THE GEOGRAPHY OF GENDER
GEOG 101 Cultural Geography
Dr. Powell
November 15, 2017
Jacob Keith
Across the world, women are being culled; killed, aborted, and abandoned simply because they are female. The United Nations estimates that as many as “200 million girls are missing in the world today because of this so-called “gendercide” (Banerji 2011). Gendercide refers to the abandonment, aborting, selling, mistreating, or killing of girls based solely on their gender. Those that are not culled during infancy are frequently subject to parental neglect and extreme violence either at the hands of their family members or their own husbands. This topic intersects with human geography in terms of place, cultural values, population issues, religious beliefs, and differences among countries.
The reasoning behind ‘gendercide’, a term coined by Mary Anne Warren (Warren 1985), is often chocked up as an unintended result of the Chinese one-child policy or as a combination of poverty and ignorance. However, this is not entirely true. In cultures such as India, a son is born as an automatic asset to his family, while a daughter is born as a burden to her family. A female birth is considered the loss of money without even considering money spent on raising the child, while the birth of a male has only the costs associated with raising him. Countries within the Asian continent seem to have higher gender preferences than other countries; China and India having peculiarly high numbers of male births, while eastern Asian countries such as South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan are close behind. Outside of Asia, former communist countries such as Caucasus and the western Balkans are suffering from similar gender disparity. A preference for sons in some Asian countries has been well documented for centuries. Now a study suggests the practice has led to significant imbalances in the male/female population in China, South Korea, and India that could have long-lasting effects. According to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), the gender ratio in China today is 123 boys per 100 girls (Xue 2010). According to the British Medical Journal (BMJ), only one region of China, Tibet, has a sex ratio within the bounds of nature (Zhu, Lu and Hesket 2009).
The effects of this skewed sex ratio on the countries suffering from this gender disparity are numerous. The excess amount of single men – referred to as “bare branches” or guanggun in the Chinese culture– seems to have increased rapidly in the wake of the one-child policy of 1979 (Xue 2010). Throughout human history, young men have been responsible for the vast preponderance of crime and violence – especially in countries where status and social acceptance depend on being married and having children, such as China and India. A rising population of frustrated single men spells trouble, as the crime rate has almost doubled in China over the last twenty years, with stores of rape, prostitution, the trafficking of women, and bride abduction abound. Likewise, India has a correlation between provincial crime rates and sex ratios. That besides, while the cost of dowries has fallen, the rate of bride prices (where the groom’s family gives money to the bride’s family) has increased due to the limited of supply of available females. The surplus of bachelors in South Korea has sucked in “brides from abroad”. In 2008, 11% of marriages were mixed between Korean men and foreign women (Xue 2010). This is causing tensions in an otherwise homogeneous society, which is often hostile to the children of mixed marriages. The South Korean government believes that half the children of farm households will be mixed by 2020. An unexpected consequence of this skewed sex ratio is an increased rate of savings in China. The families with a single son are saving money in order to make him more capable of attracting a wife, as the marriage market is becoming increasingly competitive.
The Hindu proverb stating that “raising a daughter is like watering your neighbors’ garden” makes sense within the context of a culture that participates in the nuptial tradition of a dowry. A daughter is born as a deficit to her family, doomed to carry off a large portion of the family wealth to the family she marries in to through her dowry. Doctors in India had even begun to advertise ultrasound scans as a method of paying, “5,000 rupees today [to] save 50,000 rupees tomorrow” (Xue 2010). Parents who would prefer a son but would not kill a living baby daughter began to choose abortion as a method of obtaining the desired gender for their child. Even in countries where gender-based abortion is banned, sex-selective abortion is still prevalent, as it is nearly impossible to prove that an abortion has been carried out for reasons of sex selection. Now the issue of gendercide is being addressed, both by the governments of those suffering from sex ratio and the evolving cultures of said countries. Firstly, sex-selective abortion has been banned in India and China as well as most other countries (although Sweden had legalized the practice in 2009). That besides, modernization is changing people’s values, undermining norms which set a higher store on the life of a son as opposed to a daughter. Census data and CASS studies both show that the sex ratio has become stable at around 120, meaning that it seems to have stopped increasing (Xue 2010).
Bibliography
2011. It's a Girl. Directed by W. Ashley Maddox. Produced by Shadowline Films. Performed by Rita Banerji.
Warren, Mary Anne. 1985. Gendercide: The Implications of Sex Selection. Rowman & Allanfield Publishers.
Xue, Xinran. 2010. The worldwide war on baby girls. March 4. Accessed November 15, 2017. http://www.economist.com/node/15636231.
Young, Saundra. 2011. Gender Preference Leads to Imbalance in Asian Countries. March 14. Accessed November 15, 2017. http://thechart.blogs.cnn.com/2011/03/14/gender-preference-leads-to-imbalance-in-asian-countries/.