Indian lawyers protest at the entrance to Saket District Court in New Delhi on January 3, 2013, where five men charged with the rape and murder of a 23-year-old student on a bus in New Delhi were to appear in court for the first time.
The horrific gang rape and murder of a 23-year old medical student in New Delhi may seem unrelated to fundamental demographic forces, but it isn’t. The public outcry following the victim’s death from catastrophic internal injuries has rightly focused on calls to reform India’s criminal justice system. Yesterday, five men were formally charged and the case is being put on a fast track set up in the wake of the incident to handle crimes against women, in contrast to the years of delay rape victims often face.
But behind the angry protests is an even deeper story: the preference for male babies in India and much of the world may be at the root of this senseless violence.
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Growing evidence suggests that in countries like India and China, where the ratio of men to women is unnaturally high due to the selective abortion of female fetuses and neglect of girl children, the rates of violence towards women increase. “The sex ratio imbalance directly leads to more sex trafficking and bride buying,” says Mara Hvistendahl, author of Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men. A scarce resource is generally considered precious, but the lack of women also leaves many young men without marriage partners. In 2011, the number of cases of women raped rose by 9.2 percent; kidnapping and abductions of women were up 19.4 percent. “At this point, we’re talking correlation, not causation. More studies need to be done….[But] it is clear from historical cases and from studies looking at testosterone levels that a large proportion of unmarried men in the population is not a good thing,” says Hvistendahl.
In a natural state, slightly more male babies are born than females (roughly 105 male infants to 100 females). Male infants are a little more fragile than females at birth, and women generally have a slightly longer life expectancy, so absent conditions such as warfare or unequal access to health care and nutrition, we would expect to see a nearly 1:1 ratio of adult men and women of marriageable age.
India’s 2011 census showed 914 females to one thousand males, the most skewed ratio since India’s independence in 1947. In some regions, such as the Northern state of Haryana, there are only 830 females to 1000 males. More than twenty years ago, Nobel prize winner economist Amartya Sen warned of more than 100 million “missing” girls from India as a result of this preference for male children.
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The imbalance has squeezed poor and uneducated men out of the marriage market in particular, so there is a surplus of young men who are unable to find partners and assume standard adult roles in their societies. According to the Economist, China has nearly as many unmarried young men, known as ‘bare branches,’ as the entire population of American men. Ironically, the men themselves are harmed by the gender preference shown to them: unbalanced sex ratios may also increase the odds of ill health and early death in men. Something similar has been observed in a number of animal species: it is stressful to compete for mates and this stress can shorten lives.
We’ve seen spasms of outrage before after random acts of barbarism, but violence towards women in the developing world continues unabated, and unremarked upon. India was recently rated the worst country for women among the G20 group of wealthiest nations. Yet sex discrimination rarely rises to the level of diplomatic action; we don’t apply economic sanctions to countries like Saudi Arabia or Pakistan where the violation of women’s freedom and safety is routine. But it’s long past time to recognize the problem of “missing girls” as an issue of international security. Alarmingly, the imbalanced sex ratios arising from what some have called “Gendercide” are wreaking havoc on the fabric of many growing societies, not just in Asia but in Eastern European countries such as Albania, Georgia and Armenia. Perhaps this reality will finally get the world’s attention when the shortage of women worldwide has downstream economic, health, and security effects, and we realize that the missing girls are a devastating loss to us all.