By far the most important cause of a shift in the balance of the sexes is a sexual culling, simple, brutal and carefully hidden from the eyes of seekers after the truth. Millions of girls are destroyed at or before birth, as testimony to their worthless state. In the West, young boys die at a higher rate than their sisters. In two-thirds of the less developed world, the opposite is true. Beliefs in elite male desirability permeate into the social customs of whole societies. The murder of female children is common and, in the new global economy, has become more so. Chinese, deprived of a chance to have more than one child killed more than 250,000 baby girls between 1979 and 1984. Worldwide, the average sex ratio at birth is about 105 male births to every 100 female births. In some age groups in China there are 122 boys for every 100 girls, consistent with 17% of all girls being killed at birth. In one recent study of clinics in Bombay, of 8,000 abortions, 7,997 were of female foetuses, leading to a move to ban ultra-sound for sexual differentiation. In one hospital 96% of mothers who were told they had a daughter aborted, while 100% with sons carried to term (Ridley R577).

Seven thousand fewer girls are born in India each day than the global average would suggest, largely because female fetuses are aborted after sex determination tests, UNICEF said on Tuesday. The problem of female feticide has significantly worsened since 1991. Out of 71,000 children born every day in India, just 31,000 are girls giving a sex ratio of 882 girls to 1,000 boys. But the global sex ratio - 954 girls to 1,000 boys - suggests that 38,000 girls should be born. (Feticide means 7,000 fewer girls a day in India Reuters December 12, 2006).

The murder of girls is a valued Indian tradition. Rajputs, Sikhs and other warrior castes preferred to marry their daughters to a husband of higher rank which meant an expensive dowry, or the rapid disposal of the unwanted child at birth. The British became concerned when they saw the results of the first census of 1871. In some villages, the commissioners reported, not a single female child was to be found. The authorities brought in the Female Infanticide Act, which set heavy penalties on child murder, and policemen were stationed in such places but, twenty years later, some provinces still had twice as many boys as girls. For a time, the habit began to fade, but now things have changed for the worse. Dowries often take half of a poor family's disposable wealth and the death of unwanted children has become more, not less, common with India's new affluence.

Steve Jones (R349), in forthrightly decrying this situation, notes that the value of females depends on the market:

In Kerala, a liberal society with an educated population, daughters are born unscathed. In the north and northwest of the country, in contrast, tradition rules. All over the Punjab, Haryana and the United Provinces, men want large families, and many children die young. Women move out of the household to marry, and are rarely seen in public once they have done so. The economy is based on wheat, rather than as in Kerala on rice. Wives play almost no part in the fields, and their value has been further reduced by the farm machinery brought in after the green revolution. Girls suffer as a result (the sole exception lies among the untouchables, whose poverty is such that the efforts of all children are needed to keep the family alive). In certain villages, young boys outnumber girls by three to one. Week-old girls die at twice the rate of their brothers. Often, neither the birth nor the death is recorded; but, when parents admit their child's demise, the cause is given as 'pneumonia', or that 'the baby became stiff'. Boys, the villagers tell the curious, are saved from such a fate because the correct gifts have been made to the gods. Mothers stay in hospital for several days when blessed with a son, but after the birth of a daughter leave at once. Dais, traditional birth attendants, often kill the child, for a fee of around a hundred and fifty rupees (about two pounds sterling). They can, they claim, assess a baby's gender even before birth, and stand ready to do their duty. In some places, each admits to a murder a week. The relatives may do the job themselves by forcing the mother to place tobacco under her child's tongue. If she refuses, she is herself killed or thrown out of the house.

The practice was once limited to the higher castes, but a desire to copy their betters, combined with economic pressure, has spread it even to Sikhs and Christians. As the Indian economy has evolved, so have the reproductive rules. The Kahar community in southern India was branded a criminal tribe in the days of the Raj' and many of its members were imprisoned for banditry. Their women were assertive, worked hard and supported their kin while their husbands were out of circulation. Their villages were poverty-stricken, but both dowries and infanticide were unknown. In 1958 a dam was built. A few communities could grow cash crops and became wealthy, but most stayed poor. At once a dowry system began as parents became desperate to marry their daughters into a richer household. Now the incidence of child murder is among the highest in India. In one recent year, five hundred and seventy of the six hundred girls born were dead within days. So scandalous were the figures that the law at last became involved. For the first time in India, somebody was found guilty of child murder and went to prison. She was, needless to say, a woman, but who was really responsible? No man was charged with any crime.

Nowadays a husband’s relatives ask not for clothes, but for televisions. In the slums of Bombay, a dowry may represent five years’ worth of household expenses. The Dowry Prohibition Act of 1961 has had no effect. Twenty years on, only the rural northwest had much of an excess of boys soon after birth. Ten years later child-killing had spread, and for the first time in history, India's cities now as a whole have a masculine bias. A dreadful recent development involves dowry murder young brides whose families have not come up with the goods are burned alive, often with the pretext of an accident with a kerosene stove. At least 2000 wives a year are the victims of such crimes, which did not become common until the 1970s.

