Grim motives behind infant killings

[Gauracandra]

Grim motives behind infant killings

 

In the first of a two-part report examining infanticide in India, CNN's Satinder Bindra looks into the social environment that can drive parents to kill their baby girls.

 

SALEM, India (CNN) -- Fifteen hours after a baby girl was buried alive by her father in central India, police managed to pull her out -- and she was still alive.

 

Police say the baby survived because she had been buried among stones and there was enough space for her to breathe.

 

Every year, thousands of baby girls in India are murdered by their own parents.

 

Sociologists blame such killings on a widely held Indian belief that girls are an economic drain because families still have to pay expensive dowries at the time of their marriage.

 

Authorities have said that over the past few years, more than 4,500 female babies in India's southern Salem district alone have been killed -- by their own parents.

 

Social scientists say the severity of the problem of selective abortions is so bad, the country's gender birth ratio shows there are 880 females for every 1,000 males.

 

Modern technology has only worsened the phenomena. While infanticide has long been practiced, female foeticide is a relatively new phenomenon.

 

Over the past decade, inexpensive access to ultrasound technology has led to many families determining the sex of an unborn child and then aborting it if it is found to be female.

 

New laws and an aggressive intervention program mean fewer girls in Salem are being murdered.

 

But the practice of female infanticide continues.

 

Officials in this south Indian city have put the word out to parents they will treat every suspicious infant death as a homicide.

 

Police, however, are still finding the shallow graves of babies and say more than a hundred female children here are killed by their parents every year.

 

A Salem woman sits crushing grain as she tells CNN she has to live the rest of her life with the pain and guilt of knowing she murdered her own new born baby girl.

 

"I wanted to keep the baby. But people around me said, 'You have three daughters. Why do you want to have yet another one?' How can I kill her, I asked?"

 

"They suggested giving the baby something that would kill her. So I got some tobacco leaves, mixed it with water and gave it to the baby. She died.''

 

In the southern Indian district of Salem, such murders are fairly common.

 

In this region alone officials say that over the past year about one hundred female children have been murdered by their own parents. Some were asphyxiated, others poisoned or starved and many just left to die in sewers and garbage dumps.

 

Adoption scheme

Sociologists blame such killings on a deep-rooted gender bias.

 

Compared to boys, girls are believed to be an economic drain because it is still customary to pay the husband's family expensive, albeit iillegal, dowries at the time of their marriage.

 

So harsh is the dowry system, it can bankrupt a poor family with more than one daughter.

 

One man told CNN that raising young girls was like "watering your neighbor's lawn."

 

To control female infanticide, officials in southern India have launched a program called the Cradle Baby Scheme to convince parents not to kill, but surrender unwanted baby girls to the state.

 

So far more than 420 baby girls have been handed over to state officials, who claim every baby surrendered is a life saved.

 

Parents like Kamala Palanisami agree.

 

Six months ago when she gave birth to her sixth child, a baby girl, Palanisami decided to give her to the state.

 

"I felt one daughter was enough, five children were enough. This child should get a better life -- so I gave her up,'' said Palanisami.

 

This woman who killed her baby also says it is poverty that drives parents to murder.

 

"If I could have clothed, fed and given the baby a decent life I wouldn't have done what I did.''

 

Officials are now trying to educate more women and find them higher paying jobs so they are better able to save their children and this region from so much suffering and shame.

[Gauracandra]

State adopts infants' cause

In the second of a two-part report on infanticide in India, CNN's Satindar Bindra takes a look at efforts to find new homes for little girls surrendered by their parents to the state.

There are high hopes that education and law enforcement can put an end to female infanticide in India.

 

SALEM, India (CNN) -- Eighteen-month-old Hema's biological parents abandoned her within hours of birth.

 

Now she has been adopted by the Somasundram family.

 

"Imagine a blind man suddenly getting the gift of sight. There's as much joy when a childless couple can adopt a child,'' says the child's new father.

 

The Somasundram's live in southern India's Salem district -- an area where prejudice against girls runs so deep officials say every year about 100 girls are murdered by their own parents.

 

It's a practice that shames and embarrasses the Somasundrams.

