kept ducking through the doorway to squeeze in; the sheikh squatted in their midst, frowning and interrupting. He regarded me dubiously.
"You have children?" he asked. Two, I said, and the sheikh looked dismayed. "Only two!" He tipped his head toward a young woman nursing a baby in one arm while fending off two small children with the other. "This young lady is 26," he said. "She has had ten." Her name was Suad. The sheikh was her father. She had been married at 14 to a cousin he selected. "I liked him," Suad said, her voice low, as the sheikh kept his eyes upon her. "I was happy."
The sheikh made various pronouncements concerning marriage. He said no father ever forces his daughter to marry against her will. He said the medical dangers of early childbirth were greatly exaggerated. He said initiation to marriage was not necessarily easy, from the bride's point of view, but that it was pointless to become agitated about this. "Of course every girl gets scared the first night," the sheikh said. "She gets used to it. Life goes on." His phone tootled. He extracted it from his belt and stepped outside. I pulled the scarf off my hair, something I'd seen my interpreter do when men were gone and the intimate talk of women was under way. Speaking quickly, we asked, How are you all prepared for your wedding night? Are you taught what to expect?
The women glanced toward the doorway, where the sheikh was absorbed in his phone call. They leaned forward. "The girls do not know," one said. "The men know, and they force them."
Could they tell us about young Ayesha and her elephant husband of 50? The women all started talking at once: It was an awful thing; it should have been forbidden, but they were helpless to stop it. Little Ayesha screamed when she saw the man she was to marry, said a young woman named Fatima, who turned out to be Ayesha's older sister. Someone alerted the police, but Ayesha's father ordered her to put on high heels to look taller and a veil to hide her face. He warned that if he was sent to jail, he would kill Ayesha when he got out. The police left without troubling anyone, and at present—the women talked urgently and quietly now, because the sheikh appeared to be ending his conversation—Ayesha was living in a village two hours away, married. "She has a mobile phone," Fatima said. "Every day, she calls me and cries."
"If there were any danger in early marriage, Allah would have forbidden it," a Yemeni member of parliament named Mohammed Al-Hamzi told me in the capital city of Sanaa one day. "Something that Allah himself did not forbid, we cannot forbid." Al-Hamzi, a religious conservative, is vigorously opposed to the legislative efforts in Yemen to prohibit marriage for girls below a certain age (17, in a recent version), and so far those efforts have met with failure. Islam does not permit marital relations before a girl is physically ready, he said, but the Holy Koran contains no specific age restrictions and so these matters are properly the province of family and religious guidance, not national law. Besides, there is the matter of the Prophet Muhammad's beloved Ayesha—nine years old, according to the conventional account, when the marriage was consummated.
Other Yemeni Muslims invoked for me the scholarly argument that Ayesha was actually older when she had marital relations—perhaps a teenager, perhaps 20 or more. In any case her precise age is irrelevant, they would add firmly; any modern-day man demanding marriage with a young girl dishonors the faith. "In Islam, the human body is very valuable," said Najeeb Saeed Ghanem, chairman of the Yemeni Parliament's Health and Population Committee. "Like jewelry." He listed some of the medical consequences of forcing girls into sex and childbirth before they are physically mature: Ripped vaginal walls. Fistulas, the internal ruptures that can lead to lifelong incontinence. Girls in active labor to whom nurses must explain the mechanics of human reproduction. "The nurses start by asking, 'Do you know what's happening?'" a Sanaa pediatrician told me. "'Do you understand that this is a baby that has been growing inside of you?'"
Yemeni society has no tradition of candor about sex, even among educated mothers and daughters. The reality of these marriages—the murmured understanding that some parents truly are willing to deliver their girls to grown men—was rarely talked about openly until three years ago, when ten-year-old Nujood Ali suddenly became the most famous anti-child-marriage rebel in the world. Among Yemenis the great surprise in the Nujood story was not that Nujood's father had forced her to marry a man three times her age; nor that the man forced himself upon her the first night, despite supposed promises to wait until she was older, so that in the morning Nujood's new mother- and sister-in-law examined the bloodied sheet approvingly before lifting her from bed to give her a bath. No. Nothing in those details was especially remarkable. The surprise was that Nujood fought back.
"Her case was, you know, the stone that disturbed the water," says one of the Yemeni journalists who began writing about Nujood after she showed up alone one day in a courthouse in Sanaa. She had escaped her husband and come home. She had defied her father when he shouted at her that the family's honor depended on her fulfilling her wifely obligations. Her own mother was too cowed to intervene. It was her father's second wife who finally gave Nujood a blessing and taxi money and told her where to go, and when an astonished judge asked her what she was doing in the big city courthouse by herself, Nujood said she wanted a divorce. A prominent female Yemeni attorney took up Nujood's case. News stories began appearing in English, first in Yemen and then internationally; both the headlines and Nujood herself were irresistible, and when she was finally granted her divorce, crowds in the Sanaa courthouse burst into applause. She was invited to the United States, to be honored before more cheering audiences.