Prenatal sex tests e.g. with ultra-sound were forbidden in 1996, because they lead to selective abortion, with a three-year sentence and a heavy fine, but the law applied only to government health centres and not to private clinics. Bombay alone has two hundred clinics that offer such abortions, with almost all the procedures aimed at daughters. Now, the job has got easier, with portable scanners taken from village to village to check whether a fetus passes its prenatal examination. Up to a million unborn girls are destroyed in India each year. To check whether his wife is pregnant with the wrong kind of child costs an unskilled worker two months' wages, but the fiscal balance makes it worthwhile. For the middle class, private clinics have begun to provide test-tube fertilisation followed by selection of the desired type; and, of the few dozen who have so far used them, every one has asked for a boy.

The murder of children which so shocked the British in 1871 led to a ratio of 972 women to a thousand men. In 1991 modern science had shifted the figure to 929 females to each thousand males. Gandhis goal of a nation in which, intellectually, mentally and spiritually, women would be equivalent to men has not been realised.

Indian women (AP)

India has an unusual gender balance. In most countries, women slightly outnumber men, but in the year 2001, for every 1,000 male babies born in India, there were just 933 girls. This has often been explained by the fact that some Indian mothers abort their female offspring because they regard them less favourably than boys. But the latest research suggests that discrimination may persist into childhood. The researchers analyzed autopsy reports of babies in three socially deprived parts of Delhi over a five-year period and discovered that the overall death rate for girls was almost one-third higher than that for boys. This was particularly the case for sudden, unexplained deaths - three out of four cases were girls. The researchers suggest some of these deaths may be cases of parents actually killing their female babies. Where death occurred because of a severe and non-preventable disease, there was no gender gap, but deaths due to diarrhoea - which is treatable - were twice as likely to happen to girls as to boys. Again, the researchers suggest that this could be due to discrimination, with parents seeking medical help more urgently for male than for female offspring.

Medical research in India suggests that baby girls are much more likely to die than infant boys, even from illnesses that can be treated. The research, published in the British Medical Journal, was carried out at St Stephen's Hospital in Delhi. The report concludes that the imbalance in the proportion of deaths may be due to the fact that baby girls are less welcome and are treated less favourably by parents (Indian girls ‘more likely to die’ BBC 18 July, 2003)

More than 10m female births in India may have been lost to abortion and sex selection in the past 20 years, according to medical research. Researchers Prabhat Jha of St Michael's Hospital at the University of Toronto, Canada, and Rajesh Kumar of the Postgraduate Institute of Medical Research in Chandigarh, India writing in Lancet said prenatal selection and selective abortion was causing the loss of 500,000 girls a year, based on a national survey of 1.1m households in 1998. The ‘girl deficit’ was more common among educated women but did not vary according to religion. In most countries, women slightly outnumber men, but separate research for the year 2001 showed that for every 1,000 male babies born in India, there were just 933 girls. They found that there was an increasing tendency to select boys when previous children had been girls. In cases where the preceding child was a girl, the ratio of girls to boys in the next birth was 759 to 1,000. This fell even further when the two preceding children were both girls to 719 girls to 1,000 boys. However, for a child following the birth of a male child, the gender ratio was roughly equal (India 'loses 10m female births' BBC 9 Jan 2006).

Indian authorities have been ordered to enforce laws designed to stop the abortion of female foetuses. The Supreme Court ruled that clinics must be punished for using womb scans to determine the sex of a fetus. The case was brought by a children's charity which said many Indians have abortions after ultrasound scans tell them to expect a baby girl (“India confronts fetal sex checks” BBC10 Sep 2003).

This pattern of girl slaying is an overblown response under the pressures of a changing developing capitalist consumer society to pressures on the dowry from higher technological expectations and a desire on the part of more people in lower classes to adopt the life style including the practices of girl killing of those in ‘higher strata’: Nevertheless, its basis is firmly rooted in the Trivers-Willard hypothesis discussed in context of the prisoners’ dilemma: as elaborated by Sarah Hrdy (R330 331):

“No research on biased sex ratios in birds or mammals had been done when anthropologist Mildred Dickemann first encountered the logic laid out by Trivers and Willard in their 1973 paper. Social scientists at that time paid scant attention to the idea that there might be innate human predispositions that enhanced inclusive fitness and the long-term survival of family lines. Devaluation of daughters was viewed as a purely cultural construct. It was assumed to be the outcome of free-floating minds spinning infinitely variable webs of meaning out of locally received traditions. As far as cultural anthropologists were concerned, the ideology of son preference along with the custom of paying dowries to marry off daughters sufficed to explain female infanticide. What other reasons could there be? Yet Dickemann was struck by how well the patterning of son preference in the north Indian case conformed to predictions of an evolutionary model that applied to animals generally. Trivers and Willard proposed that parents in good condition should prefer sons, those that were disadvantaged, daughters. They even specified that this logic would be found in socially stratified human societies, where women marry up the social scale, whenever the ‘reproductive success of a male at the upper end of the scale exceeds his sister’s, while that of a female at the lower end of the scale exceeds her brother’s. A tendency for the female to marry a male whose socioeconomic status is higher than hers will, other things being equal, tend to bring about such a correlation.’ Trivers and Willard's logic even explained the most puzzling feature of daughter slaying in the Rajput case - why the most elite families were the most likely to kill half of their offspring. By contrast, sub-elites were left paying exorbitant dowries to place daughters in one of these elite households, impoverishing their sons in the process. The poorest subcastes, who really did not have enough resources to feed their children, were the ones who welcomed daughters and did not kill them. None of this made sense unless one accepted the assumption that parents were not counting offspring but looking further down the line, toward grandchildren and beyond, toward the survival of a family line.”

