Half the Sky

by Nicholas D. Kristof

The best estimate is that a little Indian girl dies from discrimination every four minutes.

On average, the deaths of fifteen infant girls can be avoided by allowing one hundred female fetuses to be selectively aborted.

more girls have been killed in the last fifty years, precisely because they were girls, than men were killed in all the wars of the twentieth century.

More girls are killed in this routine “gendercide” in any one decade than people were slaughtered in all the genocides of the twentieth century.

The International Labour Organization, a UN agency, estimates that at any one time there are 12.3 million people engaged in forced labor of all kinds, not just sexual servitude. A UN report estimated that 1 million children in Asia alone are held in conditions indistinguishable from slavery. And The Lancet, a prominent medical journal in Britain, calculated that “1 million children are forced into prostitution every year and the total number of prostituted children could be as high as 10 million.”

“Well, is the best solution really to kidnap Nepali girls and imprison them in Indian brothels?” The officer shrugged, unperturbed. “It’s unfortunate,” he agreed. “These girls are sacrificed so that we can have harmony in society. So that good girls can be safe.”

Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people. —GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Surveys suggest that about one third of all women worldwide face beatings in the home.

Women aged fifteen through forty-four are more likely to be maimed or die from male violence than from cancer, malaria, traffic accidents, and war combined.

21 percent of Ghanaian women reported in one survey that their sexual initiation was by rape; 17 percent of Nigerian women said that they had endured rape or attempted rape by the age of nineteen; and 21 percent of South African women reported that they had been raped by the age of fifteen.

One impediment for women planning to run for political office in Kenya is the cost of round-the-clock security. That protection is needed to prevent political enemies from having them raped; gangsters calculate that female candidates can be uniquely humiliated and discredited that way. The result is that Kenyan women candidates routinely carry knives and wear multiple sets of tights to deter, complicate, and delay any attempted rape.

Of course, that’s only the law, and in poor countries laws rarely matter much outside the capital.

Granted, men are often brutal to women. Yet it is women who routinely manage brothels in poor countries, who ensure that their daughters’ genitals are cut, who feed sons before daughters, who take their sons but not their daughters to clinics for vaccination. One study suggests that women perpetrators were involved, along with men, in one quarter of the gang rapes in the Sierra Leone civil war. Typically, women fighters would lure a victim to the rape site, and then restrain her as she was raped by male fighters.

ubiquitous gang rape in civil wars isn’t about sexual gratification, but rather is a way for military units—including their female members—to bond, by engaging in sometimes brutally misogynistic violence.

This is not a tidy world of tyrannical men and victimized women, but a messier realm of oppressive social customs adhered to by men and women alike. As we said, laws can help, but the greatest challenge is to change these ways of thinking.

rape becomes a tool of war in conservative societies precisely because female sexuality is so sacred.

Half of the women in Sierra Leone endured sexual violence or the threat of it during the upheavals in that country, and 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.

“When I treat rape victims, I tell the girls not to go to the police,” Dr. Syed added. “Because if a girl goes to the police, the police will rape her.”

In 2008, the United Nations formally declared rape a “weapon of war,” and Congo came up constantly in the discussions. Major General Patrick Cammaert, a former United Nations force commander, spoke of the spread of rape as a war tactic and said something haunting: “It has probably become more dangerous to be a woman than a soldier in an armed conflict.”

In just the Congolese province of South Kivu, the UN estimates that there were twenty-seven thousand sexual assaults in 2006. By another UN accounting, three quarters of the women in some areas had been raped.

maternal health generally gets minimal attention because those who die or suffer injuries overwhelmingly start with three strikes against them: They are female, they are poor, and they are rural.

Eleven percent of the world’s inhabitants live in sub-Saharan Africa, and they suffer 24 percent of the world’s disease burden—which is addressed with less than 1 percent of the world’s health care spending.