Everyone Nujood met was bowled over by her unnerving combination of gravity and poise. When I met her in a Sanaa newspaper office, she was wearing a third-grader-size black abaya, the full covering Yemeni women use in public after puberty. Even though she had now traveled across the Atlantic and back and been grilled by scores of inquisitive grown-ups, she was as sweet and direct as if my questions were brand-new to her. At lunch she snuggled in beside me as we sat on prayer mats and showed me how to dip my flat bread into the shared pot of stew. She said she was living at home again and attending school (her father, publicly excoriated, had grudgingly taken her back), and in her notebooks she was composing an open letter to Yemeni parents: "Don't let your children get married. You'll spoil their educations, and you'll spoil their childhoods if you let them get married so young."
Social change theory has a fancy label for individuals like Nujood Ali: "positive deviants," the single actors within a community who through some personal combination of circumstance and moxie are able to defy tradition and instead try something new, perhaps radically so. Amid the international campaigns against child marriage, positive deviants now include the occasional mother, father, grandmother, teacher, village health worker, and so on—but some of the toughest are the rebel girls themselves, each of their stories setting off new rebellions in its wake. In Yemen I met 12-year-old Reem, who obtained her divorce a few months after Nujood's; in doing so she won over a hostile judge who had insisted, memorably, that so young a bride is not yet mature enough to make a decision about divorce. In India I met the 13-year-old Sunil, who at 11 swore to her parents that she would refuse the groom who was about to arrive; if they tried force, she declared, she would denounce them to police and break her father's head. "She came to us for help," an admiring neighbor told me. "She said, 'I'm going to smash his head with a stone.'"
The push to reach many more underage girls and their families, through education programs and scattered government or agency-supported efforts, is targeted way beyond just the prepubescent marriages that most easily rouse public indignation. "The public loves those kinds of stories, where there's a clear right and wrong," says Saranga Jain, an adolescent-health specialist. "But the majority of girls getting married underage are 13 to 17. We want to recharacterize the problem as not just about very young girls."
From the ICRW's point of view, any marriage of a teen under 18 is a child marriage, and although definitive tallies are impossible, researchers estimate that every year 10 to 12 million girls in the developing world marry that young. Efforts to reduce this number are mindful of the varied forces pushing a teenager to marry and begin childbearing, thus killing her chances at more education and decent wages. Coercion doesn't always come in the form of domineering parents. Sometimes girls bail out on their childhoods because it's expected of them or because their communities have nothing else to offer. What seems to work best, when marriage-delaying programs do take hold, is local incentive rather than castigation: direct inducements to keep girls in school, along with schools they can realistically attend. India trains village health workers called sathins, who monitor the well-being of area families; their duties include reminding villagers that child marriage is not only a crime but also a profound harm to their daughters. It was a Rajasthan sathin, backed by the sathin's own enlightened in-laws, who persuaded the 11-year-old Sunil's parents to give up the marriage plan and let her go back to school.
Because the impossible flaw in the grab-the-girl-and-run fantasy is: Then what? "If we separate a girl and isolate her from her community, what will her life be like?" asks Molly Melching, the founder of a Senegal-based organization called Tostan, which has won international respect for its promotion of community-led programs that motivate people to abandon child marriage and female genital cutting. Tostan workers encourage communities to make public declarations of the standards for their children, so that no one girl is singled out as different if not married young.
"You don't want to encourage girls to run away," Melching says. "The way you change social norms is not by fighting them or humiliating people and saying they're backward. We've seen that an entire community can choose very quickly to change. It's inspiring."
The one person who explained most eloquently to me the excruciating balance required to grow up both independent and respectful within a culture of early marriage was a 17-year-old Rajasthan girl named Shobha Choudhary. Shobha was in her school uniform, a dark pleated skirt with a tucked-in white blouse, the first time I met her. She had severe eyebrows, an erect bearing, and shiny black hair combed into a ponytail. She was in her final year of high school and a scholarly standout; in her village she had been spotted years earlier by the Veerni Project, which disperses workers throughout northern India in search of bright girls whose parents might let them leave home for a free education at its girls' boarding school in the city of Jodhpur.