“Eliminating daughters at the top of the hierarchy produces a vacuum sucking up marriageable girls from below, and creating a shortage at the bottom. Families don’t pay dowries to place daughters in families with the same or lower status than their own. They demand payment for them instead. At the bottom of the heap, sons whose families cannot cough up the required bride price remain celibate. Far from calamities, daughters are the most valuable commodity low-status families possess. Referring to a daughter as a commodity will strike many as extraordinarily callous. But we are not talking about post-industrial Western populations that for generations have lived in an unprecedented state of ecological release, freed from concern about famines. Continued survival of such parents and their children rarely depends on choices mothers make about how much food to allocate to one child versus another. But not all mothers are so fortunate. Daughters not only offered the only prospect for upward mobility, in many cases they provided the only possibility at all of continued survival of a family line. In parts of the world where drought and famine are recurring hazards, the landless and dispossessed invariably have the worst chance of making it through. Under such harsh circumstances the likeliest survivors will be offspring of mothers who marry into families with access to resources, like arable land. Hypergamy (girls marrying up) is not a fluke. It was a long-standing necessity for lineage survival. Nor can it be denied that decisions leading to it have genetic outcomes. Centuries of hypergamous mating have left a trail of genetic markers, like bread crumbs through the forest of the Indian caste system, documenting the different paths followed by the two sexes as they married and produced offspring. An examination of genetic traits carried in mitochondrial DNA (found in somatic and egg cells but not preserved from sperm), which is transmitted only from mother to offspring, showed that these mother-transmitted traits are spread widely beyond traditional caste boundaries. For centuries, they have been carried by brides and concubines moving up in the world by marrying into higher-caste families. By contrast, paternally transmitted markers, traits passed from father to son on the Y-chromosome, are less mobile. Father-transmitted traits remain localized, rarely spreading beyond the caste where they originated. This may be one reason why male traits are more vulnerable to extinction than those carried by mothers. Thus do customs previously viewed as purely cultural have profound demographic and genetic consequences, as well as deep roots in human motivations and their decision rules regarding children”.

The earliest evidence for sex-biased infanticide derives from the DNA of baby skeletons-all less than two days old and without apparent defect excavated from the sewer of an ancient brothel in Roman Ashkelon on the southern coast of modern Israel. Fourteen of the nineteen victims of what archaeologists suspected were male consistent with coming from prostitutes in lower class society where daughters would be more valuable.

Whatever the social pressures to get rid of one sex, the laws of reproduction will, in the end, always make their presence felt. To interfere with them can lead to painful and expensive consequences. In China girls are still sometimes called ‘Too Many’ or ‘Little Mistake’ to reflect their value, but once they were worth even less. In the nineteenth century the province of Huai-Pei suffered a series of famines which led to civil war. Daughters were despised as another mouth to feed and, quite soon, their numbers began to plunge. As their brothers grew up, they found nobody to marry. Great gangs of disaffected youths grew into a horde of a hundred thousand rebels, the Nian. They almost overthrew the Imperial dynasty before they were crushed. The problem of the friendless and discontented Chinese youth has returned. Even official statistics (which understate the problem) suggest a ratio of 117 male births for each 100 females which gives the nation eighty million young men with no hope of marriage. The age gap between groom and bride has increased as older men take teenage wives (which makes life even worse for the next generation), and bachelor villages have appeared in distant provinces. The residents of such places ('bare branches', as they are known) once became monks, or soldiers, or eunuchs in the royal household. Now they move to the cities and add to social unrest. There has been an outbreak of abduction of girls, who are sold into families in search of a daughter-in-law or as prostitutes in the male-filled cities. The government sees the problem. Selective abortion of daughters has been banned, and posters proclaim that ‘Girls are fine descendants too’. It will, alas, take more than slogans to remove a habit built so deep into the nation’s fabric.

A principal effect of the one-child policy was to cause children after the first to be skewed. Later births in families with more than one existing daughter were extremely male-biased, those with several sons were somewhat female-biased (R427).

Bobbi Low (R427 173) notes the effects of this process of families biased towards sons:

“In the early 1980s, the government of China instituted its “one child” policy in an attempt to slow China's population growth rate. Couples were restricted to one child per family, with some exemptions. The cultural history of son preference has interacted with the limits on family size, and possibly with marriage preferences. The proportion of families with only one child did increase, and the birth sex ratio became more male-biased. In one or two provinces the sex ratio. of children in single-child families to soared to over 129.

But it was primarily in later births that the sex ratio became most pronounced. In a nationwide study in 1989-90, the sex ratio of first births was 105.6, right at the worldwide average, but the sex ratio of later-born children depended on how many older brothers and sisters already existed. The sex ratio of third-borns when there were two older sisters was 224.9 males per 100 females, and the sex ratio for third-borns with two older brothers was 74.1. Some daughter preference did exist when several older brothers were already born”.

“China acts to protect baby girls” BBC 15 July, 2004:

China says it will intensify its efforts to protect girls and address the gender imbalance of newborn babies. A senior government official said that trafficking and abandonment of girls would be severely punished, and a ban on selective abortion reinforced. Government figures show that 117 boys are born for every 100 girls. The imbalance is widely believed to be a result of China's strict one-child policy. Many parents abort baby girls, hoping to try again for a boy. “Illegal sex determination and sex-selective abortion must be strictly banned,” said Zhao Baige, the deputy director of China’s National Population Commission. “China has set the goal of lowering the sex ratio to a normal level by 2010”

Yet the sex ratio is still as skewed as in India:

China will have 30 million more men of marriageable age than women by 2020, making it difficult for them to find wives, according to a national report. The gender imbalance could lead to social instability, the report by the State Population and Family Planning Commission warned. It found that around 118 boys were born to every 100 girls in 2005 (Chinese facing shortage of wives BBC 12 Jan 2007)..

