MercatorNet: This is a very harrowing film. How did you come to make it?

Evan Grae Davis: I have spent the last nearly two decades travelling the world capturing stories of human need for humanitarian aid and development NGO's and non-profits. Throughout this time I witnessed a lot of injustice. I began asking the question, what are the cultural roots and mindsets that allow for human rights violations on the scale seen throughout the world today? I set out to explore this question through a documentary film. I and the team travelled to nine nations capturing stories for this film. One of the nations we visited was India, hoping to understand how the subjugation and devaluation of women could be justified by the deeply established son-preference culture.

What we discovered while filming in India about the epidemic of missing girls and dramatically skewed sex ratios and related abuse and neglect of girls was a game-changer for us. After hearing the UN statistic of as many as 200 million girls missing in the world today as a result of 'gendercide' we researched the issue in China, as well, and were completely astonished by how few people seemed to be aware of what appeared to be the greatest human rights issue of our time, and certainly the greatest form of violence against women in the world today. There seemed to be very little out there on the topic. It was then that we determined to dedicate the film project to exposing this untold story and educating and mobilizing a movement to end gendercide in India and China. Continue reading

Sources

• Mercator.net
• Image: babble

The United Nations estimates that as many as 200 million women and girls are missing in the world today as a result of being born into societies in which they have no value. The latest figures from China show that in some parts of the country there are as many as 130 boys for every 100 girls, a ratio that has widened rather than narrowed in the past decade. In that same period, it's estimated between 3 million to 6 million girls were aborted in India, despite the fact that sex determination tests have been outlawed there as a response to such a trend. And before you make the mistake of thinking this is due to poverty, think again - the wealthiest classes in both China and India are just as likely if not more so to dispense of their girl children because of the cultural honour of having boys.

By 2020, it's estimated that China will have around 30-40 million more men than women. Known as the 'bare branches syndrome', it describes a phenomenon in which significant proportions of the population will be unable to "bear fruit". Simply put, with no women to marry in a culture that prizes the structure of family (albeit a one-child one in China), what will those millions of men do? There's already evidence of increased trafficking of girls and women through China, while rural areas with even fewer options see wives being shared. To put this problem into a very tiny nutshell, the ritual gendercide of women and girls throughout the world has even more ramifications than the moral implications of devaluing humans according to biological sex. It is real, it's happening and it's a devastating insight into the logical endpoint of patriarchal codes that position women as property and resources rather than human beings.

So what does this have to do with Australia? Continue reading

Sources

• Clementine Ford in Daily Life
• Image: The Independent Blogs

Clementine Ford is an Australian writer with a background in feminist/social commentary.