Gendercide and The West

The article was written for It’s A Girl, a film about gendercide in south Asia. It originally appeared here.

Gendercide is the unreported tragedy of our age.

I was one of those guilty of dismissing gendercide as an Asian problem. Surely, unwanted female foetuses were aborted there, in illegal clinics, not here. And surely unwanted daughters were killed there, in forgotten villages, not here. The egalitarian Shangri-La that is ‘The West’ would never allow unwanted daughters to be eliminated in this way. Surely? The shocking truth, I discovered, is that gendercide is a global tragedy.

An Oxford University study revealed that between 1995 and 2005, 1500 girls “disappeared” among Indian communities in England and Wales. Sex selective abortions are the only plausible explanation. If the study is correct, the figures mean that 1 in 10 extra girls, who should have been born according to normal birth statistics, were selectively aborted. Sex-selective abortions are illegal in the UK under the 1967 Abortion Act and yet, as the recent investigation carried out by The Telegraph exposed, families can and presumably have had pregnancies terminated here. Doctors, being secretly filmed, agreed to falsify paperwork to circumvent legal prohibitions even though they recognised the immorality of ‘female infanticide’. Sex-selective abortions are, shockingly, legal in the US and the post-communist states of east Europe all have unnatural discrepancies in their birth gender ratios.

Most, if not all, of the agreed solutions fall away when we understand gendercide as a global problem. Activists have always spoken of the need to economically empower women, to inform women of their rights and to improve legal enforcements. These are all the solutions to problems that don’t exist in the US, Australia or the UK. Those fighting to end gendercide have always kept faith in modernisation as a force that will uproot the “backward culture” of son-preference. But modernisation, though necessary, has been proved to be insufficient.

Gendercide is a problem of supply and demand. Modernisation has failed to root-out foetal gender-preference and developments in technology have facilitated femicide. With sex determination now possible at seven weeksonline, new technologies have had the perverse effect of decreasing reproductive liberty rather than can increasing reproductive control. Logic suggests then, that the process of combatting gendercide must be inverted: eliminate supply before tackling demand. This though, might not be the answer either.  Campaigners warn that those extreme enough to want a gender-selective abortion would “always a find a way”. As Kishwar Desai highlights, Indian families from the UK are prepared to travel to India to end pregnancies, where illegal abortions can be procured for a small price. It is impossible to know how many women each year go abroad to eliminate female foetuses. What is certain is that driving these abortions abroad or underground is counter to all interests.

It’s not only the absence of solutions that complicates the fight against gendercide in The West. Abortion – and controls on it – remains a fraught issue. The risk of talking about gendercide in The West is that it becomes engulfed by the abortion debate. The difficulty, as Cristina Odone notes, is that combatting gender-selective abortion ‘smacks of pro-life’. It is entirely consistent with being pro-choice to argue that gendercide is the not-too-remote consequence of permissive abortion controls. A hijacking of the anti-gendercide cause by either the pro-life or pro-choice lobby would be a huge setback.

Abortion and gendercide are distinct issues and if we are to end gendercide, we must constantly remind ourselves of this distinction. The routine elimination of female foetuses, solely because they are not male, is something we must all work to end.

Gendercide is an issue in relation to which our first and last question must always be: how do we end it? All manner of policy initiatives have been tried. Over concerns of sex-selection, the Council of Europe went as far as to suggest that doctors must now refuse to tell parents the gender of their baby. But technology and culture undermine policy at every stage and no legislation can combat a global cultural malaise. As Evan Grae Davis, It’s A Girl’s director has said, gendercide is one among many issues that is “greater than any single organisation can fight alone”. It is for this reason that the work of Shadowline Films, and similar projects, is vital: where policy falls short, awareness and activism must fill the gap.

Ram Mashru

[Guest Contribution] Putin’s ‘re-election’ faces empowered opposition

“I promised you we would win, and we won. Glory to Russia!” Those were the words of Vladimir Putin on the night his victory was declared. He now has a mandate to rule for six more years and, if the next elections are as disgracefully unfair as last month’s, it is likely he will rule for much longer.

Even if the elections had been free and fair, there was little chance Putin would have suffered a defeat. Under Putin, votes during the Russian presidential elections were always a vote for the Kremlin, the choice was simply between a direct or indirect vote. Putin’s electoral opponents were mediocre and unelectable, a motley crew of reactionaries, political dinosaurs and cowards. Perversely, pro-Putin sections accused credible opposition candidates of electoral discrepancies and so prevented them from running.

Putin once enjoyed the reputation of a pragmatist. He was portrayed as a man able to clean up the mess left by the violence and instability of the nineties. Now, there remains little doubt that Putin is an autocrat. In 2010, Wikileaks revealed that US diplomats refered to Putin’s Russia as “a virtual mafia state”, where “democracy has disappeared” and political corruption is rampant. Indeed under his rule, Russia was run by a criminal cartel of self-interested ex-KGB bureaucrats. There is a great deal of evidence to suggest that his security forces have harrassed and, it is strongly suspected, murdered journalists; appointed sadistic sociopaths to the head of regional governments and his government also committed, what is slowly being accepted as, war crimes in Chechnya.

The line of the Putinist cabal and their supporters, including apologists in the West, is that Russia has no history of democracy, that the Russian people prefer being ruled by authority rather than be governed by popular will. The argument is that Russians have no desire to live in a free and secure society. That reason, liberalism and democracy have never succeeded in Russia is not because Russians harbour some self-hating desire to be subjugated. Rather, it is because whenever these ideals have come close to being realised, they have been stifled by violence and intimidation.

So what do the opposition do, now Putin has been re-elected?

Western leaders, while stressing the need to investigate allegations of electoral irregularties, have avoided outright condemnation. Therefore, first, those outside the country must start condemning Putin’s rule outright. For too long Putin has been allowed to continue in his criminal activity without Western leaders or expatriates openly criticising him. Russian opposition to Putin is hampered by its lack of a coherent and effective critique of Putin and the opposition needs the emboldening impact of foreign leaders taking a strong stance.

Secondly the Russian opposition must continue to take to the streets, as they have begun to do. Russia has a long history of toppling autocracy through popular, peaceful protest and Russian protesters have never been better equipped. The internet remains relatively free of state control and the opposition must use this to their advantage. In the context of state regulated press, the opposition can use the internet to to articulate their dissidence, to organise protests and to develop networks of support around the world. But, whatever happens, the opposition must challenge him, protest, challenge his rule.

Opposition to Putin is strong among the city-dwelling middle classes. It is from the remaining socially and geographically disparate groups that Putin draws his support. Putin announced his victory with tears rolling down his cheeks. Much was made of his tears – his tears of fear. Putin is scared, scared that the informed and active urban classes have woken up to the damage he has done to the country and woken up to his corrupt government. They are beginning to become cynical of his empty patriotism, his ridiculous cult of personality, and increasingly aware of the contempt he feels for them. Increasingly, Putin realises that his time is almost up.

As the third term of President Vladimir Putin looms, Russia stands at a crossroads. The potential success of this third term as president is, of course, up for debate. Some dictators have made concessions when they find their backs against the wall and of course Putin will do everything he can to stay ‘in power’. But the choice to be made at the crossroads is stark – either Putin will clamp down, becoming the tyrant he has shown the signs of becoming or he will be deposed by the Russian opposition. Between despotism and deposition, there is no middle ground.

Oliver Hotham is an undergraduate reading History at Queen Mary, University of London. He writing interests encompass politics, both domestic and international. He tweets @OliverHotham