When people think of mass killings, what comes to mind are usually the stories of the Tutsi in Rwanda, the Armenian genocide, the Jewish Holocaust, and the “disappearing” of hundreds of members of the Native Indian tribes in North America. But the destructive practices which have been taking place globally over the last two decades have eradicated close to 150 million female human beings and fetuses from the face of the earth – and yet it is a problem rarely discussed or reported.
In June 2016, residents of a poor enclave of Beijing heard the sound of a crying baby emerging from a public restroom, and called the police. The responding officer saw tiny feet sticking out of a drainpipe, and acted quickly. He stuck his hand into the pipe and pulled out a newborn baby girl. She had been abandoned and left to die. The phenomenon of female infanticide.
In the last few decades, tens of millions of people have chosen to abort or exterminate female embryos, or kill baby girls, and to try instead to conceive boys. The babies are either murdered at birth, or left to die of starvation or exposure. This phenomenon of gendercide, a term coined by American feminist and philosopher Mary Anne Warren in 1985, occurs mainly in Asia, and in the Caucasus and Balkan states. Its consequences are already echoing around the world. After decades of gender selection during pregnancy or at birth, the makeup of the population in the countries where gendercide is practiced has been distorted. The number of women is much smaller than it would have been without sex-selective abortions, or had baby girls not been murdered. In China, there are 66 million “missing” women – 10 percent of the current female population. In India the number is estimated at 43 million.
The shortage of women in the populations of certain countries creates large concentrations of “involuntary bachelors,” bride-theft and human trafficking, and is closely correlated to high crime rates and violence. In China, men who can’t find women to marry are called “bare branches,” and they are a cause for worry: Research shows that in a society where there is a surplus of unmarried young men, there are also unusually high rates of violence and crime. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences predicted in 2010 that by 2020, 20 percent of Chinese men would not find anyone to marry. In the 20 years that gendercide has been practiced in China, the national crime rate has doubled. Bride-napping, trafficking in women, rape and prostitution are now among the most common crimes.
Governments in Asia have also begun to be concerned about their so-called missing girls. By 2100 the population of China, according to predictions, could plummet to 700 million, from its current 1.3 billion, in part due to the many years of gender distortion. Countries and organizations are taking the issue of gendercide and the large-scale problems that it has brought in its wake seriously and are working for change. It may be years before a result is seen.
Written by Dafnar Maor, read the complete article here
