How did 100,000,000 women disappear?

Two researchers crunching population statistics have confirmed an unsettling reality. Siwan Anderson and Debraj Ray noticed the ratio of women to men in developing regions and in some cultures is suspiciously below the norm

In India, China and sub-Saharan Africa, millions upon millions of women are missing. They are not lost, but dead: victims of violence, discrimination and neglect.

A University of British Columbia economist is amongst those trying to find them – not the women themselves, who are long gone, but their numbers and ages, which paint a sad and startling picture of gender discrimination in the developing world.

The term "missing women" was coined in 1990, when Indian economist Amartya Sen calculated a shocking figure. In parts of Asia and Africa, he wrote in The New York Review of Books, 100 million women who should be alive are not, because of unequal access to medical care, food and social services. These are excess deaths: women "missing" above and beyond natural mortality rates, compared to their male counterparts.

Women who are dead because their lives were undervalued.

Around the world boys outnumber girls at birth, but in countries where women and men receive equal care, women have proved hardier and more resistant to disease, and thus live longer. In most of Asia and North Africa, however, Sen found that women die with startlingly higher frequency.

His research began a flutter of activity in academic circles and by 2005, the United Nations produced a much higher estimate for how many women could be "missing": 200 million.

From her office at the University of British Columbia, economics professor Siwan Anderson has been crunching numbers to try and understand why so many women are dying. "If you're interested in gender discrimination, it's really one of the starkest measures of discrimination, because it's women who should be alive, but aren't," she says.

The 40-year-old researcher recently co-authored a paper with New York University's Debraj Ray, focusing on figures from China, India and sub-Saharan Africa for the year 2000. What they discovered flew in the face of existing literature and commonly held beliefs about the missing women phenomenon.

"Previously, people had thought that they (the missing women) were all at the very early stages of life, prenatal or just after, so before four years old," Anderson says. "But what we found is that the majority are actually later." Female infanticide has been endemic in India and China for some time, which she says led researchers to assume that it was the source of all the missing women. But the truth is much more complicated.

Once she and Ray broke down the numbers by age group, they found that the majority of excess female deaths came later in life: 66 per cent in India, 55 per cent in China and 83 per cent in sub-Saharan Africa.

One of their colleagues in the economics department at the University of British Columbia says this finding is striking, and points the way for future research and advocacy.

"Why would there be excess mortality of, let's say, 45-year-old women versus 45-year-old men?" asks economics professor Kevin Milligan. "And what they find is ... they have the same set of diseases, they just seem to die more frequently. The explanation that seems most consistent with that is differential access to health care. And so that's a really striking finding."

Anderson says that lack of health care is likely a big part of the problem, but that there are numerous cultural and social factors at play that can be difficult to pinpoint.

In their "elementary accounting exercise" published this February, Anderson and Ray began to plot the causes of excess death in 2000 by age group, and produced some interesting figures.

In sub-Saharan Africa, the dominant source of missing women was HIV and AIDS, the cause of more than 600,000 excess female deaths each year.

In China, Anderson says, most of the 141,000 excess female deaths by injury were suicides, making China the only place in the world where women are more likely than men to kill themselves, often by eating pesticides used for crops.

And in India, a category called "injuries" yielded ominously high figures: 86,000 excess deaths in the age group 15-29 in 2000 alone. Anderson has done extensive research in India, and says the numbers beg the question of exactly how many deaths were so-called "kitchen fires" – often used to mask dowry-related killings, the result of a new bride being tortured by her new family until her parents pay their debts.

Contrary to what you might expect, Anderson says, dowry prices have not dropped off with improvements in education in India. Instead, they have gotten worse, with educated brides and their families willing to pay even more for high-quality grooms.

Anderson says dowry payments can be six times a family's annual wealth – an excruciating price, especially for poor villagers. The implications of this hefty sum trickle down to the first moments of a child's life. While conducting recent field work in India, Anderson asked villagers about selective abortions and found them open about the fact that they use ultrasound to determine the baby's gender and help them decide whether or not to keep it.

"They see no other options," she says. "They really cannot afford to have a daughter."

Future research will delve deeper, seeking answers to questions such as: How often are men given mosquito nets to protect themselves from malaria, but not women? How many women die because they are not taken to the hospital when they are sick?

Anderson is using data gathered primarily from the World Bank, the United Nations and the World Health Organization, but admits that getting the figures can be a huge challenge. In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, many deaths go undocumented, and in India, it is virtually impossible to know how many "unintentional" deaths are actually dowry killings, because they are not accurately reported to the authorities.

It is also difficult to separate direct gender discrimination from biological, social, environmental, behavioural and economic factors. That will be part of the task as Anderson works on calculating missing women by region in India, and isolating gender discrimination from other factors that might contribute to uneven male-to-female ratios.

