The BBC has done some excellent reporting over the past few months about the continuing problem of grooms and their families demanding large dowries from brides and occasionally resorting to violence if the dowries are not forthcoming.

The issue was brought to the forefront again in May of this year when 21-year-old Nisha Sharma had her husband and his mother arrested under India’s 1961 Anti-Dowry Act. Sharma told police that initially her husband-to-be did not request a dowry but just minutes before the planned wedding demanded $25,000 from Sharma’s father.

When Sharma’s father explained he did not have that kind of money, the groom and his family members assaulted Sharma’s father.

Other women have not been so lucky. The BBC cited Indian government statistics claiming as many as 7,000 women were murdered by their husbands and/or in-laws in 2001 in disputes over dowry payments. Indian domestic violence activist Ranjana Kumari told The BBC,

Somteimes women are tortured to squeeze more money out of their families and in extreme cases they’re killed. Then the husband is free to remarry and get another dowry.

According to the BBC, the dowry problem is one of the factors driving Indian families to use sex-selective abortion (also illegal in India) in order to avoid having female children.

Sources:

India’s dowry deaths. Lucy Ash, the BBC, July 16, 2003.

Dowry demand lands groom in jail. Rajyasri Rao, The BBC, May 14, 2003.

The BBC reports on studies in India suggesting that infant girls have a substantially higher death rate than infant boys, even from diseases that should be relatively easy to treat.

The BBC notes that in 2001 that for every 1,000 male babies born in India there were just 933 girls born. This might sound horribly askew but in fact is just barely above the world average sex ratio. Worldwide the average is 105 boys for every 100 girls. Some countries have truly out-of-control sex ratios, such as parts of China where there are 140 boys born for every 100 girls. But in India, using the BBC’s figures, there are 107 boys born for every 100 girls. This could easily be explained by even moderate use of sex-selective abortions.

The BBC cites research from Delhi over a five-year period, however, that found the death rate for girls was almost one-third higher than for boys. In cases of “sudden, unexplained deaths,” 75 percent of victims were girls. The researchers behind the study believe that infanticide of female infants may explain the difference.

Which is not surprising — if parents are willing to go out of their way to ensure they abort a female fetus for cultural reasons, it’s not surprising to learn that females which are brought to term might receive substandard care and fewer resources.

This seems to be confirmed by the Delhi research which found that death rates among boys and girls for unpreventable deaths were roughly the same. But in the case of deaths from preventable diseases such as diarrhea, the death rate of girls was twice as high as that of boys.

Sources:

India girls ‘more likely to die’. The BBC, July 18, 2003.

Should women who kill their babies be punished? That might sound like an absurd question to ask, but in fact a group in India is arguing that women who commit female infanticide are themselves victims and should not be punished.

The BBC reported this month on the controversy in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. It cites surveys suggesting that the infanticide rate among female infants is as high as 1.6 percent of all live female births. In some areas, the BBC claims, the rate of infanticide may approach 15 percent.

The standard response, not surprisingly, is to arrest, try and jail women who the state can prove have killed their infants (the BBC mentions that two such cases resulted in life in prison for the convicted women). But the Campaign Against Female Infanticide maintains that the women involved are themselves victims of violence and threats from family members and that punishing them simply exacerbates the problems with poverty that their families face.

The BBC quoted retired Bombay judge Justice Suresh as saying that women have no choice but to kill female infants,

The decision to kill the baby is made by her husband and parents-in-law. If she disobeys, she has to face the wrath of the family.

On the other side is Tamil Nadu’s Women’s Commission who argues that while penalties against women who commit infanticide may be too severe, that removing any and all punishment would send a signal that female infanticide was acceptable.

But, according to the BBC, the anti-infanticide activists “say even milder punishment could leave the mother with social stigma and cause several psychological problems.”

If you have a society in which “milder punishment” from the state leaves social stigma and psychological problems distinct and more severe than the stigma and psychological problems attendant in killing one’s child, then Tamil Nadu has even larger problems than the anti-infanticide activists will admit.

Source:

India rights campaign for infanticide mothers. Sampath Kumar, The BBC, July 17, 2003.