WUNRN
CALL FOR JUSTICE, RIGHTS OF ALL
THE WORLD'S GIRLS
Reality Highlighted by Nigeria
Schoolgirls Abductions but Reflections Worldwide
including by Polygamy
Communities in Canada
By Daphne
Bramham, Vancouver Sun, British Columbia, Canada - May 16, 2014
The outrageous kidnapping of more than 270
Nigerian schoolgirls could have one positive outcome. It might change attitudes
toward the more than 100 million other women and girls missing in the world.
Some Canadian
commentators have suggested the rescue of the Nigerian girls would have been
almost immediate had they been Caucasian. That’s folly.
The disappearance of the
many blond-haired, blue-eyed girls from Bountiful has never received the
attention it deserves.
For decades, schoolgirls
have disappeared from fundamentalist Mormon communities in British Columbia
(B.C.), ending up in related communities in Alberta and across the American
west.
Other schoolgirls have
ended up in Bountiful, B.C. as child brides bearing the babies of aging
polygamist patriarchs.
Perhaps if they’d been
abducted together and moved across national, provincial and state borders,
there would have been an international outcry and a reason for an earlier
#BringBackOurGirls campaign.
For decades, nothing was
done to stop those kidnappings and forced marriages.
More than three years
after detailed information was presented in court about how men in the
Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had trafficked 32
girls between Bountiful and the United States, nothing has been done to return
those school girls to their communities or bring the men who perpetrated this
atrocity to justice.
There is no chasm between
the beliefs of the Islamist leaders of Boko Haram and the FLDS leaders. Their
disregard for the value and rights of girls and women inextricably links them.
For them, girls and women
are chattel. Like cattle, their only value is their breeding ability.
For them, educating girls
must be stopped. Allowing it to continue might mean that some day those girls
could challenge the patriarchy that enslaves them.
But girls taken by
religious fanatics are only a few whose fates have never been properly
addressed.
For too long, the issue
of missing girls and women has been conflated with prostitution. It’s a sly way
of suggesting the missing are somehow responsible for their fate. But it makes
them easier to forget.
Only this week, B.C.
Attorney General Suzanne Anton insisted the Highway of Tears is now safer than
ever even though little has been done other to put up billboards warning girls
and women not to hitchhike and improving cellular service so potential victims
might be able to make a phone call.
As many as 43 girls and
women have disappeared along the lonely, Highway 16 in northern British
Columbia.
The youngest was 12. All
but six of the 18 documented cases were in their teens. More than half of them
were Aboriginal and they are among the nearly 1,200 Aboriginal women and girls
RCMP have identified as missing or murdered in the last 30 years.
The perils faced by girls
and women in other countries often find their way to Canada as well.
The ethics of doing
ultrasounds that lead to selective abortions has been a local story.
Last week, a B.C. Supreme
Court justice ordered the deportation of Jassi Sidhu’s mother and uncle to
India to face trial for Jassi’s murder in 2000. The contract killing of the
Canadian-born Jassi is frequently mischaracterized as an “honour killing.”
Stories of abducted
Nigerian schoolgirls and Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani schoolgirl nearly
killed by the Taliban alter demanding an education, grab our attention. But
they are a tiny part of the broader picture of the missing 100 million.
In India alone, there are
an estimated 25 million and UBC economics professor Siwan Anderson along with
New York University economist Debraj Ray are leading the research.
They don’t challenge
other research that suggests as many as 10 million female fetuses were aborted
in a 20-year period. But they found it’s only in Punjab (where the majority of
Canadian immigrants are from) that the gender discrepancies come either because
of selective abortion or deaths before the age of 15.
But their 2012 research
found that in India, at least, female mortality is “sharply highest at
reproductive ages.”
They speculate it’s
partly due to death in childbirth or after due to complications, but also due
to the high rate of injuries reported.
They estimated that, in
2003 alone, injuries resulted in the deaths of more 225,000 women, dwarfing the
130,000 maternal mortality deaths. Fire-related deaths are most common,
resulting in the deaths of 100,000 Indian women each year.
They speculate these
deaths might be related to dowry, the price a family pays to have a daughter
married, and the nonpayment of dowry fees.
But as important as that
research is, Anderson and Ray raise a question that links back to the Nigerian
kidnappings.
Are not the so-called
excess deaths and violence against women at least as worthy of concern, study
and mitigation as the excess deaths, kidnappings and violence perpetrated
against girls?
The obvious answer is
yes. So, alongside the current campaign #BringBackOurGirls, we need another
worldwide lobby called #KeepGirls&WomenSafe.