India Journal: Why Does India Hate Women?
So, which countries in the world boast — though I suspect that’s not quite the right word — the highest rates of pregnancy among teenage girls? If you were to pick one of the nations of the supposedly sexually precocious West, you’d be quite wrong
The latest United Nations human development report shows that if you’re looking for large numbers of teen mothers, you should look at India. While the highest rates of teen pregnancy in the world are in sub-Saharan Africa, rates in some South Asian countries are up there, too.
Within South Asia, India and Nepal have the highest rates. In India, 8.6% of girls aged between 15 and 19 are having babies; in Nepal, that figure tops 10%. But because of India’s huge population, the country probably has, in absolute numbers, more teen mothers than almost anywhere else in the world — a rough calculation would put the figure at about five million.
pregnancy epidemic, because those pregnancies are generally happening within the confines of marriage — and that, apparently, makes it okay. Except it’s not.
Teen pregnancy rates are an indicator of how a nation is treating its women. Most health experts (and the rest of us) agree that teenagers aren’t grown up yet, either physically or mentally, and most of them aren’t equipped to care both for themselves and a child. Some studies show that Indian girls who marry young are more likely to have malnourished children.
These are years when young girls could be — or should be — finishing an education, and then getting married, joining the workforce, or some combination of the two, depending on their personal circumstances.
The figures on adolescent fertility are part of the calculations for the United Nations gender inequality index — first introduced last year in its human development report. Last year, India ranked 122 out of 138 countries on gender inequality; this year it ranked 129 out of 146. More countries were included in the gender inequality index in 2011, so it’s hard to compare the two years.
In overall development, India ranked 134 out of 187 countries this year; last year it ranked 119 out of 169 countries.
Not coincidentally, most of the countries on the “high” human development list don’t have very high rates of teen pregnancy. In the United States, just over 4% of teenagers have babies; in sexually permissive Norway, which topped the human development index, that figure is under 1%.
And many of the countries with the highest rates of teen pregnancy appear rather low down the human development index. Sure, there are countries that buck the trend — that have teen pregnancy rates similar to India’s and still report higher rates of overall development — but there’s still a pattern here that India should pay attention to.
Will it? Looking at the gender equity numbers, Jairam Ramesh, minister for rural development, saw a world where India was being discriminated against because of how the UN calculates some parts of the index, according to a story in the Indian Express on Thursday. Looking at the numbers, many of us would see a country where women are not just discriminated against, but actively disliked.
Which is why it’s sort of a puzzle when Indians, particularly those who have settled overseas, remark upon how proud they are that they or their children haven’t succumbed to Western mores, that they remain Indian “at heart.” That’s great for Indian boys, maybe — not so much for Indian girls.
Numbers related to gender development, trafficking, sex abuse, education and nutrition rarely show that Indians are particularly good at protecting their daughters from early sexual activity, early pregnancy, dropping out of school or even hunger — the mistreatment just happens in a way that’s culturally palatable.
Let’s take sex, for example. It’s probably fair to say that most Indian women have their first sexual experience with a complete stranger. If that were happening post a visit to a bar and a few drinks — horrors. Subtract the bar and add a fire and priest — all well and good. Relations between teenage women and older men would anywhere else be called pedophilia or at least statutory rape. But add a fire and a priest, and well, you see where this is going.
Yes, yes, India had a female head of government before many industrialized countries have; the head of the nation’s ruling party is a woman, and so on and so forth. But surely the existence of Sonia Gandhi or Pepsico CEO Indra Nooyi says as little about the general well-being of women in India as Mukesh Ambani’s bank balance does about India’s overall economic development.
Even families who have educated their daughters pressure them to abandon their professional desires, as this blogger laments.
Think a moment on the lives of the Indian women you know, no matter the class. Think a moment on the experiences women you know have told you about.
I think, for example, of the number of women friends who have grown up in South Asia who recount having been molested by a family friend. I think, for example, of the backbreaking work most Indian women do every day, without it appearing to earn them much respect from their own families.
Village fields are dotted with women weeding and doing other agricultural work; up in the hills, mothers and their daughters carry enormous bundles of firewood on their heads.
Some two centuries ago, Thomas Munro, a settlement officer and collector in south India wrote a letter recounting how one farmer “cannot afford to pay his usual rent because his wife is dead, who used to do more work than his best bullock,” which Philip Mason quotes in his account of Indian Civil Service life. I doubt women are working any less hard today.
At city construction sites, women hoist heavy baskets of bricks back-and-forth as men run the machines. The people who sweep the streets in many city neighborhoods are women. I’ve met many women, even married ones, who are the main bread-winners in their families, sometimes because a husband is unemployed or drinks, sometimes for other reasons.
If there’s anything to quibble about in the human development stats, it’s surely how much the 32.8% labor force participation rate is missing, given that it’s hard to meet an Indian women, except perhaps the very rich, who don’t spend most of the day toiling away.
First they toil in their parents’ homes; then they toil in their in-laws’ homes (for which honor the new family often gets a handsome sum, even these days). And yet somehow the collective wisdom that daughters are a burden still prevails, despite daily visual evidence to the contrary, and becomes a justification for neglect. When that neglect shows up in the numbers, we quibble about how they were calculated.