Shobha is married and has been since she was eight. Picture the occasion: a group ceremony, a dozen village girls, great excitement in a place of great poverty. "Beautiful new clothes," Shobha told me, with a mirthless smile. "I didn't know the meaning of marriage. I was very happy." Yes, she said, she had seen her young husband since the wedding. But only briefly. He is a few years older. So far she had managed to postpone the gauna, the transition to married life in his household. She looked away when I asked her impression of him and said, he is not educated. We regarded each other, and she shook her head; there was no possibility, none, that she would disgrace her parents by delaying the gauna forever: "I have to be with him. I'll make him study and understand things. But I will not leave him." She wanted to go to college, she said. Her intense wish was to qualify for the Indian police force so she could specialize in enforcement of the child marriage prohibition law. She had been keeping a diary throughout high school. One of the entries read, in carefully lettered Hindi: "In front of my eyes, I'll never ever allow child marriages to happen. I'll save each and every girl."
Every time I visited Shobha's village, her parents served chai, or spiced tea, in their best cups, and the Shobha stories thickened in their layers of pride and dissembling and uneasiness as to what the foreign visitor was up to. It wasn't a wedding! It was only an engagement party! All right, it was a wedding, but that was before the Veerni people made their kind offer and Shobha's capability had astounded them all. It was Shobha who had figured out how to obtain electricity for the house, so that she and her younger siblings could study after dark. "I can sign things," Shobha's mother told me. "She taught me how to write my name." And now, her parents indicated, this fine episode was surely concluding—and it was time. The husband was calling Shobha's cell phone, demanding a date. Her grandmother wanted the gauna before old age overcame her. The classes in Jodhpur were both Shobha's passion and her delaying tactic, but Veerni support runs only through high school; to stay on and cover the cost of college, Shobha needed a donor. The email arrived after I'd returned to the United States: "How are you I miss you Mam. Mam I am pursuing B.A. 1st year I also want to do English spoken course and computer course. Please reply mam fastly it is urgent for admission date in college."
My husband and I made the donation. "Let's see what happens," Shobha had said to me, the last time I saw her in India. "Whatever will be, I have to adjust. Because women have to sacrifice." We were in the cooking room of her family's home that afternoon, and my voice rose more than I intended: Why must women be the ones to sacrifice, I asked, and the look Shobha gave me suggested that only one of us, at that moment, understood the world in which she lives. "Because our country is man-oriented," she said.
She has completed more than a year now of post–high school study: computer training, preparation for the police exams. I receive emails from her occasionally—her English is halting but improving—and recently my Jodhpur Hindi interpreter borrowed a video camera and sat down with her, on my behalf, in a city café. Shobha said she was studying for the next exam. She had lodgings in a safe girls' hostel in the city. Her husband still called frequently. No gauna had yet taken place. She looked straight into the camera at one point, and in English, an enormous smile on her face, she said, "Nothing is impossible, Cynthia Mam. Everything is possible."
Two days after I received the video, a dispatch arrived from Yemen. Newspapers were reporting that a bride from a village had been dropped off at a Sanaa hospital four days after her wedding. Sexual intercourse appeared to have ruptured the girl's internal organs, hospital officials said. She had bled to death. She was 13 years old.
Since 1961, Amnesty International has been working to make sure that all people everywhere live in dignity with their voices heard. They will continue their efforts until no one is tortured or executed. Currently, there are 3 million supporters, members and activists in over 150 countries aiding the cause (from the web site, Amnesty International).
Syria's President Bashar al-Assad 'should be tried'
Hamza al-Khatib's death has become a rallying point for anti-government protesters
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad should face trial at a UN court over the "brutal" treatment of his people, Australia's foreign minister says. Kevin Rudd said incidents such as the alleged torture and murder of a 13-year-old boy by security forces had robbed Mr Assad of any legitimacy. Syrian officials have announced an inquiry into the boy's death.
Activists say more than 1,000 people have been killed and 10,000 arrested in weeks of anti-government protests. The 13-year-old boy, identified as Hamza al-Khatib, has become an icon of the uprising in Syria, says the BBC's Jim Muir. Activists say he was detained by security forces and tortured to death, while the authorities insist he was shot dead during a demonstration. Mr Rudd called it a "brutal act" and accused Mr Assad of taking "large-scale directed action" against his own people. "I believe it is high time that the Security Council now consider a formal referral of President Assad to the International Criminal Court," said Mr Rudd. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the boy's death showed the regime was deaf to the voice of its people. "I can only hope that this child did not die in vain but that the Syrian government will end the brutality and begin a transition to real democracy," she said. Hamza Khatib is being hailed as a martyr, and his picture is now held aloft at demonstrations around the country and abroad.
He is also being called a martyr by the Syrian authorities. The teenager's father and family were invited to meet President Assad, and they were quoted as saying they were overwhelmed by his kindness.
The boy went missing after a demonstration at an army barracks near Deraa in the south at the end of April. Activists say he was captured and tortured to death, and that his mutilated body was handed back to his family four weeks later. The government says he received three fatal gunshot wounds during the protest and died on the spot, but there was a delay in handing over his body because he was not identified.
