“More girls were killed in the last 50 years, precisely
because they were girls, than men killed in all the wars in the 20th century.
More girls are killed in this routine gendercide in any one decade than people
were slaughtered in all the genocides of the 20th century.
The equivalent of 5 jumbo jets worth of women die in labor
each day... life time risk of maternal death is 1,000 x higher in a poor
country than in the west. That should be an international scandal.”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, Half the Sky: Turning
Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide
One of the most notorious global crises of our time is the
failure of women’s rights – a gendercide as it’s being called. And if Kristof’s
statistics don’t put things into perspective for you, then even on a common
sense approach there are three readily observable premises to validate that
claim:
Fact – women make up half of the global population
The majority of the world population lives in the developing
world
The most serious violations of women’s rights occur in the
developing world
This International women’s day, I want to reflect on the
objective of parity at the most fundamental level. There is a major gap between
how I as a female citizen of the free world experience this lack of parity and
the experience of how my female counterparts in other parts of the world do.
I know that while I might get off a conference call feeling
overlooked in place of the male voices who continue to occupy leadership
positions in the corporate world, elsewhere in the world a young girl’s entire
dignity and freedom of her own body is not just overlooked but categorically
denied as she is forced to allow her body to be violated by as many as 50
“customers” a day.
The fundamental denials of parity occur long before a girl
is even brought into this world and continue to threaten her at every stage of
her life. I wanted to illustrate the scale and multitude of these very real
violations over a trajectory of a women’s life in today’s world:
Pre-birth:
**She may be denied the right to
come into existence, it was the nobel-prize winning research of
Amartya Sen who first sounded the alarm bells with her 1990 paper entitled
“More than 100 million women are missing”. A recent estimate reveals that 24
million girls are missing from today’s population due to sex-selection abortion
over the past 14 years, and this doesn’t count abortions of girls due to other
reasons such as economic pressure, rape, incest or other factors.
Growing up:
**She is denied her dignity, her
freedom, her future, her education: Should she make it into this world, a
plethora of other violations await her:
**She may not survive beyond infancy due to malnutrition–
the majority of severely malnourished children in India are girls and the
research shows that overall in male centric societies like India where little
value is placed on female lives, they are far more neglected than their male
counterparts, particularly where she has brothers for siblings
**Long before she understands her female body her
genital organs will be deliberately mutilated for non-medical reasons
- more than 200 million girls and women alive today have been cut in 30
countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia where FGM is concentrated. The
practice is mostly carried out on young girls between infancy and age 15.
**She’ll be a bride to an older stranger who’s statistically
far more likely to be her abuser than her lover: One third of girls in the
developing world are married before the age of 18 and 1 in 9 are married before
the age of 15. Pregnancy is consistently among the leading causes of death for
girls ages 15 to 19 worldwide. They rarely receive any education and in places
like sub-Saharan Africa will often face a higher risk of contracting HIV
because they often marry an older man with more sexual experience.
**Should she allow herself to love she may pay with
her life: There is an estimated 5000 “honour” killings internationally per
year, about every 90 minutes an honour killing unfolds somewhere in the world.
In many of the countries where this abhorrent practice is most prevalent, the
law not only fails to punish the perpetrators but indeed protects them by
upholding it as a complete defence.
**She is no more than her body, and is sold into sex
slavery: women and girls make up more than 98% of victims of trafficking
for sexual exploitation. It’s the fastest growing criminal enterprise in the
world, second only to the market for illicit drugs. Recent Australian research
on the global numbers reports that almost half of all modern slaves in the
world are from India. There are countless stories of girls as young as 5 from
rural areas being kidnapped or sold by their own families and trafficked to
larger cities where they spend the rest of their life confined in brothels,
required to sleep with up to 50 customers and frequently beaten and abused by
their captors to ensure submission. Many of these girls contract HIV or other
sexually transmitted diseases as there is no right or regard to any form of
protection. If they fall pregnant they are either subjected to dangerous
abortion methods or forced to give birth within the brothel without any medical
attention. The babies are often separated from their mothers and either raised
for labour (boys) or future prostitution (girls). Even if these girls manage to
escape from the brothel, their families and society are unlikely to accept them
back into their home, viewing their forced sexual exploitation as a mark of
shame.
3. Motherhood and marriage: Rather than a
loving partnership, her marriage will be a life-long entrapment that
justifies abuse, degradation and domestic violence:
**Based on WHO data from over 80 countries, globally 35% of
women have experienced either physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence
or non-partner sexual violence. Most of this violence is intimate partner
violence. Worldwide, almost one-third (30%) of all women who have been in a
relationship have experienced physical and/or sexual violence by their
intimate partner, in some regions this is much higher. Globally as many as 38%
of all murders of women are committed by intimate partners. Given that domestic
abuse is one of the most unreported types of abuse, the available statistics
are likely to severely understate the scale of actual abuse.
**"Bride burning" accounts for the death
of at least one woman every hour in India, and more than 8000 women a year. The
heinous practice is financially motivated and is in most cases preceded by a
history of abuse of the woman by her husband, mother-in-law or other family members.
It's a systematic torturing strategy designed to extract as much
"Dowry" from the woman's family for the marriage and culminates in
pouring kerosene over the woman and setting her alight. Some perpetrators
swiftly re-marry to begin the torture for dowry process all over again, as a
legitimate stream of income. Again these women, should they muster the strength
to escape from their abusers are often shunned from their own homes for the
"disgrace" of abandoning the marriage. Perhaps the most alarming part
is that figures indicate that the ancient practice is on the rise.
**She will give her life trying to bring another's
into the world. Every day, approximately 830 women die from preventable
causes related to pregnancy and childbirth. 99% of all maternal deaths occur in
developing countries. These are mostly women who go through their pregnancy and
labour without any medical assistance. One of the complications that can occur
is an obstetric fistula (a hole between the rectum or bladder and the vagina). Without
treatment (as is mostly the case in sub-saharan Africa and south asia) the
common scenario is that the injury causes ongoing urinal and faecal leakage and
sometimes nerve damage immobolising the sufferer and due to the foul smell and
perception of uncleanliness, these women are thought of as cursed and
marginalised from main stream society. In Ethiopia there are countless
incidents of such women (many who were impregnated from rape) being shunned to
huts on the outskirts of villages and left for hyenas and other predators to
attack.
These violations pervade
women at every stage of their life. And while the above certainly makes for a
dark picture of our humanity in today's world, there is certainly progress,
increased awareness and sure signs of change. Education and empowerment remain
the critical priorities to achieve meaningful changes.
As I reflect on how I will never know the injustices and
violations that the majority of my female counterparts will, I feel
overwhelmingly fortunate for my freedom but I cannot say that I feel grateful for
it. It doesn't seem to make sense to be grateful for something that is
inherently my right and my most basic entitlement as a member of humankind. My
freedom and dignity isn't something that was provided or bestowed by anyone,
rather it's what was never taken away. And this is precisely why the struggle
for parity is less about asking for equality and is all the more
about reminding everyone of what is lacking, what we still need to
fight for and rightfully have returned.
