It started on Spring break. I was waiting at my gate in the Salt Lake airport for my flight to Los Angeles to see Paul Simon in concert. I was wasting time when something on the airport TV screens caught my attention. I saw a 3-4 minutes CNN Hero clip about Anuradha Koirala, a woman who fights human sex trafficking in Nepal (a brief version of the video is embedded below). I found myself weeping in the middle of the airport, knowing I was unable to comprehend in the smallest degree what hell millions of my sisters face. I thought of my little son, and perhaps future sons and daughters, and how my heart could never be at peace if I could not know my children were safe.
I had looked up her charity and then forgotten about it.
Last weekend I got the next movie in my Netflix cue called Water. Recommended by my sister Marie, I was absolutely engrossed and challenged by what I saw. Besides an incredibly beautifully shot film with fantastic performances, this story of the evils perpetrated against widows, women, and the poor by these cultural and religious traditions was heart-rending and eye-opening.
Now, I highly recommend this film. But that’s not what I want to write about.
What has struck me is the visceral reaction I had and how little it has dissipated half of a week later. I believe what is happening in the name and practice of this aspect of Hinduism is evil. Straight up evil. “Wicked tradition of your fathers” evil. As a liberal and Christian I believe in giving a wide berth to people and cultures, but this tugs at something deep.
Then, yesterday, this article pops up on the Yahoo homepage:
Early results show India has 914 girls under age 6 for every 1,000 boys. A decade ago, many were horrified when the ratio was 927 to 1,000.
The discrimination happens through abortions of female fetuses and sheer neglect of young girls, despite years of high-profile campaigns to address the issue. So serious is the problem that it’s illegal for medical personnel to reveal the gender of an unborn fetus, although evidence suggests the ban is widely circumvented.
Part of the reason Indians favor sons is the enormous expense in marrying off girls. Families often go into debt arranging marriages and paying elaborate dowries. A boy, on the other hand, will one day bring home a bride and dowry. Hindu custom also dictates that only sons can light their parents’ funeral pyres.
The census data shows that the worst offenders are the relatively wealthy northern states of Punjab and Haryana.
China is experiencing similar infanticide and a gross gender imbalance.
I don’t know what to do about this. This is a cultural battleship carrying over 2 billion people that will not turn on a dime. But what choice do we have? How can we rest or be at peace when millions of babies, girls, and women are treated as chattle at best, a curse or problem at worst.
This brings me back to Sam Harris. You may know him as one of the fresh young faces of neo-Atheism, but his most recent book The Moral Landscape argues that there are some practices that we can look at through secular, logical eyes alone and deem detrimental to human happiness. There can be an empirical basis for morality. This has become one of those issues for me: I don’t think I care what the Vedas say, and for all of my fascination and deference to Eastern religion I’ve developed through the years I don’t feel like this is something that can be justified because it in a religious or cultural reality to these countries.
I remember the conversation we had about this, and I agreed with you ultimately. But I think the conclusion we came to is that this means that in the world you're imagining those of strong religious conviction must be prepared to break the law in order to follow their convictions. Which makes sense — earthly laws, even those made by men of conscience, cannot always be expected to accurately reflect God's will (and in most cases such earthly laws are actually a protection against the evil pseudo-religious traditions you reference).
Such a tension certainly happened in Mormonism, though we like to think of ourselves now as the ultimate law-abiders. Though the moral issue of polygamy was not the only reason Mormons' marital lifestyle was criminalized by the U.S. government, there were those legislators whose primary motivation *was* protecting Mormon women from what they viewed as exploitation. And of course we disagreed (vociferously) with this well-intentioned assessment. So maybe the line needs to be drawn at protecting those who are not yet of age and those who reject their own religious tradition, while leaving in peace those who are of age and who believe in the tradition of the widows' ashram/polygamy/whatever? Or must the whole institution be destroyed in such cases? As to infanticide/abortion, I doubt any Eastern religion promotes that, though certainly religious preference for males (and the economic consequences of that preference) would seem to contribute to the cultural practice of killing females. I wonder if our own religion's teachings about the equality and divinity of both sexes would successfully hold back such a practice if we had similarly strict dowry customs in our society. In our culture the family of the bride is supposed to pay for most of the wedding, but that's flexible, weddings don't have to be terribly elaborate and eat up a family's life savings. If they did, I wonder if we'd see a similar gender imbalance in our own society? Maybe even among Mormons, despite our religious law against elective abortion?
Sorry. Rambling comment. I love your posting, and have been feeling that I want to find a well-rated NGO that fights child sex trafficking. (Though the documentaries I've watched on the topic certainly paint a bleak picture as far as solving the overall problem — the experts seem to agree that as long as there is a demand by wealthy men anywhere in the world, it will be very difficult to solve the problem. You buy a child out of slavery and just enrich the system that goes on to enslave five others. So much evil and so much pain.)
I just noticed that you said that the worst offenders for female infanticide/abortion are *wealthy* regions of India. Interesting. That would suggest that it's not so much religious/cultural traditions colliding with poverty that drives people to kill their daughters, but plain old greed. We're taught in Mormonism that the wealthy tend to be less truly religiously devout (more focused on the social cache of conforming to religiously-influenced customs)…so maybe the primary culprit is materialist secularism rather than the religious/cultural attitudes toward males and females? Probably some of both.
Thanks again for your moving posts. Blogging with a purpose.
That's "cachet"