In April, I posted Third Gender Legalized in Pakistan. Now, Nepal has included a third gender category in their recent census and is working to issue citizenship cards recognizing an alternative sex. Culturally, in many non Western societies, socially recognized third, fourth, fifth or even ninth gender categories found in Indonesia, Oman, Thailand and India were necessary due to the role gender played in occupational, political and social aspects of everyday life. One could suggest that in the West, with emphasis on skills not sex when it comes to employment, in many ways gender is irrelevant, negating the need for alternative gender classifications. Indeed, even people in the transgendered community are depicted most often as men becoming woman or women becoming men, not a third gender classification (yet, anyway).
Gays and lesbians are fighting against discrimination and for equal rights to marriage across the US, but large scale efforts to promote acceptance of third gender roles is generally not part of our culture (though there is a small group wishing to be 'genderless,' identified without pronouns, as neither male nor female). Perhaps it is simply a matter of semantics? Or the fact that job seekers cannot be rejected by potential employers due to race, ethnicity or sex that mutes the importance of nuance in gender classifications - for now.
Nepal census recognizes 'third gender'
By Manesh Shrestha, CNN
May 31, 2011 10:06 a.m. EDT
Members of the third gender community march in a gay parade in Kathmandu last year.
Kathmandu, Nepal (CNN) -- When census gatherers went door-to-door visiting 5.6 million households across Nepal this month, they collected information not only on the country's men and women, but also on a so-called third gender. In what is believed to be a world first, Nepal's Central Bureau of Statistics is giving official recognition to gay and transgender people -- a move seen as major victory for equality in a country that only decriminalized homosexual relationships three years ago.
Among those happy to stand up and be counted in the third gender category is Dilu Buduja, 35. "I was born as a girl, but as I grew up I felt I was a boy. Today I totally feel like a man," he said.
A spokesman for the statistics bureau, Bikash Bista, said the new categorization was an attempt to open up the traditionally conservative country up to different points of view. But the state's recognition of the rights of gender minorities, gays and lesbians has not come without a fight. "We had to put in a lot of pressure to have the third gender counted in the census," said gender minority rights activist Sunil Babu Pant. "It was only after we said that we would go to court that the officials agreed to include the third gender as a category." If the case had gone to court, it would likely have been upheld thanks to a landmark 2007 Supreme Court ruling that directed the state to end discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity and decriminalize "unnatural sex." It also decreed the issue of citizenship certificates that clearly indicate an individual's choice of gender identity.
Citizenship certificates, which work as national identity papers, are needed in Nepal to open a bank account, own property, secure a job and get a passport among other things. "The court also directed the government to form a committee to study what kind of laws can be made for same-sex marriage or civil union," said Hari Phuyal, a human rights lawyer who made the lead argument in the case. "Nepal's 2007 ruling was an inspiration to even India and the ruling document was studied by the Delhi High Court [of India ] when it decriminalized sodomy last year," he said.
Pant, Nepal's first openly gay lawmaker, described the ruling as "very satisfying," but said its implementation was an "extremely slow and painful process." His claim is underscored by the fact that Nepal 's Ministry of Home Affairs is yet to direct the country's 75 administrative districts to issue citizenship certificates that indicate gender identity. "Local authorities did not know about third gender and they were afraid that they would lose their jobs if they gave such a citizenship," said Buduja, who last month became only the second person in the country to obtain a citizenship certificate indicating gender.
Pradeep Khadka, of sexual and gender minority rights advocacy group Blue Diamond Society -- founded by Pant nearly a decade ago -- say delays in fully enforcing the 2007 ruling represent a struggle between conservative and liberal elements in Nepalese society. Though discrimination persists, there is progress. The government is also finalizing a list of discriminatory laws that need to be changed so that gender minorities can enjoy the same rights as others, including inheritance rights. Two years ago it also formed a committee to make recommendations on legislation governing same-sex marriage or civil union. It is in the final stages of the completing the report. "We visited several districts in the country and Norway to look at its experience and use it as a case study," said sociologist Chaitanya Mishra, a member of the recommendation committee.
According to another member of the committee, it will recommend that the government legalize same-sex marriage, which would be a first in South Asia. "There are 50 to 60 couples waiting to get married on the day same-sex marriage is legalized," said Buduja, who is among those hoping to tie the knot. But activists say, reluctance among officials to issue the sexuality-specific citizenship certificates means that day may be far away. And without the certificates, many may be reluctant to disclose sexuality to census gatherers."But this is an encouraging step forward," Pant said.
In my posting on the Aga Khan Development Network, I wrote about the organization's efforts to create businesses to put in place sustainable change for people in need. The following post is from a column called 'Fixes' in the New York Times. As reported by Tina Rosenberg, the challenge here was for a non-profit to create a sustainable business while at the same time work with, not try to change, poor mothers' behaviors regarding infant feeding. The aim is to improve their kids' nutrition by providing healthy snacks to choose from instead of fast food with few nutrients (perhaps this model would work in the US?).
