:D Posted May 17, 2012 Share Posted May 17, 2012 Case Study: Female Infanticide Focus: (1) India (2) China Summary The phenomenon of female infanticide is as old as many cultures, and has likely accounted for millions of gender-selective deaths throughout history. It remains a critical concern in a number of "Third World" countries today, notably the two most populous countries on earth, China and India. In all cases, specifically female infanticide reflects the low status accorded to women in most parts of the world; it is arguably the most brutal and destructive manifestation of the anti-female bias that pervades "patriarchal" societies. It is closely linked to the phenomena of sex-selective abortion, which targets female fetuses almost exclusively, and neglect of girl children. The background "Female infanticide is the intentional killing of baby girls due to the preference for male babies and from the low value associated with the birth of females." (Marina Porras, "Female Infanticide and Foeticide".) It should be seen as a subset of the broader phenomenon of infanticide, which has also targeted the physically or mentally handicapped, and infant males (alongside infant females or, occasionally, on a gender-selective basis). As with maternal mortality, some would dispute the assigning of infanticide or female infanticide to the category of "genocide" or, as here, "gendercide." Nonetheless, the argument advanced in the maternal mortality case-study holds true in this case as well: governments and other actors can be just as guilty of mass killing by neglect or tacit encouragement, as by direct murder. R.J. Rummel buttresses this view, referring to infanticide as another type of government killing whose victims may total millions ... In many cultures, government permitted, if not encouraged, the killing of handicapped or female infants or otherwise unwanted children. In the Greece of 200 B.C., for example, the murder of female infants was so common that among 6,000 families living in Delphi no more than 1 percent had two daughters. Among 79 families, nearly as many had one child as two. Among all there were only 28 daughters to 118 sons. ... But classical Greece was not unusual. In eighty-four societies spanning the Renaissance to our time, "defective" children have been killed in one-third of them. In India, for example, because of Hindu beliefs and the rigid caste system, young girls were murdered as a matter of course. When demographic statistics were first collected in the nineteenth century, it was discovered that in "some villages, no girl babies were found at all; in a total of thirty others, there were 343 boys to 54 girls. ... n Bombay, the number of girls alive in 1834 was 603." Rummel adds: "Instances of infanticide ... are usually singular events; they do not happen en masse. But the accumulation of such officially sanctioned or demanded murders comprises, in effect, serial massacre. Since such practices were so pervasive in some cultures, I suspect that the death toll from infanticide must exceed that from mass sacrifice and perhaps even outright mass murder." (Rummel, Death by Government, pp. 65-66.) Focus (1): India As John-Thor Dahlburg points out, "in rural India, the centuries-old practice of female infanticide can still be considered a wise course of action." (Dahlburg, "Where killing baby girls 'is no big sin'," The Los Angeles Times [in The Toronto Star, February 28, 1994.]) According to census statistics, "From 972 females for every 1,000 males in 1901 ... the gender imbalance has tilted to 929 females per 1,000 males. ... In the nearly 300 poor hamlets of the Usilampatti area of Tamil Nadu [state], as many as 196 girls died under suspicious circumstances [in 1993] ... Some were fed dry, unhulled rice that punctured their windpipes, or were made to swallow poisonous powdered fertilizer. Others were smothered with a wet towel, strangled or allowed to starve to death." Dahlburg profiles one disturbing case from Tamil Nadu: Lakshmi already had one daughter, so when she gave birth to a second girl, she killed her. For the three days of her second child's short life, Lakshmi admits, she refused to nurse her. To silence the infant's famished cries, the impoverished village woman squeezed the milky sap from an oleander shrub, mixed it with castor oil, and forced the poisonous potion down the newborn's throat. The baby bled from the nose, then died soon afterward. Female neighbors buried her in a small hole near Lakshmi's square thatched hut of sunbaked mud. They sympathized with Lakshmi, and in the same circumstances, some would probably have done what she did. For despite the risk of execution by hanging and about 16 months of a much-ballyhooed government scheme to assist families with daughters, in some hamlets of ... Tamil Nadu, murdering girls is still sometimes believed to be a wiser course than raising them. "A daughter is always liabilities. How can I bring up a second?" Lakshmi, 28, answered firmly when asked by a visitor how she could have taken her own child's life eight years ago. "Instead of her suffering the way I do, I thought it was better to get rid of her." (All quotes from Dahlburg, "Where killing baby girls 'is no big sin'.") A study of Tamil Nadu by the Community Service Guild of Madras similarly found that "female infanticide is rampant" in the state, though only among Hindu (rather than Moslem or Christian) families. "Of the 1,250 families covered by the study, 740 had only one girl child and 249 agreed directly that they had done away with the unwanted girl child. More than 213 of the families had more than one male child whereas half the respondents had only one daughter." (Malavika Karlekar, "The girl child in India: does she have any rights?," Canadian Woman Studies, March 1995 why does my heart feel so bad . Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Buddhas Hand Posted May 17, 2012 Author Share Posted May 17, 2012 Los Angeles Times January 27, 2010 'Mom and pop' Baby-Trafficking Ring Provided Chinese Girls for Adoption BARBARA DEMICK, Los Angeles Times CHANGNING, China -- The telephones kept ringing with more orders, and although Duan Yuelin kept raising his prices, the demand was inexhaustible. Customers were so eager to buy more that they would ply him with expensive gifts and dinners in fancy restaurants. His family-run business was racking up sales of as much as $3,000 a month, unimaginable riches for uneducated rice farmers from the southern Chinese province of Hunan. What merchandise was he selling? Babies. And the customers were government-run orphanages that paid up to $600 each for newborn girls for adoption in the United States and other Western countries. "They couldn't get enough babies. The demand kept going up and up, and so did the prices," recalled Duan, who was released from prison last month after serving about four years of a six-year sentence for child trafficking. Hunched over a gas stove that barely took the chill out of the ground-floor apartment where he lives with his parents, Duan offered a rare window on the inner workings of a "mom and pop" baby-trafficking ring run by members of his family and an illiterate garbage collector with a habit of picking up abandoned babies. From 2001 to 2005, the ring sold 85 baby girls to six orphanages in Hunan. His story, which is backed up by hundreds of pages of documents gathered in his 2006 court case, shed light on the secretive process that has seen tens of thousands of girls born dirt-poor and unwanted in the Chinese countryside growing up in America with names like Kelly and Emily. "Definitely, all the orphanages gave money for babies," said the 38-year-old Duan, a loquacious man with a boxy haircut and hamster cheeks. At first, Duan said, his family members assumed they weren't breaking the law because the babies were going to a government-run orphanage. It had been an accepted practice among peasant families to sell unwanted children to other families. But the police didn't see it that way. Chinese law had been strengthened in 1991 to clearly prohibit the "buying, selling, transfer and transit of children for the purpose to sell." The concern is that not only is paying for babies unethical, it can also encourage kidnapping, a rampant problem in China. And when babies are trafficked and their records falsified, they grow up with no sense of where they are from and their heritage. Although Duan and his family trafficked only babies from the Guangdong, he says other families were doing the same -- bringing in babies from impoverished parts of Sichuan and Yunnan provinces. The merchandise may have been human, but it was a trading business like any other. Cash on delivery; prices set by laws of supply and demand. The Duans' supplier in Guangdong would charge extra if a baby was prettier or stronger. The orphanages would often call in their orders and barter over the price. "Sometimes they would give us money in advance to buy the babies. They'd say, 'We'll take this many babies at such-and-such a price,' " Duan recalled. Duan and five members of his family -- two younger sisters, his wife, sister-in-law and brother-in-law -- were all convicted in 2006 of child trafficking. The others remain in prison. Only Duan was released, on the grounds that he needed to support his aging parents. Family members complain that they were made the scapegoats for the widespread buying and selling of babies. Several orphanage directors involved were promoted afterward. "The government was making the big money. ... We only got a little bit, like the dregs of the tofu," said DuanFagui, Yuelin's 59-year-old father. He said that many other families were selling babies to orphanages -- "the only difference is that we got caught." It began in 1993 when Chen Zhejin, Yuelin's mother, and the two sisters who remain in jail were hired for $1 a day to take care of babies for the orphanage in Changning, a town adjacent to the larger city of Hengyang. At the time, the Communist Party's campaign to limit population size was running strong, and overly zealous cadres would sometimes demolish the houses of families that had more than one child (two for peasants if the first was a girl, because rural families wanted boys to carry on the family name). It is illegal in China to abandon a baby, even at an orphanage, so people would discard their unwanted daughters in the dark of night in cardboard boxes or bamboo baskets. If the baby was left near an orphanage, they would often light a firecracker as a signal for the staff to find the baby and bring her inside to safety. "We'd find the babies all over," recalled Chen, a tiny woman in tattered plaid trousers with short hair hugging her face like the petals of a tulip. "They'd be wrapped in rags, filthy. ... Sometimes they'd have ants all over their face because babies have a sweet smell and the ants like them." Because Chen worked for the orphanage, rural people sometimes asked her to take their unwanted babies to the