In Korea there is a similar imbalance in the sex ration caused by selective abortion:

“One son is worth ten daughters,'” exclaimed the exultant south Korean mother of a newborn boy. It's a harsh assessment, but one often heard. in male-dominated Asian societies. In South, Korea, however, the preference for boys has taken a disturbing turn. There are at least 113 men for every 100 women in Korea, one of the highest gender imbalances in the world which, according to sociologists has profound social implications. A shortage of wives perhaps is the most obvious of these, but more alarming is the willingness of many Korean women to abort female fetuses in pursuit of a son. About 30,000 female fetuses each year or one in every 12 girl births after tests to confirm their gender. The high rate of abortion is partially explained by the aborting of female foetuses,' Professor Cho says in her paper. She notes that in a national survey in 1991, nearly one-third of respondents approved of abortion of female foetuses. The abortion rate is extremely high in Korea. One survey says that half of women aged between 15 and 44 have had abortions, a rate that has stayed steady since the late 1970s. Abortions are a major factor behind the sex imbalance, particularly among third and, fourth-born children where there are more than 200 boys for every 100 girls. Most women pray for their first born to be a boy, consuming such bizarre folk medicines as raw rooker's testicles and holding religious services to boost their chances. They become increasingly desperate if they produce only girls, leading to more sex-tests and abortions. “When I felt that the fetus was a girl, I aborted my pregnancy,' said one woman interviewed for a recent paper in the Asia Journal of Women's Studies published by Ewha Women's University. “I almost decided to abort my third pregnancy because my dreams and the shape of my belly told [me] it was a girl.” In 1990 doctors were banned from telling parents the sex of their unborn child after ultra-sound tests or amniocentesis. The Government's aggressive campaign to convince to convince Koreans that a well-raised daughter is worth ten sons has seen the imbalance dip since 1990 But, despite new moves to revoke the licences of offending doctors, a high number still take money to tell parents their child's sex, and the practice is almost impossible for the authorities to trace.

In recent years ethnic Korean women from China have been imported by marriage agencies for rural men unable to find wives. The match often ends badly as many of the women are already married and agree to the match solely to support their families back home. “Nowadays the age of the girl children subject to sexual abuse is getting lower. The problem of sexual violence is high anyway and many people think it is due to the sex imbalance.” The signs are encouraging that the imbalance will gradually correct itself, but its consequences will linger for - years as the pressure on women to bear sons is still immense. The so-called ‘son-preference’ is rooted in South Korea's Confucian philosophy, which stresses the role of the son in carrying on the family's bloodline, and in various ancestral rituals. Bearing a son is regarded as a woman's most important role. Girls are secondary since they become part of their husband's family after marriage. But these traditions have been modified to suit South Korea's embrace of capitalism. It is a chauvinistic society where women have little prospect of a well-paid job. Boys, simply, are a better bet for parents wanting financial support in their dotage. “Boys are seen, as a guarantee against economic upheaval,” says Professor Cho. But she points out that South Korea's modernisation is slowly changing the attitudes of some young women: “Many young women don't want to live like their mothers.”

Authorities in Vietnam are preparing a law which will stop doctors from performing tests on pregnant women which will tell them whether they will have a son or daughter - aimed at stopping the abortion of females in a society where many parents prefer to have sons:

Senior officials are concerned that Vietnam's current population imbalance, where there are more men than women, could get worse. Vietnam has one of the world's highest rates of abortion. It is used as a contraceptive and, the authorities fear, as a way of ensuring that pregnancy results in sons, not daughters. Two-child policy The new law to ban gender testing is being prepared with the support of the National Committee for Population and Family Planning. It has warned that having an imbalance of men to women could lead to violence as men compete for partners. Vietnam's rulers urge people to control the size of their families as part of their economic and social responsibilities to the country, where the population has reached about 80 million. Women are encouraged to delay having children until their early twenties and there is a two-child policy. In the most extreme cases, parents can be penalised for having a third child. They can be expelled from the Communist Party or have their land confiscated. But Vietnam has decided against a one-child policy after looking across the border to China where the policy has led to a massive gender imbalance. There is also concern about the rate of abortions in Vietnam. The average is for a women to have two abortions in her lifetime. The high rate is attributed to the use of terminations as contraception and also to the trend for urban living and, among the young, more liberal attitudes to sex (Vietnam to ban gender testing BBC 18 Nov 2001).

