What a Drag!

In India, which lacks any semblance of social safety net (with almost 1.2 billion people, the cost of such social support systems would be staggering), relies on an age-old practice of sons’ supporting their parents in their old age; daughters are tied to their husbands’ families and do not generate ongoing support (outside of an occasional dowry) to their own parents. So it isn’t strange to see Indian statistics showing 1000 males for every 880 females, an imbalance that is leaving men at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder with great difficulties in finding life partners. These indirect abortion/birth selection figures show the profound bias against female children, whose social status is often second class or worse.

In the Middle East, again, daughters attach to their husband’s families and in ultra-conservative households, do not participate in the outside economic workforce. Second class would be an upgrade for many of these women; sons are the family prize. Prejudice against female offspring persists in China, accelerated by the “one child” policy that the Peoples Republic directed at overpopulation, has shifted birth ratios to 120 males for every 100 females, but trending suggests that as modernization and urbanization accelerate, as more women enter the workforce, younger people no longer harbor the same bias against female children. The global ratio of males to females – estimated at 106/7 to 100 favoring boys – usually evens out at adulthood, since male deaths among younger people are higher among males than females.

This prejudice against female births, more pronounced in lower socio-economic classes particularly in countries with long histories of lower socio-economic value of women, can take some pretty bizarre forms. One particularly weird practice, in that lovely desert oasis of Afghanistan, is parents’ actually having girls, but raising them and dressing them as if they were boys! The practice is so embedded in the Afghan social structure that it has been formalized in the language: “There are no statistics about how many Afghan girls masquerade as boys. But when asked, Afghans of several generations can often tell a story of a female relative, friend, neighbor or co-worker who grew up disguised as a boy. To those who know, these children are often referred to as neither ‘daughter’ nor ‘son’ in conversation, but as ‘bacha posh,’ which literally means ‘dressed up as a boy’ in [the local dialect of] Dari.

“Through dozens of interviews conducted over several months, where many people wanted to remain anonymous or to use only first names for fear of exposing their families, it was possible to trace a practice that has remained mostly obscured to outsiders. Yet it cuts across class, education, ethnicity and geography, and has endured even through Afghanistan’s many wars and governments… Afghan families have many reasons for pretending their girls are boys, including economic need, social pressure to have sons, and in some cases, a superstition that doing so can lead to the birth of a real boy. Lacking a son, the parents decide to make one up, usually by cutting the hair of a daughter and dressing her in typical Afghan men’s clothing. There are no specific legal or religious proscriptions against the practice. In most cases, a return to womanhood takes place when the child enters puberty. The parents almost always make that decision… In a land where sons are more highly valued, since in the tribal culture usually only they can inherit the father’s wealth and pass down a name, families without boys are the objects of pity and contempt.” New York Times (September 21^st).

We live in a modern world where such practices seem absurd. We wince at the tribal practice of many in Africa, for example, of female circumcision (a polite word for female genital mutilation to take away the potential for sexual pleasure, a policy to deter infidelity) and simply cannot process that woman can be treated with such utter disdain and cruelty. The Internet, television and facile travel have opened up global social practices for all to see. There is much that needs to be changed on this planet, and even the most basic semblance of human equality is still so alien to billions of people on this planet.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I hope for that dream of global human decency and equality.