orphanage. The orphanage would accept some, not all; they didn't have the caretakers or formula for all the babies. Then, in 1996 and 1997, the orphanages around Hunan began to participate in a fast-growing program that was sending thousands of baby girls abroad for adoption. For each baby adopted, the orphanage would receive a donation from the adoptive parents of $3,000. Now, instead of rejecting the babies, the orphanage director was begging Chen to bring in as many as she could, even offering to pay her expenses and then some. "Do us a favor, auntie," she says the director told her. "Bring us all the abandoned babies you can find." Five other orphanages opened nearby and were making the same request. By 2000, however, the supply of babies was drying up. Rising incomes, changing attitudes toward girls and weaker enforcement of the one-child policy had combined to stem the widespread dumping of baby girls. Besides, pregnant women who were insistent on a boy would determine the gender with ultrasound (illegal but common just the same) and abort girl fetuses. But foreign adoptions were in full swing, with more than 5,000 babies heading to the United States in 2000 alone. "It used to be that you'd get 50 or 100 yuan ($6 or $12) per baby, then 700 or 800, but there was more demand and fees kept rising and they'd bring in babies from other provinces," Duan said. One such place was neighboring Guangdong, the manufacturing hub of China, with a large population of migrant workers who often couldn't keep their babies. By chance, the husband of Duan's sister Meilin got a job in 2001 working on a chicken farm in the small Guangdong city of Wuchuan. Nearby lived an older woman by the name of Liang Guihong, a former garbage collector, who for years had been taking in babies. She sometimes had more than 20 newborns in her home, lined up on blankets on her beds. The Duan family saw opportunity. They started buying up the babies to sell to the orphanages back in Hunan. "Liang used to take care of the babies out of kindness, but she turned into a businesswoman," Duan recalled in the interview. Instead of turning over extra babies to the local orphanages in Guangdong, Liang preferred to sell them to traffickers who would pay more to take them to Hunan or adjacent Jianxi province, which also supplied many of the babies adopted in the United States. The Duans say that in addition to the 85 babies she provided them, Liang sold more than 1,000 others to orphanages. The orphanages disguised the origins of the babies, the Duans said. "They would fabricate the information. They would say that the baby was found at the Sunday market, near the bridge, on the street. Very few of the stories they put in the babies' files were true. Only the director of the orphanage knew the babies were really from Guangdong," said the father, Duan Fagui. The orphanages had to comply with a Chinese law requiring they look for the birth parents before putting the baby up for adoption. The Hunan province civil affairs department put advertisements in the local paper, but they were filled with misinformation. The well-publicized court case prompted the Chinese Center for Adoption Affairs to suspend adoptions from Hunan province and to warn orphanages against paying for babies. Insiders in the orphanage community here say the practice continues, but with more discretion. Deng Yuping, director of an orphanage in Yichun in Jiangxi province, said he pays up to $75 to cover transportation costs for people who bring in babies but that many walk away because they can get more from other orphanages. "It's true, some orphanages are paying bigger 'finders' fees' than we are," Deng said. Orphanage directors acknowledge that they don't have the resources to make sure that babies brought in were legitimately abandoned. "We can only take care of the child. It is up to the public security bureau (police) to investigate if that child was really abandoned," said Chen Ming, a former orphanage director who received a suspended sentence in the Duans' case. By the Chinese government's admission, each year between 30,000 and 60,000 children go missing, most of them abducted. The Los Angeles Times reported in September that local family planning officials in Guizhou and Hunan provinces sometimes confiscated babies from families who'd violated the one-child policies and then collected money by selling them for foreign adoption. There is no evidence in the case of the Hengyang scandal that any of the babies had been kidnapped or forcibly taken from their parents. The Duans insist that even if they broke the law, the babies have had a better life as a result. "Many of those babies would have died if nobody took them in. I took good care of the babies," said the mother, Chen. "You can be the judge -- am I a bad person for what I did Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mr. Ambien Posted May 18, 2012 Share Posted May 18, 2012 I was talking about how your statement seemed to overstate the understanding a child of that age would have about sex and homosexuality. Which would be very limited. and the mind-numbing wet dream part is only in your head because your butt hurt about my saying False at the start. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GodzillaDeuce Posted May 18, 2012 Share Posted May 18, 2012 That's so sad that Chinese girls are killed at birth. Is there a way we can sponsor one to be sent out to us rather than have it killed? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Canada Hockey Place Posted May 18, 2012 Share Posted May 18, 2012 I've never read about this before so thanks. I tried to follow up with more research by Googling "penguins suck" but it was not helpful. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Satan's Evil Twin Posted May 18, 2012 Share Posted May 18, 2012 What also fails you is basic grammar (capitals to start sentances) and formatting (putting a space after a sentance ends and a line between paragraphs) that makes your posts almost as annoying to look at as that clown avatar. Oh well, keep on looking down on everyone else. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Buddhas Hand Posted May 18, 2012 Author Share Posted May 18, 2012 What also fails you is basic grammar (capitals to start sentances) and formatting (putting a space after a sentance ends and a line between paragraphs) that makes your posts almost as annoying to look at as that clown avatar. Oh well, keep on looking down on everyone else. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ronthecivil Posted May 18, 2012 Share Posted May 18, 2012 i presume you are talking to me because of the clown reference and i fail to comprehend the reason for this attack , also i am bemused by the fact that you criticise the way i present information , i have always believed it is the content not the way you present information that is important . and let's get something straight , i do not look down on anyone , and i am pissed off that you would even suggest that . Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
avelanch Posted May 18, 2012 Share Posted May 18, 2012 anyone else find this post........ interesting....... considering who posted it? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Satan's Evil Twin Posted May 18, 2012 Share Posted May 18, 2012 What also fails you is basic grammar (capitals to start sentances) and formatting (putting a space after a sentance ends and a line between paragraphs) that makes your posts almost as annoying to look at as that clown avatar. Oh well, keep on looking down on everyone else. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ronthecivil Posted May 18, 2012 Share Posted May 18, 2012 Reading your posts, they are regularly riddled with your/you're mistakes, atrocious spelling mistakes in words longer than "your", and in general give a sense of someone using big words for effect. Stick to being an engineer, not a an English teacher. Trust me. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Satan's Evil Twin Posted May 18, 2012 Share Posted May 18, 2012 Hey, like they say, it takes one to know one! I certainly would not claim to not fail at words as well...... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Buddhas Hand Posted May 18, 2012 Author Share Posted May 18, 2012 It's hard to read. I is capital. It hurts trying to figure out then things start. Instead it looks like a run on rant. I just find it ironic that someone who puts out their words so poorly would start a topic called "words fail me". Which by the way unless your talking about your own poor typing would be looking down on other people.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bertuzzi Babe Posted May 18, 2012 Share Posted May 18, 2012 anyone else find this post........ interesting....... considering who posted it? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ronthecivil Posted May 19, 2012 Share Posted May 19, 2012 have you got a problem with me ? i have been posting on these boards for a while now and nobody has has put me down for the way i write . i used the expression words fail me to describe the feeling i had when i found out one of the most influential societies on earth banned a book that was a true story about 2 male penguins that had hatched and raised a baby penguin and it was not meant to be an attack on any particular person and i am sorry if you took it that way , but you on the other hand have attacked me twice now for no particular reason . Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ronthecivil Posted May 19, 2012 Share Posted May 19, 2012 Considered the source and ignored it as it's the same old same old typical claptrap. Just report him, puckinloveicehockey, let the mods deal with him Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Buddhas Hand Posted May 19, 2012 Author Share Posted May 19, 2012 It hurts to read your posts because it's hard to tell where one sentance ends and the other begins. That's all I mean. I simply took "words fail me" to mean something else for my purposes. I did actually make an on topic opinion earlier (that instead of arguing over these kinds of things lets pay attention to how good at math and by extension math and other fundamentals) but of course nobody cares about that kind of thing when there's partisan sides to take. So instead I took it upon myself to try to convince you to type with capitals and spaces between paragraphs even though it has an equally low chance of suceeding and I am no saint to the grammar gods. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ronthecivil Posted May 19, 2012 Share Posted May 19, 2012 damn right buddy , i march to the beat of my own drum . and you know what Ron , i do not think you are being very civil ! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mr. Ambien Posted May 19, 2012 Share Posted May 19, 2012 I am sure he's not THAT oversensitive. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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