Fixes explores solutions to major social problems. Each week, it examines creative initiatives that can tell us about the difference between success and failure. It is written by David Bornstein, author of “How to Change the World,” and founder of dowser.org, and Tina Rosenberg, contributing writer for The New York Times magazine and author of “Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World.”
Indriyati, 31, fed her daughter Aurelia, 20 months, porridge-style chicken and vegetables from the KeBal food cart.
On Tuesday I wrote about Kedai Balitaku, a for-profit company started last year by the development group Mercy Corps in Indonesia. Mercy Corps took this unusual step because it realized that its programs to educate mothers about nutrition were not changing what mothers fed their children. Healthy food is expensive, and the crowded conditions in the Jakarta slums mean that many families have no place to cook or eat. So they buy their children the cheapest street food, which is usually either sweet or deep fried. Kedai Balitaku, which usually goes by the name KeBal, aims to become a chain of street carts selling low-priced healthy food to children.
KeBal is a social business — one that exists primarily to achieve a social goal. It’s easy to see why the social businesses model has become a popular strategy for attacking the problems of the poor. The impulse to create a business rather than employ traditional nonprofit work comes partly out of the notion — right or wrong — that charity creates dependency and that without the discipline of the market it often doesn’t work. Development groups, moreover, are always looking for ways to make their projects live on once they’ve moved to other things. Creating a business is one solution.
“We were trying to get away from traditional model where everything is implemented by an N.G.O. (a non-governmental group) or by the government, and everything is dependent on the next round of funding,” said Sasha Muench, Mercy Corps’ economic development adviser. “As long as businesses are profitable, they have an inherent sustainability factor.”
But just like any other kind of project, social businesses are useful and successful only some of the time. Not every problem lends itself to a market solution, and many social businesses fail. Social businesses fall roughly into two different categories. Some try to employ people who wouldn’t otherwise have jobs: for example, fair trade groups that buy crafts from indigenous women to sell in wealthy countries. Others provide goods or services to people who otherwise can’t afford them. A few examples: Ecotact, a business started by a Kenyan entrepreneur, operates pay toilets and showers in 29 locations around Nairobi, helping to provide sanitation services to the 50 percent of Kenyans who lack them. LifeSpring runs a chain of low-cost maternity hospitals around South India, so far treating some 70,000 patients. MicroDrip, a spinoff from an Indian development organization, sells drip irrigation systems to small farmers in Pakistan to help them improve crop yields. AllLife in South Africa offers life and disability insurance to people with HIV. Grameen Danone Foods, a joint venture between the Grameen Group and the yogurt maker known to Americans as Dannon, makes nutrient-fortified yogurt for Bangladeshi children.
Many such businesses get financing from impact investment funds — organizations that connect promising social businesses with medium- or long-term investors who give priority to making a difference. One of the best known is the Acumen Fund, which supports Ecotact and MicroDrip, among many other social businesses.
Sometimes a hard business approach is needed to accomplish a social good. For a social business, “the obstacles are similar to those of starting and running any new business,” said J. Gregory Dees, a professor of Practice of Social Entrepreneurship at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. “New ventures are risky — raising capital, attracting talent, managing the organization, attracting customers, selling your product (ideally at a profit, though most businesses take a while to reach profitability) are all difficult. And the social mission adds to the degree of difficulty by constraining your options.” Dees points out something important — success isn’t instant. Many social businesses spend years receiving donations or relying on a nonprofit for back-office work before they fly solo. Grameen Bank took 18 years to stop accepting donations. This is also the case with Soluciones Comunitarias, a Guatemalan business I wrote about in late January and early February that sells reading glasses, improved cookstoves, solar lamps and other products to rural people. It was founded by a nonprofit called CE Solutions, which continues to help by lending money, proposing new products and carrying out market research and evaluation.
But no nonprofit can prop up a social business which doesn’t get the basics right. “It’s the same thing that makes any business successful. First and foremost they need strong management and a business strategy that understands the needs of customers,” said Randall Kempner, the executive director of the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs. “The thing that typifies most successful social enterprises is that they’re successful enterprises.”
This is usually more difficult for a social business that sells to the poor — their margins are by definition limited. KeBal faces other challenges. There is no established market for healthy food, and it is more expensive to produce — a crucial factor when consumers make decisions based largely on price. In addition, starting a social business is perhaps most difficult for large, traditional N.G.O.’s like Mercy Corps, which have a very different culture than for-profit companies. “With an N.G.O. you get the funds and implement the project, and you get your salary whatever happens,” said Sean Granville-Ross, Mercy Corps’ Indonesia country director. “It’s tough to find people who think like a business and not an N.G.O.”
