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thirty-nine thousand baby girls die annually in China because parents don’t give them the same medical care and attention that boys receive—and that is just in the first year of life.
In India, a “bride burning”—to punish a woman for an inadequate dowry or to eliminate her so a man can remarry—takes place approximately once every two hours,
in normal circumstances women live longer than men, and so there are more females than males in much of the world. Even poor regions like most of Latin America and much of Africa have more females than males. Yet in places where girls have a deeply unequal status, they vanish. China has 107 males for every 100 females in its overall population
Every year, at least another 2 million girls worldwide disappear because of gender discrimination.
girls in India from one to five years of age are 50 percent more likely to die than boys the same age.
To prevent sex-selective abortion, China and India now bar doctors and ultrasound technicians from telling a pregnant woman the sex of her fetus. Yet that is a flawed solution. Research shows that when parents are banned from selectively aborting female fetuses, more of their daughters die as infants.
Women aren’t the problem but the solution. The plight of girls is no more a tragedy than an opportunity.
“They’re obedient and work harder than men,” said the head of a toy factory. “And we can pay them less.”
The basic formula was to ease repression, educate girls as well as boys, give the girls the freedom to move to the cities and take factory jobs, and then benefit from a demographic dividend as they delayed marriage and reduced childbearing. The women meanwhile financed the education of younger relatives, and saved enough of their pay to boost national savings rates. This pattern has been called “the girl effect.” In a nod to the female chromosomes, it could also be called “the double X solution.”
In 2001 the World Bank produced an influential study, Engendering Development Through Gender Equality in Rights, Resources, and Voice, arguing that promoting gender equality is crucial to combat global poverty. UNICEF issued a major report arguing that gender equality yields a “double dividend” by elevating not only women but also their children and communities.
the countries that nurture terrorists are disproportionally those where women are marginalized. The reason there are so many Muslim terrorists, they argued, has little to do with the Koran but a great deal to do with the lack of robust female participation in the economy and society of many Islamic countries. As the Pentagon gained a deeper understanding of counterterrorism, and as it found that dropping bombs often didn’t do much to help, it became increasingly interested in grassroots projects such as girls’ education. Empowering girls, some in the military argued, would disempower
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A modest amount of international scolding had led a government to take action, resulting in an observable improvement in the lives of girls at the bottom of the power pyramid. The outcome underscores that this is a hopeful cause, not a bleak one.
One 2008 study of Indian brothels found that of Indian and Nepali prostitutes who started as teenagers, about half said they had been coerced into the brothels; women who began working in their twenties were more likely to have made the choice themselves, often to feed their children. Those who start out enslaved often accept their fate eventually and sell sex willingly, because they know nothing else and are too stigmatized to hold other jobs.
Paradoxically, it is the countries with the most straitlaced and sexually conservative societies, such as India, Pakistan, and Iran, that have disproportionately large numbers of forced prostitutes.
just as many antebellum Americans turned away from the horrors of slavery because the people being lashed looked different from them.
She breaches the pattern of femininity in rural India by talking back—and fighting back.
The horror of sex trafficking can more properly be labeled slavery.
far more women and girls are shipped into brothels each year in the early twenty-first century than African slaves were shipped into slave plantations each year in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries—
The Americans decided they couldn’t just buy Kun Sokkea another bicycle, so the girl returned to walking an hour each way to school and back. Perhaps in part because of the distance involved and the risks of getting to school, Kun Sokkea began to miss a fair number of days. Her grades suffered. In early 2009, she dropped out of school.
India had delegated an intelligence officer to look for pirated goods because it knew that the United States cares about intellectual property. When India feels that the West cares as much about slavery as it does about pirated DVDs, it will dispatch people to the borders to stop traffickers. The tools to crush modern slavery exist, but the political will is lacking.
American left and right collaborated and achieved the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000,
Hillary Rodham Clinton
Carolyn Maloney,
George W....