When asked what can be done to combat such deep-seated inequality, Anderson pauses. Even when governments outlaw root causes, such as the Indian dowry system, violence persists, she says. "It's too embedded in the system in their world."

In India, a woman becomes a crime victim every three minutes

Every three minutes a woman becomes victim of a crime somewhere in India . The highest number become targets of their husbands and in-laws.

A total of 185,312 incidents of crime against women were reported in the country during 2007 as compared to 164,765 during 2006, an increase of 12.5 percent.

The number of crimes committed against women has increased continiously during the last five years.

In 2007, the highest number of crimes against women was recorded in Andhra Pradesh, according to the 'Crime in 2007' report of the National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB).

Homes were far from being safe havens for women. Last year, 75,930 women became victims of torture and cruelty by their husbands and in-laws, accounting for the highest number of crimes against women.

'This reflects growing disorder in terms of social relations in our society. On the other front our law enforcement agency has also failed to book culprits and our laws, rather than acting as a deterrent, is giving culprits a chance to commit crime and walk away scot-free,' women's rights activist Ranjana Kumari told IANS.

According to the Centre for Social Research, an NGO working for women's rights, aspiration for a high standard of living among young couples is an important reason behind rising family discord.

'Globalisation has brought a major shift in our attitude as we are moving towards a spending culture from a saving culture which is causing inter-personal tensions,' said Kumari.

There were 20,771 cases of rape reported in the country in 2007. In more than 90 percent of the cases, the victims knew the offenders. The highest number of rape cases was reported from Madhya Pradesh.

Despite the rise in the number of crimes against women, the National Commission for Women is of the view that laws such as the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, the Dowry Prohibition Act and various sections in the Indian Penal Code are important legislative measures that provide protection and legal remedies to women.

'The laws are effective enough to protect women, but it is the lack of awareness that is responsible for increasing crime against women. We need a major change in the mindset of our society to deal with these issues,' said National Commission for Women member Yasmin Abrar.

The great Trojan war

The Austrian Police has become the latest European agency to express its intention to use specially-crafted Trojans to remotely monitor criminal suspects. DIRT (Data Interception by Remote Transmission) Trojan, with which law-enforcement agents can secretly monitor a suspect's computer, is the latest on police's cards.

According to reports in Austrian media, the Minister of Justice Maria Berger and Interior Minister Gunther Plater, have drafted a proposal that will be amended by legal experts and the cabinet with the intention of allowing police to carry out such surveillance legally with a judge's warrant.

There doesn't appear to be a defined timescale for such a law and it is not clear whether the move would face the legal challenges encountered by the German authorities in the last year as they attempted to get a similar law off the ground. According to Berger, Trojans would only be used in cases of serious crime, such as terrorism and organised racketeering. The Swiss authorities have declared the intention of using the same controversial technique, but only in cases of the most extreme nature, such as terrorism.

One formidable hurdle is that opinion in the security software industry is almost universally hostile to the idea. You don't have to dig far to find negative reaction.

"I'm sure the Austrian Secret Service will develop some pretty ingenious software to infect users' PCs, but there is a real danger that the package could leak into the hacker community," said Geoff Sweeney of security outfit Tier-3. "That scenario would create a serious free-for-all on the industrial espionage and identity theft fronts as legitimate Trojans are redirected to create an even more hostile environment for organisations to defend against," he said.

The authorities have been keen to portray the use of Trojans as similar to phone-tapping, a long established police practice the world over. However, Trojans are different on one important respect from phones and this is where the anti-malware companies sense trouble.

"How should anti-virus companies react to the existence of such malware? Detect it? Avoid detecting it on purpose? Avoid detecting hacking software used by Governments of which country? Germany, USA, Israel, Egypt, Iran?," commented F-Secure's Mikko Hypponen in a blog earlier this year.

The Austrian, German and Swiss Governments have yet to explain how they would circumvent security programs that might be used by criminals to protect themselves, whether this would involve collusion with security software companies and what would happen if such software-busting Trojans were subsequently reverse engineered and deployed by criminals themselves.

"The anti-virus companies aren't going to turn a blind eye to State-endorsed Trojan horses," said Graham Cluley of Sophos, himself a good barometer of likely industry opinion.

"We're going to add detection for them just like any other spyware. So, if the cybercops think they can give us a funny handshake, a wink and buy us a pint for not adding detection for the Trojan they're using to spy on their suspect they're mistaken.

"The reason why we take that policy is that we can't know if the Trojan has been placed there by the cops or a criminal. It's unlikely that the Trojan will say 'Copyright (c) FBI 2007'," he said.