“There’s always the dichotomy,” said Muench. “You’re thinking about profits and sustainability, and you’re thinking about the humanitarian issues. It can become an internal battle. We’re always inclined to shift back into humanitarian need but have to remember that to be sustainable you have to have a hard business mentality.”
These two imperatives have clashed in the hiring of street vendors. Mercy Corps would like to create jobs for people who need them most — low-skilled single mothers. But the business demands vendors who have the confidence and boldness to sell, and who will take the risk of ordering a lot of inventory — not the usual profile of downtrodden women in this society. KeBal’s health requirement that food must be sold the day it is made has reduced sales. Vendors order less than they think they will sell for fear of being stuck with excess inventory at the end of the day. Mercy Corps has pushed hard to infuse KeBal with a business mentality. It spent two years doing market testing and developing and testing menus. It also had the chance to make low-cost mistakes. The group tried to start a version of KeBal in Aceh, the province in tsunami recovery where Mercy Corps has many projects. It didn’t work well, mainly because Aceh doesn’t have the population density of Jakarta. People have kitchens in Aceh, so the culture of street food is not as strong. KeBal’s challenge now is to find the capital it needs to grow — the only way it can lower the costs of cooking healthy food.
KeBal is probably the riskiest kind of social business. Even if it fails, it’s an admirable idea. There was probably no other way to solve the problem of getting healthy food to Jakarta’s children. Boldness is often lacking in established nongovernmental groups, and in this case, it is something to applaud.
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All over the world are children living bereft of a childhood. They are treated as a commodity, providing labor, income and heirs to families held hostage to outdated and often illegal traditions (see The Child Bride) or corporations and companies more concerned with their own or their shareholders pockets than the hearts and minds of their underage employees. Fortunately, many good individuals and agencies alike are working to help these children return to an age-appropriate life filled with play, education and hope for the future.
In a recent article (see below), Nicholas Kristoff of the New York Times observed a raid on a brothel using child prostitutes in Kolkata, India conducted by the International Justice Mission. While I find Mr. Kristoff's participation in the raid an unnecessary and not too insightful example of ethnographic reporting, I do understand that the experience allowed him to personalize and give a name to at least some of the estimated 1.8 million children engaged, or perhaps more accurately stated, 'enslaved,' in the sex trade each year as reported by Unicef.
While many of these young girls and boys are indeed abducted by strangers and sold into prostitution, enticed by greedy foreigners or tricked into leaving home by 'friends of friends' with promises of paid employment in peoples' homes or other kinds of legitimate if not high paying work, some are actually given up willingly by parents, often excruciatingly poor parents, who receive cash in exchange for their offspring. Still other children follow in a family tradition of prostitution. Even when offered free schooling, they may return to their parents trade (as can be seen in the documentary, 'Born Into Brothels,' by Ross Kauffman and Zana Briski); whether for reasons of filial piety, overall family loyalty or fear of unknown sanctions, religious, social or otherwise, it is always not clear.
In the book, 'Abandoned Children,' edited by Catherine Panter-Brick and Malcolm T. Smith, is an entry by Heather Montgomery entitled, "Abandonment and child prostitution in a Thai slum community." Montgomery interviewed fifty child prostitutes, boys and girls, over a 15 month period. These families lived in a rural community and had no land, no jobs and no access to social welfare. Though these children, some as young as six, did not like sex work they felt good using the money they earned to help their families. For example, a 12 year-old prostitute was elated at being able to rebuild her parent's house, saying she would 'make merit' for taking care of them. Montgomery wrote, "as a Buddhist she believed that the merit she gained from looking after her parents would accrue to her in her next incarnation and negate the effects of prostitution" (pg.191).
In this Thai slum, parents and children had reciprocal obligations. Moreover, while some parents felt that one-hour of sex with a foreigner would not harm their children, one six-year old explained, "I don't want to go with foreigners, but my grandmother asks me to so I feel I must" (pg. 192). Here, poor and exploited families used prostitution to keep their families in tact, to fulfill filial obligations and because no other economic alternatives existed, normalizing what in actuality was emotional, physical and sexual abuse. Montgomery stated that they were victims of industrialization and modernization and concluded that "It is much easier to blame inadequate parents or depraved Westerners than it is to provide long-term help in the form of poverty alleviation programmes or to examine critically the consequences of successive governments' development policies" (pg.195).
Parents 'pimping' their children is not unique to the poor of non Western nations. Even in the US, there are reports of a growing number of parents who, through the Internet, offer their children up for sex with strangers in exchange for money. Below is an article from ABC News about an American woman allegedly offering to sell her daughter's virginity for $10,000. I am not sure explanations for an incident that occurred in Salt Lake City, Utah, can be found in Buddhist beliefs in merit and reincarnation or Asian values of filial piety. Moreover, I have not as yet researched any academic journal articles proposing theories for this phenomenon. However, I wonder if 24/7 exposure to reality television, an emphasis on cultural values based on consumption, acquisition and instant gratification, or a hyper-sexualized/hyper-violent media and advertising climate in America has any effect? I welcome your thoughts and comments.