The World Health Organization estimates that 536,000 women perished in pregnancy or childbirth in 2005, a toll that has barely budged in thirty years. Child mortality has plunged, longevity has increased, but childbirth remains almost as deadly as ever, with one maternal death every minute.

In Ireland, the safest place in the world to give birth, the MMR is just 1 per 100,000 live births. In the United States, where many more women fall through the cracks, the MMR is 11. In contrast, the average MMR in South Asia (including India and Pakistan) is 490. In sub-Saharan Africa, it is 900, and Sierra Leone has the highest MMR in the world, at 2,100.

During World War I, more American women died in childbirth than American men died in war.

maternal health is persistently diminished as a “women’s issue.”

“Women are not dying because of untreatable diseases. They are dying because societies have yet to make the decision that their lives are worth saving.”

it’s tragic that up to 40 percent of all pregnancies globally are unplanned or unwanted—and that almost half of those result in induced abortions.

Given biological differences, women prefer to have fewer children but to invest heavily in each of them. One way to curb fertility, therefore, may be to give women more say-so in the family.

study found that each $1 million spent on condoms saved $466 million in AIDS-related costs.

In Burundi, which the World Bank counts as the poorest country in the world, donor countries provide fewer than three condoms per man per year. In Sudan, the average man receives one condom every five years.

The Index of Global Philanthropy calculates that U.S. religious organizations give $5.4 billion annually to developing countries, more than twice as much as is given by U.S. foundations.

Conservative Christians contribute very generously to humanitarian causes, but a significant share of that money goes to build magnificent churches. Likewise, liberal contributions often go to elite universities or symphonies. These may be good causes, but they are not humanitarian.

one reason religion is blamed is that it is often cited by the oppressors.

One cannot rear young people in such wise that half of them think themselves superior by biology, without dulling ambition and devaluing accomplishment.

Half of Tanzanian women, and nearly half of Ugandan women, say they were abused by male teachers, and one third of reported rapes of South African girls under the age of fifteen are by teachers.

Westerners sometimes create problems by sponsoring scholarships to be awarded by teachers or the principal. The scholarship winners are sometimes the prettiest girls, who in return are expected to sleep with the principal. Camfed avoids this problem by having the girls selected by a committee, without giving a central role to the principal.

Many African and Indian men now consider beer indispensable and their daughters’ education a luxury. The service of a prostitute is deemed essential; a condom is a frill.

It’s no accident that the countries that have enjoyed an economic takeoff have been those that educated girls and then gave them the autonomy to move to the cities to find work.

Today, female genital cutting is practiced mostly by Muslims in Africa, though it is also found in many Christian families in Africa. It is not found in most Arab or Islamic cultures outside Africa. The custom goes back to ancient times, and some female mummies in ancient Egypt have cut genitals.

A German textbook on surgery from 1666 includes illustrations on how to amputate the clitoris, and the practice occurred regularly in England until the 1860s—even occasionally after that in Europe and America. Across a broad swath of northern Africa, the practice is still nearly universal.

The aim is to minimize a woman’s sexual pleasure and hence make her less likely to be promiscuous.

In Malaysia, the ritual sometimes involves no more than a pinprick, or simply the waving of a razor blade near the genitals. But in Sudan, Ethiopia, and Somalia, it is common to see the most extreme kind, in which the entire genital area is “cleaned up” by snipping away the clitoris, labia, and all external genitalia. This creates a large raw wound, and the vaginal opening is then typically sewn up with a wild thistle (leaving a small opening for menstrual blood), with the legs tied together so that the wound can heal. This is called infibulation, and when the woman is married, her husband or a midwife uses a knife to reopen the sealed part so that she can have intercourse.

Guinea passed a law in the 1960s that punishes female genital cutting with a life sentence at hard labor—or, if the girl dies within forty days of being cut, a death sentence. Yet no case has ever come to trial, and 99 percent of Guinean women have been cut. In Sudan, the British first passed a law against infibulation in 1925 and extended that to all cutting in 1946. Today, more than 90 percent of Sudanese girls are cut.