WUNRN
INDIA - THE STATISTICS OF GENDER
BIAS
The Hindu The World Bank estimated that over the last two
decades, around 2.5 lakh girls were killed in
- March 25, 2014
The extent of violence against the girl as foetus and
infant shows how deep the bias against women is and why they will be secure
only if India introspects and changes
Over the next few weeks, there will be many tussles
between our mostly male politicians over India’s security. But almost no one
will ask if a country can be secure when half its citizens live in deepening
insecurity, threatened not by terrorists or enemy soldiers but by the society
into which they are born. We seem to forget that India’s security must
encompass the security of 48 per cent of its citizens — women — and urgently
address the endemic threats they face, ranging from entrenched discrimination
to violence.
This starts with the mass murder of female foetuses. In
its 2012 report on “Gender Equality and Development,” the World Bank estimated
that over the last two decades, around 2.5 lakh girls were killed in India each
year because of their sex.
When infant and child mortality are driven by biology,
fewer girls die than boys, but the third National Family Health Survey (NFHS-3)
found that the postneonatal mortality rate for Indian girls is 21/1000,
compared with 15 for boys. For the age group 1-4 years, “the child mortality
rate for girls, at 23/1000, is 61 per cent higher than for boys, at 14.” The
World Bank report estimated that, as a result, India lost another 2.5 lakh
girls in 2008.
These figures put us to shame as a society. This
systematic massacre could not happen unless society accepted it and governments
turned a blind eye to it. Sections 312 to 317 of the Indian Penal Code list the
punishments for causing miscarriage, injuring unborn children, preventing a
child from being born or causing it to die after birth, and abandoning a child
under 12 years. Over the last 20 years, how many prosecutions have there been
under these provisions of the law? There should have been 10 million.
Entrenched bias
The extent of the violence against the girl as foetus and
infant shows how deep the bias in India is against women and why women will be
secure only if we as a nation introspect and change. Not only is this not
happening, but the 2011 census shows that the sex ratio in the age-group 0-6
had fallen in 27 States and Union Territories from 2001.
Millions of girls who are allowed to live are fed and
educated less than their brothers. The United Nation’s Human Development Report
2013 estimates that 42.5 per cent of our children suffer from malnutrition (as
against 3.8 per cent in China). There is also great irony in this because
NFHS-3 established that when mothers were undernourished, 54 per cent of their
children were stunted and 25 per cent wasted. The more educated they were, the
lower the chance of their children being either stunted or wasted. By starving
millions of girls so that their brothers can eat marginally better, and by
taking them out of school, we have condemned each new generation – boys and
girls – to a fresh cycle of malnutrition.
The treatment of little girls moulds the psyche of their
brothers, who internalise the view that their needs — as males — have
preference over those of their sisters. What we have come to thereby is the
socialisation of violence against women.
There are no estimates of the extent of physical violence
against the girl child but it would be reasonable to assume that it is
extensive.
In 2007, the Ministry of Women and Child Development
published a “National Study on Child Abuse,” which reported that 53 per cent of
the children interviewed had suffered one or more forms of sexual abuse. It
would be dangerous to extrapolate from this limited study that over half our
children suffer sexual abuse, but it is clearly far more widespread than we
admit. What should be of the gravest concern was that in most cases the
children reported that the attack was by someone they knew, often a close
relative.
Data from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB)
confirms that this pattern continues as the girl becomes a woman. Since the
NCRB can only collate cases registered, its data represent just the tip of the
crime iceberg. But it reports that in 2012 there were 24,923 cases of rape
registered. In 98 per cent of the cases, the victims knew the offenders. This
is a logical outcome of a nurturing process in which boys grow up believing,
from what they see in their families, that women exist only to satisfy the
needs of men.
Society still resists change. NFHS-3 found that the
median age for marriage for girls is still just over 16, and commented that
this “is an indicator of the low status of women...it is related to lower
empowerment and increased risk of adverse reproductive and health
consequences.” There is enough data to show how adverse these are.
Women, particularly poor women, are most insecure in
childbirth when they fulfil the role society has set for them. According to the
Millennium Development Goals, maternal mortality in India which was 301 per
lakh of live births in 2001 should be down to 75 by 2015. This will not happen.
We are perhaps down to a maternal mortality rate of 200 now. At 27 million live
births in India each year, at least 54,000 women die in the process.
We also perhaps do not realise how other problems have a
compounding effect. We are, for instance, the world leaders in open defecation.
That is being perpetuated in most States where, despite a requirement that all
houses built under the Indira Awas Yojana must have a toilet, very few do. Open
defecation is also an open invitation to rape. Complaints to the NHRC show how
many women are abducted or raped when they go out into the fields at night. In
many States, teenage village girls either refuse to go to school or are taken
out by their parents because the building has no toilet and their right to
education suffers.
It is sad but to be expected that women have also been
indoctrinated to believe that their security depends on good behaviour, as
mandated by men. NHFS-3 found that 40 per cent of married women have been
subjected to spousal violence. But it also found that 54 per cent of the women
it surveyed agreed that wife-beating was acceptable if the wife went out
without telling her husband, argued with him, refused sex, neglected the
children, did not cook properly, was suspected of being unfaithful or showed
disrespect toward her in-laws. On this, NFHS-3 said: “Violence is more likely
to be justified if the described behaviour violates what is perceived as
acceptable behaviour for women in their gendered roles as wives, mothers and
daughters-in-law.”
Obvious acts of violence
And then there are the more obvious acts of criminal
violence against women. There is the enormous problem of trafficking; the
special insecurities of women in conflict zones. Adivasi and Dalit women are
branded as witches. There are the continuing tragedies of forced marriages, of
girls being killed for marrying boys of their choice or for not bringing in
enough dowry, the needless hysterectomies under the Rashtriya Swasth Bima
Yojana.
Within society as between states, security depends on
power. The weakest are the most insecure. Women in India are insecure and remain
at risk because in this patriarchal society they are children of a lesser god.
For women to be secure, the country must change — there should be more women in
Parliament and in positions of political and executive authority. Every
election brings with it hope of renewal, but India will not be transformed, it
cannot be secure, developed or respected if the democracy in which it takes
pride does not bring about urgent and fundamental change in the lives of its
women.
*Satyabrata Pal was a Member of the India National
Human Rights Commission.