Low (R427 171) also notes that highly biased sex ratios can also occur from some customary practices without necessarily implying infant mortality or abortion:

“Among orthodox Jews, marital intercourse is prohibited during menstruation and for seven days thereafter, and the husband is not to masturbate or seek other sexual outlets. At the end of the seven days, the wife takes a ritual bath, and the couple is directed to have intercourse at that time, and twice' a week during the rest of the month, with the exception of men in unusual occupations. There is additional advice if the couple wishes to conceive a son: intercourse should take place twice in succession. It is difficult to obtain birth sex ratios for orthodox Jews independent of nonorthodox Jews, and conception biases are certainly difficult to measure, for the obvious reason that important parameters are difficult to control. Nonetheless several things are true. Y-bearing sperm, which combine with the egg to make an XY (male) fetus, are slightly pointier-headed (hydrodynamically better) than X-bearing sperm; they are also smaller, with fewer resources to stay alive if the egg is not immediately ready. As a result, in humans as in most mammals, conceptions close to time of ovulation tend to be male- biased. The orthodox cultural practice of abstinence for about twelve days per month, combined with frequent intercourse near the time of ovulation, appears to interact with biological biases in conception probabilities: sex ratios for Jews in a number of traditionally orthodox locations historically average 137 males/ 100 females, while for nonorthodox Jewish populations, and nearby secular populations, they average 105, the worldwide average”.

The developed world, less bound by economic pressure, is not much concerned with gender balance. Parents with two boys, or two girls, choose to have a third child more often than do those whose first pair were of different gender. This affects their own household, but has no effect on the overall balance. In the United States a third of counsellors would allow a pregnancy termination for a couple who want a child of a particular gender even if no medical issue is involved. The figure for Israel is twice as high. Britain has so far been strict, except to avoid inborn disease.

Plenty of couples try to subvert the rules of nature in a less drastic way and are happy to pay for the privilege. The author of ‘How to Choose the Sex of Your Baby’ retired to Las Vegas on the proceeds. The FACS machine, used to sort cattle sperm, has now been turned to our own ends. The businesses who shift the ratio for cows have been joined by the MicroSort Company, which does the same for humans. So far its services are restricted to couples who already have two or more children of the same sex and who are happy to be counselled to ensure that they do not reject a child of the unwanted variety should the device fall. At two thousand dollars a try the procedure is not cheap, but already five hundred or so American pregnancies have come from sorted sperm.

In stark contrast to parents in the developing world, Americans who make such choices much prefer girls. Three-quarters ask for a daughter rather than a son. The global shortage of a hundred million of their fellows is a reminder that in other places the economic sums add up in a different way. Remorseless as such calculations may be, human evolution follows the rules of other creatures and the laws of nature are likely to win in the end.

The Indian government says it will reward girls from single child families with free education and other benefits. The move is intended to bolster India's dwindling female population and help promote population control. India, with a population of over one billion, has only 933 women per thousand men according to the 2001 census.(Free school for one-girl families Jyotsna Singh BBC 22-9-2005).

Girl’s less than half the value: Shanghai police are investigating a scheme to sell newborn babies on a popular auction Website, according to eBay officials. The starting bid for a baby was 1 yuan, like most items sold on eBay. If a bidder agreed to pay 28,000 yuan (US$3,457) for a boy or 13,000 yuan for a girl, the person would win the auction immediately (ShanghaiDaily.com 20-10-2005).

Till Death us do Part

There is a more sinister patriarchal logic to the burning of wives for their dowries. A new study (Swami R676), the first of its kind, provides appalling proof of what many in India already acknowledge - that many of the unusually large number of kitchen burning ‘accidents’ affecting young married women are in fact dowry-related murders, or forced suicides, acts of unimaginable violence against wives who can't meet their husbands’ and in-laws’ demands for yet more money. The study suggests that in spite of India's strict anti-dowry laws and long-running campaigns by women’s groups, incidents like these are on the rise across India. Worse still, the guilty nearly always go unpunished either because police and forensic pathologists fail to investigate the cases, or because rampant corruption scuttles them at a later stage.

Hindu practices in India cause the death of more females than any other social or religious system, when infanticide of up to 15% of girl children, plus up to 25,000 wife burnings annually are taken into account. Although the dowry is illegal, social customs persist (Swami)

The study carried out by Baldev Raj Sharma and his colleagues shows that of 385 burn deaths at his hospital between 1994 and 2001, most of the 292 women who died were not victims of kitchen accidents (Burns, 28, p 250). What's more, the numbers are rising. In 1994, burns accounted for 12 per cent of postmortems at the hospital. In 2001, the figure had jumped to nearly 30 per cent. However, the police reports Sharma examined concluded that 97 per cent of the women, usually young women within five years of their marriage, were burnt in accidents in the kitchen, usually due to a burst kerosene stove. Yet in some of their homes, kerosene wasn't even used in the kitchens. And while most kitchen accidents cause burns on the arms, chest and abdomen, many of these women suffered 80 to 90 per cent burns.

In traditional Indian homes, girls learn to cook when they are around 13, which is when most accidents would be expected to occur. Most burns victims in the West are children and the elderly. In stark contrast, only 4 per cent of the deaths studied by Sharma were among girls younger than 15. The number jumps to 16 per cent for women aged 16 to 20 - the age at which most women marry - and to 28 per cent for those aged 21 to 25. The most damning statistic is that every one of the married women was burned in her in-laws’ home. “That speaks for itself,” says Sharma. Why then, in the face of seemingly overwhelming evidence, do the guilty nearly always go free? The problem is not with the anti-dowry laws. “The villain of the piece is the investigation,” says NR Menon. And the problem starts with the woman's dying declaration. “There is a belief that the dying will not lie. Invariably, the victim is brought to hospital by her husband and her in-laws, the very people who may have tried to kill her or forced her to attempt suicide (the law treats those responsible as guilty in both cases). The woman is told that her own parents will be hurt if she doesn't say it was an accident, or is beseeched to consider the fate of her children if she dies and her husband goes to jail, or warned that she will have to come back home if she survives. “Even if I send the in-laws outside, she'll invariably lie”.

