January 18, 2012

It's A Girl! A Documentary About Killing Infant Girls In India & China & Such

"Today, India and China eliminate more girls than the number of girls born in the United States every year."

That's the opening line in the trailer for It's A Girl!, Christian filmmaker Evan Grae Davis's upcoming documentary on the widespread practice of female infanticide in the world's two largest countries. Sometimes it's through sex-selective abortion, but there's also the old-fashioned way, of just cold killing girls, or abandoning them to die:

Activists attribute a culture of valuing children by their economic potential to South Asia's patriarchal social model in which men are the sole breadwinners. Sons both carry the family name and work from a young age. Daughter, on the other hand, impose the burden of a dowry before leaving the home upon marriage. Strict moral codes, onerous cultural expectations and demanding domestic responsibilities are all forces that further subjugate women.
Awareness and understanding the scale of the problem seems important, but I'm not finding anything very substantive about what to do, or even what anyone on the ground in India or China are doing.

Which risks turning this vast, serious problem into little more than a throw-up-your-hands, WTF moment. I'd like to be wrong here.

It's a girl: The three deadliest words in the world [independent uk via kottke]
It's A Girl! film site [itsagirlmovie.com by shadowline films]

3 Comments

Thank you for bringing some attention to this. It is so sad that this happens in such great numbers. Perhaps there are adoption agencies that are on the ground to combat this tragedy? I know there are agencies in china, but I have no idea about India- I had no idea this was an issue there as well.

It's likely that this is only going to stop as the culture changes, which is a very slow process. Usually (in other non-firstworld-countries) the most effective first step is educating the women and girls. Things like teaching them to read and write, some math, and so on, as far as they can take it.

this is certainly a problem in many rural part of China and India. Adoption agency is not an effective solution either. I know for a fact there are women in china that keep having babies and have them adopted and they get paid more that way than working . It's a brutal side effect of old culture and population control system clashing into each other.

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