As a university lecturer, I encourage my students to be critical thinkers. When watching films in class, reading assigned textbooks or examining news, journal and research articles, I ask them to look behind the story and ask, Who wrote that piece? Who funded that research? What's the real story here? I tell them to question me too, my background, motives and experience, as truth is a matter of perspective and the 'view' can change or be changed at any time. Just as a photo shows a story through the lens of one witness, a story, even one backed up by fact, is edited to present a particular piece of information in a particular way.
I've written many times here about the inequality of women in regards to men in India. This situation leads to female feticide, female infanticide and heinous forms of domestic violence including acid burning, often at the hands of a woman's in-laws. Though some change is evident, whether for reasons of culture, caste or cash, across India women and men are not equal politically, economically, socially or under the law.
The following articles are from BBC News and the New York Times. The first, written by a male journalist, Soutik Biswas, gives an overview of a select group of women elected to political office in India. The second article, also written by a man, Jim Yardley, revisits the phenomena of 'missing girls' in India. It gives results of a study reported in the British medical journal, the Lancet, linking high rates of sex-selective abortions in India to increased rates of wealth and literacy. (It perhaps can be added that while better-off families can afford to pay for an ultrasound and therefore abort female fetuses, the poor may resort to female infanticide.) So, we have a suggestion of women gaining power in politics while at the same time their numbers are dwindling through feticide, particularly if the female fetus is a first-born (and we've not even touched on 'dowry deaths' and honor killings).
Mr. Biswas states the female leaders he profiles have benefited from their familial connections and their powerful mentors. Despite this, he adds they have carved their own identities as politicians. Giving a balanced voice to his writing, Biswas provides other opinions that contradict his suggestion of a rise of 'women power.'
In truth, though these women are leaders, they live in a chauvinistic, gender-role-traditional culture. I hope they are not 'political surrogates' or 'honorary men,' and instead are working as advocates for the rights of women. To quote feminist author Cynthia Enloe, from her 1989 book, Bananas, Beaches and Bases:
"When a woman is let in by the men who control the political elite it is usually precisely because that woman has learned the lessons of masculinized political behavior well enough to know not to threaten male political privilege" (pgs. 6-7).
My question is, Will these women bring change or more of the same? In their conclusion, the research authors' interpretation of the Lancet study reads, "Selective abortion of girls, especially for pregnancies after a firstborn girl, has increased substantially in India. Most of India's population now live in states where selective abortion of girls is common." It would appear, comparing information presented in both articles that follow, that although India's government boasts a female prime minister, speaker of the parliament and leader of the opposition, male power has yet to be challenged in the household.
16 May 2011
The women who rule India
Mamata Banerjee and Jayalalitha were victorious in recent state elections
Is India now living on woman power? The most powerful Indian is a woman - Sonia Gandhi, chief of the ruling Congress party. India's President is a woman. The speaker of the parliament and the leader of the opposition are women. Mayawati, a Dalit (untouchable) woman rules India's most populous and politically crucial state of Uttar Pradesh. The urbane Sheila Dikshit rules the capital, Delhi. And last week, Mamata Banerjee created history by overthrowing a over three-decade long Communist government in Bengal to take charge of the state. Together, these three formidable women rule directly over a third of India's people. Most of these women are influential politicians in their own right, and Ms Banerjee and Mayawati belong to the fast vanishing tribe of mass leaders.
Certainly, many of these women are beneficiaries of family patronage and male mentors. Ms Gandhi took over the party as a privileged dynast. Mayawati and Jayalalitha were anointed successors by their mentors, one a leader of the untouchables, and the other a film-star. Ms Dikshit belongs to a well-connected political family. Only Ms Banerjee has earned her spurs as a rebel who emerged victorious after a decade of gritty street-fighting politics. However, most of these leaders have carved out their own identities and styles of functioning, however controversial they may be. Mayawati, with her penchant for diamonds, flashy birthday celebrations and statues, has managed to steer her Bahujan Samaj Party to become a formidable political force, seeking to give dignity of millions of untouchables. Jayalalitha led much-acclaimed rehabilitation work after the 2005 tsunami hit Tamil Nadu. Ms Dixit has won three consecutive terms in Delhi, thanks to her development work. But Indira Gandhi, the subcontinent's most powerful woman politician ever, was once described as a "dumb-doll" by a group of male Congress figures who thrust her to the political centre-stage, confident that they could control her.