In fact, Sharma found that fewer than 4 per cent of the women died within an hour because of shock, while more than half survived for anywhere from three days to over a week before succumbing to infections. Sometimes, in the hours or days before her death, the woman reveals that she tried to commit suicide after being unbearably tormented at home, or even accuses her husband and in-laws of trying to kill her. In such cases, the courts are forced to consider an her statements and look at other evidence. Some evidence comes from the post-mortem, which must be performed on the body of any woman who died an unnatural death within seven years of marriage. And experienced forensic pathologists can usually tell whether burns are accidental from their nature and extent. Yet even then the system fails. The problem is that such evidence is not enough in itself. Because the police invariably do not start investigations until the woman dies, supporting evidence from the scene is usually lost. It should be completely obligatory on the part of the police to take the help of the forensic scientists and forensic pathologists. Until two years ago, Victoria Hospital's burns ward was like a railway station, she says. People wandered in and out as they pleased, and staff had to be bribed to change sheets or give injections. ‘It was a hell-hole,’ says Fernandes. And this remains the state of many hospitals across the country.

Kali in the flames Katmandu (Chris King)

“According to the reported deaths - and they are all under-reported - almost 100 women die every month in Bangalore [of unnatural causes such as hanging, poisoning or burns]. And 70 to 800 per cent of these deaths are deemed accidental”, says Fernandes. “The interest and commitment to find out the truth are not there.” As a consequence, official figures on dowry-deaths don't mean much. The National Crime Records Bureau in Delhi reported about 6000 dowry deaths a year in the 1990s. Unofficial estimates are much higher. Himendra Thakur of the US-based International Society against Dowry and Bride-Burning in India estimated in 1999 that nearly 25,000 women are murdered or forced to commit suicide every year. Aside from sheer negligence, corruption at all levels is sabotaging efforts to crack down on the culprits. “When they don't succeed with the police and the doctor, they get hold of the prosecutor,” says Saldanha. “And he'll very cleverly sabotage the case.” The problem is so bad that in Karnataka state an astounding 97 per cent of the accused in dowry death cases are acquitted. And after appeals to the High Court, the acquittal, reach nearly 99 per cent. This problem affects the entire country, creating a climate in which some men feel they can get away with murder. Saldanha adds that one section of India's anti-dowry law states that if a woman dies, any property or wealth given as a dowry should be returned to her own family, regardless of whether her husband was convicted or acquitted. “Judges in India had totally overlooked [that] section As a result, when the case fails, the husband and in-laws are left with the loot. And that gives them a tremendous appetite to do it again. Society will have to take a leading role and revolt against this, and see that the system is taken to its logical end.”

Most killing of women for non-payment of ‘promised’ dowry have so far occurred in the urban affluent upper-caste Hindu communities, in spite of its rapid escalation and migration into traditionally incidence-free areas and non-Hindu communities of India as well as Bangladesh and Pakistan (where death of newly married women due to ‘stove bursting’ has often featured the news media in recent years). In places where traditionally there is an absence of caste- or dowry-based marriage system (such as the tribal communities of the far-east Indian states or predominantly caste-free Muslim, Christian, or Buddhist majority areas), dowry deaths are still not rampant (Partha Banerjee). This evidence reasserts that the problems of dowry death, bride burning, and other forms of dowry-related violence on women is a Hindu phenomenon that is now almost out-of-control. Reasons cited by one author are: (1) retention of the caste system, (2) undermining of the woman by the religious orthodox and social patriarch making herself and her family vulnerable to socio-economic pressure and extortion, (3) ever-increasing greed of the bridegroom and his family, (4) an economically strangled hyper-populated society non-supportive of unmarried women, (5) a morally depraved political system run by the pro-status quo conservatives. (6) Apathy from the educated Indian middle-class.

The epicenter of the problem of bride burning and other forms of dowry-related violence on women is Delhi (the Indian capital), western and central Uttar Pradesh (cities such as Kanpur, Lucknow and Agra have witnessed the highest number of deaths), and places adjoining Delhi (Haryana, northeastern Rajasthan, northern Madhya Pradesh, and southern Punjab), and the problem has largely been concentrated among the upper caste above-average Hindu communities. Now the problem has spread rapidly to other traditionally incidence-free areas and classes -- south Indian states such as Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, and Karnataka, western states such as Maharashtra and Gujarat, and eastern states such as Bihar and West Bengal (the latter having been one of the bastions of leftist politics of India) have witnessed rapid surge of incidents in recent years.Incredibly, in some cases, the convicted husband will be requested by the parents of his previous bride to marry her sister. The latter is an example of the severity of the problem. The sister and her parents have no place else to go but the abuser/killer man. The death of the woman has left a permanent mark of misfortune on her family resulting outcasting/abhorrence by other prospective bridegrooms. The surviving sister can't remain unmarried: the patriarch society and the upper caste rulers would not permit that. But the incidence of the ‘untimely death’ of her older sister prevents her parents to find a “clean” groom for her. Now, here comes the widower willing to remarry with an batch of dowry probably a little less than the first time. And, he will now probably be more ‘forgiving’ to the bride's family he already so much knows. So, who should the family turn to but the ‘closely related’?

