January 18, 2012

It’s a Girl!

It’s a Girl! is a documentary about the systematic killing and suppression of girls in South Asia and around the world.

In India, China and many other parts of the world today, girls are killed, aborted and abandoned simply because they are girls. The United Nations estimates as many as 200 million girls are missing in the world today because of this so-called “gendercide”.

Girls who survive infancy are often subject to neglect, and many grow up to face extreme violence and even death at the hands of their own husbands or other family members.

The war against girls is rooted in centuries-old tradition and sustained by deeply ingrained cultural dynamics which, in combination with government policies, accelerate the elimination of girls.

Speechless.

(via kottke)

posted by in culture, death, gender, international, movies, public policy, sadness, society, unbearable pain, uncomfortable truth | * | 4 comments 

comments

  1. Michael Smith on January 18th, 2012 at 1:54 pm

    Alicia worked for an international adoption agency for a few years and watched a video that sounds similar to this one. I was lucky to have met several of the families that went through the process and managed to adopt children from places like China. The parents would gather and share experiences, including the fact that most of the girls from China would take food from the kitchen and hide it their bedrooms even years after the adoption. These are kids that probably have no specific memories of life in China, only the subconscious idea that they might not get food again anytime soon.

  2. Kelsey Parker on January 18th, 2012 at 3:44 pm

    I’ll have to find it, but I swear somewhere I read something about a group of big wigs deciding that the solution to the threat of overpopulation was this gendercide. I’m on my way to work but I look forward to watching this video and handing over the article soon.

  3. Kelsey Parker on January 18th, 2012 at 8:37 pm

    Aha! I found it.

  4. Kelsey Parker on January 18th, 2012 at 8:40 pm

    It’s an article from Foreign Policy:

    As it turns out, Western advisors and researchers, and Western money, were among the forces that contributed to a serious reduction in the number of women and girls in the developing world. And today feminist and reproductive-rights groups are still reeling from that legacy.

    The story begins in the mid-20th century, when several factors converged to make Western demographers worried about global population growth. Thanks to advances in public health, people were living longer than ever before. Projections released by the U.N. Population Division in 1951 suggested what the sum of all those extra years of life could be: Rapid population growth was on the horizon, particularly in the developing world. As pundits forecast a global “population explosion,” anxiety mounted in policy circles, and the population control movement that coalesced brought together everyone from environmentalists to McCarthyites. Viewed through a 1960s Beltway lens, mounting numbers of people meant higher rates of poverty, which in turn made countries more vulnerable to communism.

    Read more here.

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