Ms Banerjee has been physically attacked by Communist party workers in the past, and described as "that woman" by its leaders. Last month, a Communist MP was forced to apologise after he publicly called her a "loose woman" who was interested in "bigger clients like the USA". Most parties are deeply chauvinist - for all the glib talk of gender equality, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) has no female leader of any standing. India also doesn't have a single Muslim female leader, and the matriarchal states of the north-east are all ruled by rather unremarkable men.
Women comprise nearly half of India's population, but their lot needs to improve. India's sex ratio remains scandalously skewed. Sex selective abortions, female infanticide and foeticide are rife in northern states. Men remain major beneficiaries of government schemes, a lot of women still die during childbirth - though the record is improving, and more girls drop out of school than boys.
The political empowerment of women is a remarkable achievement in this context. Many believe that the presence of so many women in powerful positions in politics is a quirk. I don't agree. Indira Gandhi's ascendancy through the Congress party to become India's most powerful and controversial leader was an an exception in South Asia those days, but things have changed. Female literacy is improving, triggering aspirations in a booming economy. Reservation of seats in village councils and municipalities has been seen as a fillip for women. In many unprogressive northern states like Haryana, spouses and male relatives still keep their female leaders indoors and run proxies, but in large parts of India, the political empowerment of women has been genuine.
How much of a real change will Ms Banerjee and her sorority bring for the people of India? It has not been a very inspiring record till now - Ms Mayawati seems to have belied a lot of expectations in the way she runs Uttar Pradesh, and Ms Dixit's record has been marred by shoddy infrastructure work for last year's Commonwealth Games. There is still no evidence that women politicians are less corrupt than their male counterparts. "To suggest that women in power will be less corrupt is fatuous, and contrary to all prevalent evidence," says journalist-writer MJ Akbar.
Historian Ramachandra Guha says the rise of women in powerful political roles does not mark a "new age" of gender equality. The reasons for their rise, he says, may be personal (their courage and drive) or historical (the impact of a generations of reformers) or political (universal adult franchise). Whatever the reason is and whatever its consequences, he says, the phenomenon is noteworthy.
PS: On second thoughts, is India's neighbour Bangladesh also in a grip of women power? The two most powerful politicians in the country are women and one, Hasina Wazed, is in power. Five of her top ministers are women too!
May 24, 2011
As Wealth and Literacy Rise in India, Report Says, So Do Sex-Selective Abortions
NEW DELHI — India’s increasing wealth and improving literacy are apparently contributing to a national crisis of “missing girls,” with the number of sex-selective abortions up sharply among more affluent, educated families during the past two decades, according to a new study. The study found the problem of sex-selective abortions of girls has spread steadily across India after once being confined largely to a handful of conservative northern states. Researchers also found that women from higher-income, better-educated families were far more likely than poorer women to abort a girl, especially during a second pregnancy if the firstborn was a girl. “This has deep implications,” Shailaja Chandra, one of the study’s authors and the former director of the National Population Stabilization Fund, said Tuesday during a panel discussion after the release of the findings. “The scale is very large and requires intervention beyond what has been done so far.”
The study, being published in the British medical journal The Lancet, is the latest evidence of India’s worsening imbalance in the ratio of boys to girls. The 2011 Indian census found 914 girls for every 1,000 boys among children 6 six or younger, the lowest ratio of girls since the country gained independence in 1947. The new study estimated that 4 million to 12 million selective abortions of girls have occurred in India in the past three decades.
The government has enacted legislation intended to prevent parents from using ultrasound screenings or other technologies to decide whether to abort a girl. Yet despite such laws, the situation has not improved. Few medical practitioners who violated the law have been prosecuted, while regulation of private health care providers is very limited. India is similar to many Asian countries in that many families prefer boys. In Hindu funeral rituals, only males, preferably a son of the deceased, may perform last rites; sons also usually inherit property (while daughters are married into other families) and carry on the family name. A cultural preference for sons is also common among many Indian Muslims.
Dr. Prabhat Jha, a lead author of the study, noted that the use of sex-selective abortions expanded throughout the country as the use of ultrasound equipment became more widespread. Typically, women from wealthier, better-educated families are more likely to undergo an ultrasound, Mr. Jha said, and researchers found that these families are far more likely to abort a girl if the firstborn is a daughter.
“This is really a phenomenon of the educated and the wealthy that we are seeing in India,” said Mr. Jha, director of the Center for Global Health Research at the University of Toronto. Census data has already confirmed that the problem has accelerated since 2001. The 2011 census found about 7.1 million fewer girls than boys under the age of 6, compared with a gap of roughly 6 million girls a decade earlier.
The Lancet study was conducted by researchers from several partner institutions, with the United States National Institutes of Health providing some of the financing. About 250,000 births from 1990 to 2005 were examined, using data from surveys conducted by India’s National Family Health Survey, as well as census data from 1991 to 2011.
