The three deadliest words in the world: It’s a girl →
It’s a girl, a film being released this year, documents the practice of killing unwanted baby girls in South Asia. The trailer’s most chilling scene is one with an Indian woman who, unable to contain her laughter, confesses to having killed eight infant daughters.
The statistics are sickening. The UN reports approximately 200 million girls in the world today are ‘missing’. India and China are said to eliminate more female infants than the number of girls born in the US each year. Lianyungang in China has the worst infant gender ratio on record with 163 boys born for every 100 girls. Taiwan, South Korea and Pakistan are also countries in which unwanted female babies are aborted, killed or abandoned.
Hey. This is what I study. You guys should read this because shit’s important. There are more than a million “missing” women in South Asia.
I can’t speak for femicide in other countries but I think the article hit it on the nail wrt India. It’s not just an economic thing but a cultural thing that happens to have widespread and enduring economic implications. I was in India last year and I’d just go through my uncle’s copy of the Times of India every morning. The Classified section would always piss me off because it would have all these ads for educated, white collar jobs and yet most of them would ask for male applicants only. I kept trying to think of all the reasons a company would be against hiring a female programmer or engineer and I would just reach the point where I’m about to rip the paper into shreds. It’s like even if you are incredibly privileged and educated, you’re still screwed over by society at large because people think you can’t be a breadwinner.
(via merrybutts)