 

"Instead of killing children, if these people only dropped off the girls at state adoption centers thousands of people like us can get tremendous happiness,'' says the father of the Somasundrams household.

 

Officials are now encouraging mothers who do not want to keep baby girls to surrender them to the state. Government agencies then arrange for their adoption.

 

Officials are also taking other steps to curb female infanticide.

 

It is now mandatory for all pregnant women in the Salem area to register at the local hospital. Here many receive their first lessons in gender equity and are counseled not to kill or abandon female children.''

 

Such counseling appears to be working. One expectant mother, Jayalakshmi, says she is looking forward to giving birth to a baby girl.

 

"Those who kill baby girls discard them like trash," she says. "Do they have such low regard for women? Can't that girl become a civil servant a doctor lawyer? Why do they kill them?''

 

Local women volunteers called "motorcycle messiahs" travel door-to-door spreading just such a message.

 

In the areas they work in, fewer girls are now being killed.

 

The messiahs, though, admit they have not been able to stem the number of babies being handed over to the state and social agencies.

 

But the social workers are not worried. They have a long list of childless couples that want to give these female children their right to life.

[Avinash]

SALEM, India (CNN) -- Fifteen hours after a baby girl was buried alive by her father in central India, police managed to pull her out -- and she was still alive.

 

The father should be buried. He is a demon.

[livingentity]

Indian community in Reno and when I lived and worked there a lot of the other employees at my employment were from India. They befriended me and would come into my office and chat with me quite a bit.

 

One man whose wife was pregnant told me that if they did not have a son he would kill the child and himself because he would consider himself a failure. I tried very hard to talk to him about it but he was adamant. I breathed a very heavy sigh of relief when his wife gave birth to a son.

 

Another Indian man that I worked with whose wife was also expecting had a totally different attitude. He was just happy to be a father for the first time and told me it did not matter to him nor his parents what sex the child was. He had a little girl and was beaming with pride when he showed her to me for the first time.

 

Several years later, I was gone from that job but an event hit the news bigtime - an Indian woman had drowned her infant daughter in the river. It took several days for the media to release the name and I was on edge thinking it was the wife of the man that was so against have a daughter. It was not.

 

Funny thing about the first man in my story - there were two of us women in the office. The other woman has five daughters and I have only one child - a son. Well this man would have nothing to do with the other woman except to be polite. However, the first day I came to work there he immediately asked me if I had any children and I told him that I had only one - a son. Well, from that day forward he went out of his way with respect - I guess I had done the world a great favor in having a son.

[Avinash]

It is engrained in some people's mind that girl babies are bad. Not only male members of a family, female members also sometimes hate it when a girl child is born. It is said that mother is harassed if she gives birth to a girl. I agree that in most of the cases it is true. But, it is not always true. Let me mention an incident from my personal experience.

Years back, I was living in a house as a tenant. The children of land-lord were far elder than me and my siblings. The eldest son was married. He had two daughters. His wife was to give birth to one more child. On the day the baby was born, the baby's father came to the house from hospital. By that time, his two sisters had somehow been informed that the child was again a girl. I do not know how they came to this information. The information was wrong. The child was a boy. But, the two sisters were thinking that it was a girl. Both of them became very sad. They started telling that their fate was not good and all such things. The baby's father informed that the baby was a son. Then his two sisters were overjoyed. But, of course, now they started saying that they did not make any distinction between boy and girl. Though, just a while back, they were very gloomy.

 

It can also not be said that they did not want girl child because of economic reasons. The family was very well-off.

[I_love_krishna_]

It is the Indian Mentality. Changing it is quite hard.

 

However, it is not always the case. In some of the well off families it does not really matter if the child is a girl or a boy.

 

My aunt grew up with out any discrimination in her family.

But when she got married to some guy from an Indian family in A.P. India, she saw the difference.

 

Most of the men and women are sexist and the sexist biases are toward women.

Even now, In my father's village in India, the statements like " He is a boy!, He doesn't have to do it!" and "Don't let him do it!, he is a boy!" or "you are a girl you have to do it!" are quite prominent.