Think on all this and it’s hard not to think this is a country that doesn’t just dislike women, it hates them.
Now, can someone please tell me why?
The latest United Nations human development report shows that if you’re looking for large numbers of teen mothers, you should look at India. While the highest rates of teen pregnancy in the world are in sub-Saharan Africa, rates in some South Asian countries are up there, too.
Within South Asia, India and Nepal have the highest rates. In India, 8.6% of girls aged between 15 and 19 are having babies; in Nepal, that figure tops 10%. But because of India’s huge population, the country probably has, in absolute numbers, more teen mothers than almost anywhere else in the world — a rough calculation would put the figure at about five million.
pregnancy epidemic, because those pregnancies are generally happening within the confines of marriage — and that, apparently, makes it okay. Except it’s not.
Teen pregnancy rates are an indicator of how a nation is treating its women. Most health experts (and the rest of us) agree that teenagers aren’t grown up yet, either physically or mentally, and most of them aren’t equipped to care both for themselves and a child. Some studies show that Indian girls who marry young are more likely to have malnourished children.
These are years when young girls could be — or should be — finishing an education, and then getting married, joining the workforce, or some combination of the two, depending on their personal circumstances.
The figures on adolescent fertility are part of the calculations for the United Nations gender inequality index — first introduced last year in its human development report. Last year, India ranked 122 out of 138 countries on gender inequality; this year it ranked 129 out of 146. More countries were included in the gender inequality index in 2011, so it’s hard to compare the two years.
In overall development, India ranked 134 out of 187 countries this year; last year it ranked 119 out of 169 countries.
Not coincidentally, most of the countries on the “high” human development list don’t have very high rates of teen pregnancy. In the United States, just over 4% of teenagers have babies; in sexually permissive Norway, which topped the human development index, that figure is under 1%.
And many of the countries with the highest rates of teen pregnancy appear rather low down the human development index. Sure, there are countries that buck the trend — that have teen pregnancy rates similar to India’s and still report higher rates of overall development — but there’s still a pattern here that India should pay attention to.
Will it? Looking at the gender equity numbers, Jairam Ramesh, minister for rural development, saw a world where India was being discriminated against because of how the UN calculates some parts of the index, according to a story in the Indian Express on Thursday. Looking at the numbers, many of us would see a country where women are not just discriminated against, but actively disliked.
Which is why it’s sort of a puzzle when Indians, particularly those who have settled overseas, remark upon how proud they are that they or their children haven’t succumbed to Western mores, that they remain Indian “at heart.” That’s great for Indian boys, maybe — not so much for Indian girls.
Numbers related to gender development, trafficking, sex abuse, education and nutrition rarely show that Indians are particularly good at protecting their daughters from early sexual activity, early pregnancy, dropping out of school or even hunger — the mistreatment just happens in a way that’s culturally palatable.
Let’s take sex, for example. It’s probably fair to say that most Indian women have their first sexual experience with a complete stranger. If that were happening post a visit to a bar and a few drinks — horrors. Subtract the bar and add a fire and priest — all well and good. Relations between teenage women and older men would anywhere else be called pedophilia or at least statutory rape. But add a fire and a priest, and well, you see where this is going.
Yes, yes, India had a female head of government before many industrialized countries have; the head of the nation’s ruling party is a woman, and so on and so forth. But surely the existence of Sonia Gandhi or Pepsico CEO Indra Nooyi says as little about the general well-being of women in India as Mukesh Ambani’s bank balance does about India’s overall economic development.
Even families who have educated their daughters pressure them to abandon their professional desires, as this blogger laments.
Think a moment on the lives of the Indian women you know, no matter the class. Think a moment on the experiences women you know have told you about.
I think, for example, of the number of women friends who have grown up in South Asia who recount having been molested by a family friend. I think, for example, of the backbreaking work most Indian women do every day, without it appearing to earn them much respect from their own families.
Village fields are dotted with women weeding and doing other agricultural work; up in the hills, mothers and their daughters carry enormous bundles of firewood on their heads.
Some two centuries ago, Thomas Munro, a settlement officer and collector in south India wrote a letter recounting how one farmer “cannot afford to pay his usual rent because his wife is dead, who used to do more work than his best bullock,” which Philip Mason quotes in his account of Indian Civil Service life. I doubt women are working any less hard today.
At city construction sites, women hoist heavy baskets of bricks back-and-forth as men run the machines. The people who sweep the streets in many city neighborhoods are women. I’ve met many women, even married ones, who are the main bread-winners in their families, sometimes because a husband is unemployed or drinks, sometimes for other reasons.
If there’s anything to quibble about in the human development stats, it’s surely how much the 32.8% labor force participation rate is missing, given that it’s hard to meet an Indian women, except perhaps the very rich, who don’t spend most of the day toiling away.
First they toil in their parents’ homes; then they toil in their in-laws’ homes (for which honor the new family often gets a handsome sum, even these days). And yet somehow the collective wisdom that daughters are a burden still prevails, despite daily visual evidence to the contrary, and becomes a justification for neglect. When that neglect shows up in the numbers, we quibble about how they were calculated.
Think on all this and it’s hard not to think this is a country that doesn’t just dislike women, it hates them.
Now, can someone please tell me why?
टिप्पणियाँ