A bitter truth of female foeticide

Parents are choosing to abort female foetuses in such large numbers that experts estimate India has lost 10 million girls in the past 20 years.

A hundred yards from a school playing field on the edge of Nayagarh, a small town in eastern India, is an innocuous damp circular patch covered with what appears to be sticks and stones.
A closer look reveals that the debris is shards of tiny skulls and bones, all that remains of more than 40 female foetuses - aborted because of their sex and then dumped in a disused well.
The secret tragedy of being conceived female in India burst into the open this week with the grim discovery of the well, dug on land earmarked for a private hospital - the Krishna clinic owned by an obstetrician, Nabakirshora Sahu, and his wife, Savitha. The latter is in custody but the medic is on the run.

Last Thursday Santish Mishra, a health official, was poking at the top of the hole, from which had been exhumed 132 bags of putrefying human remains. Above the grisly sight hangs an acrid smell, the telltale chemical stench of hospital waste used to hide the truth.
"Femur, skull, forearm - probably. We are pretty sure these are all female, aborted at about five months which is the legal limit," said Dr Mishra. "You can say it was a hidden mass grave."
In India ultrasound technology, coupled with a traditional preference for boys, has led to mass female foeticide. Although gender-based abortion is illegal, parents are choosing to abort female foetuses in such large numbers that experts estimate India has lost 10 million girls in the past 20 years. In the 12 years since selective abortion was outlawed only one doctor has been convicted of the crime.
Nursing homes
Authorities in Nayagarh said they will come down hard on clinics offering ultrasound scans to determine the sex of an unborn child and the "nursing homes" where abortions are carried out. All five clinics and eight nursing homes have been shut and sealed.
It is hard to believe that in such a small town illegal terminations could happen without official connivance - at least one government doctor has been arrested.
Two weeks ago an 11-year-old boy out playing in a grove at the edge of Nayagarh town opened a sealed bag to find bloody remains of seven female foetuses. Although the alarm was raised and local television stations aired shocking images, by the time the police arrived - three hours late - they had been removed.
"I was very scared. There was blood everywhere," said Upendra Kalasha, the boy who found the remains. "The people came but not the police."
Paresh Nayak, the top local civil servant, said: "Nobody said anything to me. The public have a responsibility to come forward. They did not and we were overtaken by events."
One of those events was the election of India's first female head of state, president Pratibha Patil. In her inaugural address this week to both houses of parliament she said India "must banish (the) social evil of female foeticide".
What happened in Nayagarh is merely the tip of the iceberg. Last month a doctor in Delhi was arrested after remains of aborted babies were found in a septic tank at his practice. In February police found the remains of 15 infants buried in the backyard of a hospital in the central state of Madhya Pradesh. A television investigation last year filmed dozens of doctors offering to perform illegal terminations of female foetuses and dump them in rivers or in fields.
The prejudices against having a daughter run deep in India, where tradition dictates that when she is married a woman's family must pay the groom's in-laws a large dowry. By contrast a son is considered an asset. Even leaving aside the wealth his bride will bring, a boy will inherit property and is seen as a way of securing parent-care in old age.
Development has not erased traditional values: in fact, selective abortion has been accelerating in a globalising India. Wealthier and better-educated Indians still want sons. A survey revealed that female foeticide was highest among women with university degrees. The urban middle classes can also afford the ultrasound tests to determine the sex of the foetus.
"We are seeing a rush of multinational companies selling ultrasound machines in India with little regard for how they are used," said Sabu George, a campaigner against female foeticide. "Chinese companies now sell machines at just 200,000 rupees ($5000 or £2,500) half the price of American ones. Every small town doctor can get one and more families can afford the test."
The mix of old customs and new technology means a shortage of girls that will haunt India for decades, say researchers. The latest figures from a sample registration system which covers 1.3m households shows that for the two years up to 2005 Indian had just 880 female babies born to each 1,000 males.
Prem Chowdhry, who has studied the implications of a widening gender deficit, says unmarried young men are turning to crime and violence against women has increased. Some men in the rich northern state of Haryana have taken to buying brides from other parts of India. Many of these wives end up slaves and their children are shunned.
"We are seeing five to 10 households in every village where wives are brought," said Professor Chowdhry. "The pattern is being reproduced across India and we are staring at a huge problem for the future."

Crime Free Village

At a time when spiralling crime graph is a matter of concern for the Uttar Pradesh -a province of India - Police, a small village on the Bhadohi - Varanasi Road here has set a record of sorts by not reporting even a single case of crime in the past 50 years.

Residents of Chandi-Sona village leave their houses unlocked while going out or even during nights.

According to Chauri police station, about two km from the village, there is little to worry about the village having a population of about 1500, as no case has been reported from there in the past over 50 years.