Cerbera odollam, which grows across India and south-east Asia, is used by more people to commit suicide than any other plant, but doctors, pathologists and coroners are failing to detect how often it is used to murder people. Three-quarters of Cerbera victims are women. The team says this may mean the plant is being used to kill young wives who do not meet the exacting standards of some Indian families (J. Ethnopharmacology 95 123)

NZ Herald

Untouchable Sacred Whores

Untouchability is practised everywhere in India—until it comes to sex. Ten-year-old Yellamma perches on a stone slab in the dying light, absent-mindedly fiddling with her hair. She doesn't realise it but her hair has condemned her to a life of sexual slavery. Yellamma was born a Dalit (or untouchable) and lives in Pagidimar village in Andhra Pradesh. She has a wild mane of hair matted into dreadlocks. Her father has been told by the village chief it is a sign that she must be dedicated to the goddess Ellammal. His only daughter will become a Jogini woman - a role performed - only by Dalits - and will have to have sex with any man that wants her. She will not be permitted to marry and the men need not pay nor bear any responsibility for any children. Her father says, “We have worshipped Ellammal for many years. She gives us protection and guides us. I don't want to disobey the sign because she will punish us. Look at her hair. It means she must be dedicated.” In fact her hair is so tangled because her mother died from tuberculosis when Yellamma was only six and she had no one to care for her or look after her appearance. Her dedication as a Jogini has little to do with religion and more to do with economics. Her father is a day labourer, paid only in rice. He cannot afford meat or vegetables. Yellamma is a pretty girl and a Dalit— which is why her father has come under pressure from higher caste men to have her dedicated. She hasn’t reached puberty yet but already the vultures are beginning to circle. More than 10,000 Dalit women across Andhra Pradesh are forced to work as temple prostitutes. The practice was outlawed in 1984, yet the use of Jogini women is still extensive in rural areas. There is little will to help these women, especially as the local police also make use of them. Many temple prostitutes are bonded to their work through fear of punishment from the goddess, but Dappu employs former Jogini women to show change is possible. Ex-jogini Hajamma was brave enough to leave her profession and has married. She now travels from village to village to persuade elders and parents to abandon the custom. So far Hajamma has saved more than 1130 girls from a life of misery and sexual servitude. She is slowly trying to win the confidence of Yellamma's father, who has finally agreed to take her to the barbers to shave off her hair. If it grows back straight she will not be dedicated to the goddess. With constant support from Dappu, Yellamma may have a fighting chance. - India is the world's largest democracy, a nuclear power and at the forefront of the "' revolution. (Georgina Newman CCF NZ Herald 26 June 2004).

Varanasi February 2000 (Chris King)

Widows in Charnel Houses

In “Fire” Deepa Mehta had done a searing portrayal of a wife burning. In February 2000 agitated Hindu extremists, threatening violence, forced the authorities in a northern Indian state to halt her from shooting her subsequent feature film “Water” after a Hindu activist tried to commit suicide by jumping into the Ganges in protest. The film was to be about impoverished Hindu widows and their inter-caste love affairs in the holy Hindu town of Varanasi on the banks of the holy Ganges River - Mehta was requested to leave Varanasi as the authorities feared more trouble from extremists objecting to the Indian-born Canadian director ‘sullying’ their culture by portraying penurious Hindu widows in sexually exploitative situations (Feb 2000 NZ Herald).

Varanasi Feb 2000 (Chris King)

The subject of countless tragic Indian novels and stories, the hapless widows of Varanasi, mainly from eastern Bengal state have for centuries been banished by their children to this filthy and overcrowded city. Over 6000 widows live wretched lives in Varanasi today, cast aside by their sons or other male relatives within weeks of their bereavement. Many are beggars while others are forced into prostitution. Some even belong to rich Bengali families, whose sons were successful overseas businessmen. “To live and die in Varanasi can no longer be the end-all for widows today,” said former Justice Dalip Basu of Bengal's High Court, who recently upheld the rights of banished Bengali widows to sue their children for depriving them of a “decent and honourable life.” The widows, he declared, must be recognised as “helpless victims of family tragedies and a degenerate value system” (India’s neglected widows BBC 2 Feb 2002 Jill McGivering).

India alone has almost 40 million widows. Traditionally Hinduism frowns on widows remarrying and many have their social and economic power eroded too - although in recent years many widows have benefited from moves to enhance their status. Vrindavan is a pilgrimage town now home to thousands of destitute widows. Ashtabala Mundo is one of thousands of widows who have been driven by poverty to the holy town. She was married off when she was still a baby and widowed when she was still a child. “We have to come and sing here morning, noon and night and for all that I only get is $10 a month,” she said. “By the time I’ve paid the rent, I can’t afford to buy cooking oil. So I often go all day without a The women line up, after singing for several hours, to receive a cup of rice and a few teaspoons of lentils. It isn't much. In India, widows are an invisible community. Meera Khanna, one of the conference organisers, says although many widows are treated less harshly nowadays, they still face discrimination and neglect. “We treat widowhood not as a natural stage in the life cycle of a woman, we treat it as some kind of an aberration. We accept death but we don't accept widowhood,” she said. “Because somewhere in the Indian psyche, the woman's identity is with the man and the minute he’s not there, it's something that cannot be accepted.”

