Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Millions of Missing Women
Tue, Mar 28, 2006 at 8:46:09 pm PST
Dutch MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali has an article in Saturday’s International Herald Tribune that contains a shocking statistic: Women go ‘missing’ by the millions.
As I was preparing for this article, I asked a friend who is Jewish if it was appropriate to use the term “holocaust” to portray the worldwide violence against women. He was startled. But when I read him the figures in a 2004 policy paper published by the Geneva Center for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces, he said yes, without hesitation.
One United Nations estimate says from 113 million to 200 million women around the world are demographically “missing.” Every year, from 1.5 million to 3 million women and girls lose their lives as a result of gender-based violence or neglect.
How could this possibly be true? Here are some of the factors:
In countries where the birth of a boy is considered a gift and the birth of a girl a curse from the gods, selective abortion and infanticide eliminate female babies.
Young girls die disproportionately from neglect because food and medical attention is given first to brothers, fathers, husbands and sons.
In countries where women are considered the property of men, their fathers and brothers can murder them for choosing their own sexual partners. These are called “honor” killings, though honor has nothing to do with it.
Young brides are killed if their fathers do not pay sufficient money to the men who have married them. These are called “dowry deaths,” although they are not just deaths, they are murders.
The brutal international sex trade in young girls kills uncounted numbers of them.