 

 

 

[vsdprasad]

Apart from economic reasons there are many other reasons. They are highly deep rooted beliefs. It takes time to " smoke 'em off" or atleast change the perspective. In India there are many ceremonies for a girl as she grows up compared to a boy. Even after marriage, some ceremonies need to be taken care by the girl's parents. Most of the parents consider it to be like draining of their resources and only few parents consider the girl as lakshmi that gives luminance to the house. And another thing that concerns the minds of parents is the increment of family descendants. Only boys remain in the family tree and a girl goes to different family tree after marriage. Also its belived that the forefathers are benefited when direct descendants perform the family rites and hence forefathers cannot get their share of punya when there are no male descendants (considering that the descendants are religious without going away from it).

 

And dowry problem is not limited to hindus. Even many muslims in South India are playing with this menace. The attitude of people doesn't change overnight. It would take a couple of generations before the problem is completely eliminated. Pragmatism helps in dealing with it. People are slowly getting aware of the fact that its more easy (economically) to raise a single child be it girl/boy than raising two or more (considering the cost of various things like education etc...).

 

A funny thing happened to my uncle. He first had a daughter and then during the second delivery, a nurse informed that twins were born & they are both female. He felt glooomy, then took a deeeep breath, went quietly to a nearby temple to stay in peace atleast for few minutes. When he returned after some time, everyone were happy & smiling. The truth was he had twin boys and the nurse misinformed him. It is easy to imagine his plight & thought process till he came to know about his two sons. /images/graemlins/smile.gif

 

 

[atma]

When I had my first baby in Calcutta they had to operate because was a dry delivery, I was awake and chanting on my beads. My eyes were covered and when I heard the baby cry, I inmediately asked the doctor the time of birth and the sex and he told me: "whatever Krsna sent you is fine", I understood was a girl because it was so difficult for the doctor to say it straightforward.

After my second girl was born, my husband was teased for a while but lots of people told us that we didn't have to worry about dowry because the girls were white, many wealthy families would pay us to marry our daughters into their family to "bleach" the line! I just let people talk, I laughed at it and tolerated, what can you do with absurdity. Some people had marriage proposals for the kids when they were only babies.

But I saw so much suffering, embarrasment and anguish when girls were born in other families. It will take a long time and lots of education to change the mentality.

[livingentity]

so sad.

[Guest guest]

Yes it is so sad that Krishna consciousness is not everywhere. I remember Prabhupada saying: The only thing missing in this world is Krishna consciousness.

 

It is so sad that we are thought that big money is more important than a person, no matter the body. It is so sad that all those babies didn't get a chance to hear about Krishna's wonderful pastimes. It is so sad that they did not get the chance to utilize this human body to return to Krishna because of some control freaks.

 

Hare Krishna

[I_love_krishna_]

A girl child is considered "Laxmi". Sometimes people want a girl child because Laxmi arrives and brings them fortune.

 

but it is true, they rejoice more for the boy child.

 

 

 

[Avinash]

I find it very ironic when women of a family feel sad over the birth of girl babies. How do they ignore the fact that they themselves are females?

[I_love_krishna_]

Isn't it true that in India, women who give birth to boys get more respect that women who give birth to girls ?

 

I read it in a book called "Global Studies" in my school . Even though I spent a good deal of my life in India... most of it is just a haze, so I dared not to question it. /images/graemlins/smile.gif

 

But is it true?

 

I am just curious...

[Avinash]

Isn't it true that in India, women who give birth to boys get more respect that women who give birth to girls ?

 

It is true in some families. But, it does not happen as much as the books written by people outside India show. Most of these books show India as it was a few decades back. India has changed a lot since then.

[Guest guest]

Isn't it true that in India, women who give birth to boys get more respect that women who give birth to girls ?

 

I read it in a book called "Global Studies" in my school . Even though I spent a good deal of my life in India... most of it is just a haze, so I dared not to question it.

 

But is it true?

 

I am just curious...

*****

 

But the question to ask is how ignorant are they that the male actually creates the gender of the child.

 

It is the seed that determines the tree, and the earth that determines the trees health.

 

But yes I've even read it in some scriptures that women with boys are highly viewed compared to women with girls.