Varanasi Feb 2000 (Chris King)

Mr Madhav of Vrindavan's Shri Bhagwan Bhajan Ashram temple society says more than a thousand widows a day come to his temple alone. “Most are very poor and once their husbands die, they have to come here. We can at least give them food and clothes”. Outside, loudspeakers play songs honouring Lord Krishna, in the town associated with the Hindu God. Many of the widows who flock here have nowhere else to go. Hindu widows are not supposed to remarry. With little social or economic status, many become destitute. We met Nirmala Dasi, a frail 85-year-old, begging at the temple gate. When she spoke, she dissolved into tears. “I've been too ill to sing at the temple for the last three days so I haven't had a thing to eat. You don't get anything unless you go there.” We were soon surrounded by widows with sad stories to tell. “I spend almost everything I get on a room I share with four others. I've no relatives, or I wouldn't be here,” said Mithila. “It's so cold here, I'm always freezing.” Widows have been a marginalised and deprived group for generations.

Suttee: Ultimate Immolation

Ram Mohun Ray fought against and brought down the barbaric custom of suttee (‘voluntary’ immolation of the widow along with her dead husband -- in most cases, she would be coerced to die -- again, the custom was practised upon distortion of Hindu scriptures where the covert purpose was to surreptitiously gobble up the property of the deceased). Ram Mohun Ray, using his sharp progressive mind, thorough knowledge of the Hindu scripture, and social status as a rich landlord with connections with a few compassionate British officers and civilians, openly challenged and defeated Hindu orthodox pundits in scholarly debates on the issue of ‘sutee’. At the same time, on the streets of Calcutta, he fought thugs and criminals hired by the zealots.

Sati, Shiva’s wife is said to have immolated herself in shame at her lord’s exclusion from the Vedic sacrificial rites of her father Daksha. She is reincarnated as Parvati Shiva’s long-suffering wife who tries to introduce the wrathful and ascetic god of death and destruction to family life. In his wrath at the sacrifice, Shiva dropped a bead of sweat which became disease. The gods begged Shiva to limit the damage so he divided disease into its many forms. Like the celibate man, sati the chaste ‘virtuous woman’ became worthy of worship. She was equated to a goddess. The Ramayana drives the concept of female chastity to an extreme, where a slur against a woman’s reputation becomes unforgivable. In keeping with her wifely duty Sita followed her husband Rama to the forest and endured hardships for fourteen years. In the final year of her exile she was abducted by the rakshasa king Ravana. Rama rescued her, but before accepting her back he demanded proof of her chastity. Sita jumped onto a pile of burning wood. The flames did not touch her, so pure was she. But despite this the people of Ayodhya were unwilling to accept a woman associated with another man as their queen. So Rama abandoned his wife, despite knowing that she was virtuous; he did not want his family name to be soiled in any way.

Devutt Pattanaik (R530 177) notes widows who chose not to follow their dead husbands were not allowed to remarry and were forced to live a life of extreme austerity. They were prevented from wearing colored clothes, cosmetics, and ornaments and had to shave their heads. While the living widow was considered inauspicious, the widow who leapt onto her husband's funeral pyre was deified. Her love and chastity, according to popular belief, prevented the flames from hurting her. Such fidelity was not demanded of husbands”:

“Even today during marriage ceremonies the bride is reminded of women who obeyed their husbands no matter what: Sita, who followed her husband to the forest; Mandodari, who remained faithful even though her husband, Ravana, was a rapist; Kunti, who, instructed by her husband, slept with gods to bear him children; Gandhari, who blindfolded herself to share her blind husband's handicap; Draupadi, who obeyed her husband, Arjuna, and married his brothers; Anasuya and Arundhati, who even the gods could not seduce. Strategic narratives that glorify female chastity have contributed in many ways to the internment of Hindu women within the household, bound by marriage and maternity. In medieval India the idea of the sati, a chaste wife sharing the death of her husband, became immensely popular, a practice that aroused, and continues to arouse, outrage among Hindu social reformers. The practice had roots in the Brahmanical idea of absolute submission of female personality to that of her husband. Some scholars argue that the reason was economic - a way to prevent a childless widow from claiming her late husband's property.”

Laws of Manu, Yajnavalkya and Vijnaneshwar on Widowhood

IX. 4. Reprehensible is the father who gives not (his daughter) in marriage at the proper time.

IX. 88. To a distinguished, handsome suitor of equal caste should a father give his daughter in accordance with the prescribed rule, though she have not attained the proper age (puberty).

V. 157. At her pleasure let her emaciate her body, by living voluntarily on pure flowers, roots and fruits ; but let her not, when her lord is deceased, even pronounce the name of another man.

V. 161. But a widow, who from a wish to bear children, slights her deceased husband by marrying again, brings disgrace on herself here below, and shall be excluded from the seat of her lord.

V. 162. Offspring begotten on a woman by any other than her husband, is here declared to be no progeny of hers ; no more than a child, begotten on the wife of another man belongs to the begetter; nor is a second husband any where prescribed for a virtuous woman.

Y 86. When deprived of her husband, she must not remain away from her father, mother, son, brother, mother-in-law or from her maternal uncle; otherwise she might become liable to censure. Here again Yajnavalkya does not suggest that a widow become a Sati.

V "This is in the case of the alternative of leading a celibate life vide the text of Vishnu[f75] : "After the death of the husband, either celibacy or ascending the (cremation) pile after him."

Vijnaneshwar adds 'There is great merit in ascending the funeral pyre after him.'