Village head (Gram Pradhan in Hindi) Chinta Devi said, "There is absolute 'Ram Rajya' in the village where people of different castes and creeds live in peace and tranquility.

"The only concern for us is to guard our belongings from stray animals," Chinta Devi said, adding all residents were by and large dependent on agriculture and happy with their lives.

The villagers thank the Gram Devi (village goddess) installed just outside the village for the peace prevailing in Chandi-Sona.

Seventy-year old Shitla Prasad of the village claim that, "Once thieves, who had struck at some houses kept moving about the village all through the night but failed to find the way out and were nabbed in the morning".

The real Mata Hari

In July 1917, at the height of the First World War, Margaretha Geertruida Zelle, alias Mata Hari, went on trial for her life before a military tribunal in Paris. She was accused of having passed French military secrets to the German enemy - secrets so vital they had cost no less than 50,000 French lives, the prosecutor claimed. As a sensational tale of sex and espionage unfolded before the court. Margaretha's anguished declarations of innocence fell on deaf ears. The tribunal had no hesitation in pronouncing her guilty and sentencing her to death by firing squad.

Dancing into danger

Yet the facts of Margaretha's life suggest she was more a harmless, bewildered victim of circumstance than a dangerous secret agent. Born in the Netherlands in 1876, she married a Dutch Army officer when she was 19 and lived for a time in Java and Sumatra. In 1905, back in Europe and separated from her husband, she embarked on a career as an oriental dancer, first under the name of Lady MacLeod and then as Mata Hari - a Malay expression meaning 'the eye of the day'.

Mata Hari was soon famous throughout the continent, not so much for the quality of her dancing as for her readiness to perform virtually naked on the stage. She acquired a string of lovers of various nationalities in the highest military and political circles, including Crown Prince Wilhelm, heir to the German throne.

After the First World War broke out in 1914, her international contacts made her a tempting target for spymasters looking to recruit agents. By this time down on her luck, she accepted money from both the German and French intelligence services. But she proved a hopeless secret agent. There is no evidence that either side ever got any worthwhile information out of her. Eventually, tired of paying money for nothing, the Germans deliberately allowed the French to discover her duplicity.

Although some of France's most influential men - many of whom were Margaretha's ex-lovers - appealed on her behalf, she was executed at Vincennes on October 15, 1917. Her unconcerned behaviour in the face of death fed the Mata Hari myth. Salacious journalists dwelt upon the black silk stockings and fur-trimmed cloak she insisted on wearing for the execution. As she courageously refused to be blindfolded, the story was put about that she believed on of her high placed lovers had ordered the rifles to be loaded with blanks.

Shooter Identified As South Korean Student

A 23-year-old Virginia Tech student from South Korea named Cho Seung-Hui committed Monday's school massacre, police said. What motivated him is unknown. Media reports said he left behind what police called a "disturbing note" but its contents have not been revealed.

The shooter who killed 32 people and himself at Virginia Tech University on Monday has been identified by police as Cho Seung-Hui, a 23-year-old South Korean-born undergraduate student at the university who studied English and lived in a dormitory on the campus, Virginia State Police said.

They said Cho committed suicide after the attacks, and there was no indication of a possible motive. "He was a loner, and we're having difficulty finding information about him," school spokesman Larry Hincker said.

Cho reportedly left behind what police described as a "disturbing note" but the contents of this have not been revealed. His face was reported to have been badly damaged after killing himself, but he was identified by fingerprints and immigration records.

One law enforcement official said Cho's backpack contained a receipt for a March purchase of a Glock 9 mm pistol. Cho was a permanent legal resident of the United States, according to an unidentified Homeland Security Department official who spoke to Associated Press.

Unconfirmed media reports said his first victim may have been his girlfriend. Law enforcement officials said Cho's fingerprints were found on the guns used in both shootings -- the one at a Virginia Tech dorm that left two people dead and the one in Norris Hall in which 30 people were killed two hours later. The serial numbers on the two weapons had been filed off, the officials said.

Police said the victims were found in at least four seminar rooms and on the stairs. US media said the weapons used were a 9 mm Glock and a .22 Walther.

Col. Steve Flaherty, superintendent of the Virginia State Police, said it was reasonable to assume that Cho was the shooter in both attacks but that the link was not yet definitive. "There's no evidence of any accomplice at either event, but we're exploring the possibility," he said.

South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun reiterated his condolences after the revelation that the shooter was of South Korean origin. The South Korean Foreign Ministry said Cho had been living in the US since 1992.

Roh's office said in a statement that he was "shocked beyond description again over the fact that the tragic incident was caused by a South Korean native who has permanent residency" in the US, the Associated Press reported.

Source : Spiegel