Again these women are innocent by-standers, and collateral damage of the ever growing prominence of drug cartels and subsequently human trafficking. However, even though the prospect of being a woman in these countries is grim, what is going on in India and China may be even worse.
By Blaise Francis
When I first heard the term “femicide”, I thought to myself, this is just another feminist created term to over victimize women. I mean, yes it is absolutely horrible that women are being brutalized around the world, but male deaths, due to wars, revolutions, gang violence etc, still greatly outnumber female deaths and yet there is no special term for those victims, so why one for females?
The answer to that question I learned, lies in the motives behind the murders of certain women. Femicide is meant to describe the huge population of human beings that are being murdered solely because of their female gender. If these individuals were born male, they not only wouldn’t have been murdered but their lives would have been valued.
A lot, but far from all of the world’s femicide, takes place in Latin America, places like El Salvador, Guatemala, Ciudad Juarez in Mexico, and Honduras to name a few. Many of these murders are due to the ever growing profitability of the human trafficking business and the drug cartels that seem to be thriving in spite of, and sometimes not in spite of, local authorities. In many of these places, a female murdered is not worth the time or energy to be investigated and usually go unpunished. This may be explained by what is called machismo, and the general sentiment that women are far less valuable than men. Because there are so few female murders reported in these areas, the data may be far from the true estimate but according to a daily news study, less than 2% of all female murders are investigated and more than 90% of the time the accused is let off.
Again these women are innocent by-standers, and collateral damage of the ever growing prominence of drug cartels and subsequently human trafficking. However, even though the prospect of being a woman in these countries is grim, what is going on in India and China may be even worse.
In India and China, the term “femicide” is most definitely a relevant one, however there are even more relevant words one could use when describing the atrocities taking place in this region of the world, such as “infanticide” or “feticide”. «Infanticide» being the murder of infants, and «feticide» being the murder of the fetuses. Although the terms “infanticide” and “feticide” are not synonymous with the term femicide and are not limited to the killings of females, in India and China, they might as well be.
In India, infants are being killed left and right as soon as the parents know that they have been born female. Why? Because of the dowry system. The dowry system works like this: When the daughter of a family is of age to marry and finds herself a husband, her family must give her fiance a large amount of goods and wealth, enough so that the family of the fiance is satisfied. Also, after they are married, the wife is now part of the husband’s family and no longer part of her own. The higher the social status of the husband, the higher the amount of wealth must be given to him and his family. So in a poverty stricken country like India, a female child is seen as an immense financial burden. Although India has officially dissolved the dowry system, the tradition remains prevalent.
So unlike the violence against women seen in Latin America, much of the killing is being done not only by men but by other females too, more specifically the mothers. There are mothers that have killed their own female infants many times over and will continue, until they have a son. If the daughter is not killed immediately after birth, the child is still at a high risk of being left to die or being abandoned. In fact, 1 in 4 female children do not live past puberty in India and sadly, that can be greater longevity than many of the females born in China.
In China, it is not the dowry system but the “one child only” official policy that seems to be the root cause of female turmoil. In attempts to curb the ever growing over population problem in China, the government has mandated that no family be allowed to have more than one child in city areas and only two children in rural areas. This policy combined with the prevalent notion that males earn a better income and are also the ones to carry on the family name, has made for a disastrous situation for females. There are an estimated 35,000 abortions performed in China every single day, leaving the ratio of men to women highly skewed. According to a CNN study, an estimated 30 million more men will reach adulthood than women by 2020. This means that 30 million men in China will not have wives.
This sobering reality has already led to a rise in sex trafficking, prostitution, and kidnapping. Why kidnapping, you might ask, aren’t families trying to get rid of their daughters? Well, the society still needs wives for their sons for many obvious reasons the least not being that the Chinese highly value the passing on of the family name. With so few women being allowed to live, prospective wives are becoming increasingly more rare. So little girls that are lucky enough to live, are being stolen at a young age by other families that need to secure a future wife for their son. In fact 70,000 little girls are kidnapped each year in China, that’s almost 200 a day.
This horrific reality must be recognized by men and woman around the world, maybe most importantly by women in the west. To put the matter in perspective, according to the film «It’s A Girl», each year India and China eliminate more girls than the total number of girls being born in the US each year. Overall, women in the west have more rights than any other region in the world and it is these women who must speak up for those who do not have a voice. If action is not taken, the value put on the lives of women in other regions will continue to drop.