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It never ceases to amaze me how supposedly feminist, progressive thinkers like you often get weak-kneed at the prospect of women actually owning decisions about sex and work…. It is highly unsavory of you to exploit the difficult stories of sex workers as an argument against sex work as a profession at a time when sex workers are finally making some headway in creating safety for themselves. Your stance … smacks of the Western missionary position of rescuing brown savages from their fate.
“Mostly those kinds of beatings happen because the husbands are illiterate and uneducated,” she added. “But it also happens that the wife is not taking care of her husband or is not obedient. Then it is appropriate to beat the wife.”
Zoya smiled a bit when she saw the shock on our faces. She explained patiently: “I should not have been beaten, because I was always obedient and did what my husband said. But if the wife is truly disobedient, then of course her husband has to beat her.”
The United Nations Population Fund has estimated that there are 5,000 honor killings a year, almost all in the Muslim world (Pakistan’s government uncovered 1,261 honor killings in 2003 alone). But that estimate appears too low, because so many of the executions are disguised as accidents or suicides. Our estimate is that at least 6,000, and probably far more, honor killings take place annually around the world.
The crime? Fornication, for by seeking treatment she was acknowledging that she had engaged in sex before marriage, and she did not provide the mandatory four adult male Muslim eyewitnesses to prove that it was rape. Sudan also blocked aid groups from bringing into Darfur postexposure prophylaxis kits, which can greatly reduce the risk that a rape victim will be infected with HIV.
a United Nations report claims that 90 percent of girls and women over the age of three were sexually abused in parts of Liberia during civil war there.
The main factor that separates me from my friends here is the opportunities I was given as a first-world citizen, and I believe it is my responsibility to work so that these opportunities are available to all.
“Then a neighbor told me he could find better work for me,” Mahabouba recalled. “He sold me for eighty birr [ten dollars]. He got the money, I didn’t.
The cutting of Edna, who was very close to her father, led to a fierce argument between her parents and a souring of their marriage. And it is one reason Edna herself has become a passionate opponent of genital cutting.
The clinic that Rose visited represents an unusual outpost of a consortium formed by aid organizations to provide reproductive health care for refugee women, who tend to be among the most forlorn and needy people on Earth. The consortium includes CARE, the International Rescue Committee, and AMDD, Allan Rosenfield’s organization at Columbia University. This particular clinic was run by another member of the consortium, Marie Stopes International—but then George W. Bush cut off funds to Marie Stopes and the entire consortium, all around the world, because Marie Stopes was helping to provide
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Driven in part by conservative Christians, Republican presidents, including both Bushes, instituted the “gag rule,” barring funds to any foreign aid group that, even with other money, counseled women about abortion options or had any link to abortions. As a result, said a Ghanaian doctor, Eunice Brookman-Amissah, “contrary to its stated intentions, the global gag rule results in more unwanted pregnancies, more unsafe abortions, and more deaths of women and girls.”
All told, some 25 percent of AIDS care worldwide is provided by church-related groups. “In most of Africa, these are the cornerstone of the health system,” Dr. Helene Gayle, the head of CARE, said of the Catholic-run clinics. “In some countries, they serve more people than the government health system.”
The jail is a single-story compound behind a high wall in the heart of the city, without guard towers or coils of barbed wire. Its inmates include teenage girls and young women who were suspected of having a boyfriend and then subjected to a “virginity test”—a hymen inspection. Those whose hymens were not intact were then prosecuted and typically jailed for a few years.*
Some evidence suggests that where families repress women, governments end up repressing all citizens.
was how a country treated its women: The economic implications of gender discrimination are most serious. To deny women is to deprive a country of labor and talent, but—even worse—to undermine the drive to achievement of boys and men. One
Another Western aid group, trying to improve the hygiene and health of Afghan women, issued them bars of soap—nearly causing a riot. In Afghanistan, washing with soap is often associated with post-coital activity, so the group was thought to be implying that the women were promiscuous.
“It wasn’t easy, and it was very risky,” she recalls. “I negotiated that if people supplied houses and protected the schools and the students, then we would pay the teachers and provide supplies. So we had thirty-eight hundred students in underground schools. We had rules that the students would arrive at intervals, no men were allowed inside, and people would work as lookouts.”
