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Missing Girls - Side Event at CSW 2007

The International Alliance of Women organised three CSW side events at CSW 2007. The most moving was the one on 'the missing girls' by the All India Women's Conference.

Missing girls
The event on the missing girls dealt with such painful issues as prenatal sex selection, sex-selective abortion and female infanticide.

From Newsweek Health, January 2007:
“For years Rukmini Devi helped couples choose the sex of their children. But in her decades of work, she never once used PGD (preimplantation genetic diagnosis). The province she worked has few ultrasound machines and fewer fertility labs; many of its towns lack even basic health clinics, and most couples don’t know their children’s gender before birth.


But boys are a treasured commodity there, and if a couple can’t choose a child’s sex prenatally, they can see a dai like Devi.
For 80 cents, says Devi, who is now retired, a dai will help a woman give birth.

For 80 cents more, she will take a newborn girl, hold her upside down by the waist and “give a sharp jerk”, snapping the spinal cord.

She will then declare the infant stillborn. “Many couples insist that we get rid of the baby girl at birth”, Devi says. “What can we do?”
Picture: Dr. Manorama Bawa, President of the All India Women's Conference and IAW Vice-President.

The cumulative impact of the killing of females was demonstrated by Nobel prize-winner Amartya Sen’s groundbreaking work on the “missing Woman”. Her results indicated that male-to-female ratios in China, South Asia and North Africa were higher than normal. And she concluded that if these regions had normal sex ratios, there would be more than 60 million more females alive today.

Demographic aspect
With prenatal sex selection, sex-selective abortion and female infanticide we have to deal with the less documented forms of violence against the girl child. They now make their appearance in population statistics rather than in statistics of criminal courts, and it is to be feared that the demographic aspect of the problem will get most of the attention.

It is up to women’s organisations such as the International Alliance of Women to point to the threats to national security and to an increase in violence against women and girls as a result of sex selection and female infanticide.

Bachelors already try to purchase wives (from 2001 and 2003 China’s police had freed more than 42.000 kidnapped women and children). A countries stability is threatened by the growing number of surplus – very often low-status – males. The pressure on prostitution is likely to rise.

As in the majority of other forms of violence against women and girls, possible solutions are obvious and cannot be stressed too often:
These are the three E’s: education, empowerment of women and eradication of poverty.

Selected from the CSW-report of IAW President Rosy Weiss.
See also the Special March Newsletter on the IAW website: www.womenalliance.org

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