Keywords

Girl child , Globalization , Gender violence , Feminist perspective , Development , Empowerment

1 . INTRODUCTION

2 . ATTITUDE TOWARDS THE GIRL CHILD

Women’s status in any society is an indicator of its development and progress. Indian culture idolizes boys and dreads the birth of girls. She is breast fed for a shorter time and dawn out of school to take care of siblings. The cycle of deprivation and disadvantage is further compounded by early marriage, premature pregnancies and attended risks. The girl child must be empowered to enter into the main stream of economic and social activity. Today we have realized that to improve the position of women one needs to look at the girlchild who is a woman of tomorrow. Only when we visualize a female child with high self-esteem not merely in recipient roles but in active productive roles with a concern for human dignity then only we will have a strong and empowered woman. The ultimate goal is to have an active, healthy and confident female child unfettered by socio-cultural patterns and traditional roles with equal access to knowledge information and opportunities.

The Indian culture, which idolizes sons and dreads the birth of a daughter, to be born female comes perilously close to being born less than human. The girl’s discrimination begins even before birth. Our statistics clearly point out some facts that abortion of female fetuses is on rise. The ratio of female to male is declining. There is reluctance to seek medical aid for ailing daughters. Girls are breast fed for a shorter duration than boys and girls are easily withdrawn from school to look after their young siblings. Regardless of the economic background the status of the female child has never been the same as that of the male at any level (Pande, 2010).

Gender roles are conceived, taught and enacted in a complex set of relationships within family and society at large. Needless to say, the Media reinforces the same stereotyped gender roles. The girl child grows up with a low self-esteem. She grows up with a notion of temporary membership in her natal home to be disposed off with assets and dowry. A tradition saying sums it up thus, a daughter is like ghee (clarified butter)- both are good upto a point. If you do not dispose them off they start stinking her productive role is to continue the household drudgery added to which is her reproductive role.

Even as a reproductive machine, woman’s life is worth only if she produces a son. Tradition and scriptures reinforce social biases against the girl thus, “the birth of a girl grant it elsewhere, here grant us a son”. Sophisticated medical technology now strengthens societal biases against girls in the form of prenatal sex determination tests which have resulted in female feticides. Education, global exposure and affluence, all of which translates into easier access to expensive technology have made it easier to select the sex of the child. If there is a choice it is always for the male child. Despite a stringent law, doctors and patients manage to evade it. Hence, there has been a decline in female ratio (Table 1).

Few decades earlier, doctors used to openly advertise for sex selection tests for male heirs. Dr. Aniruddha Malpani of Malpani clinic in upmarket Colaba became associated with infertility treatment. Her web site advertised on how one could choose the gender of one’s child, claiming to be one of the few in the world to pre select embryos to guarantee a son. Today Malpani is facing criminal charges for misusing pre-implantation diagnostic techniques like FISH for sex selection. Dr. Aniruddha defends this stating that in a democracy, people should be allowed to make decisions and askshow many can afford the pre-implantation technique, suggesting that only the rich can go for such a costly test (India Today,2003).

The Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (Regulation and Prevention of Misuse) Ammendment Act was framed in 1994. Renamed the pre-conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Technique (Prohibition of sex selection) Act, it came into force in 2003. The Act prohibits sex selection before or after conception. It regulates, but does not ban the use of pre-natal diagnostic techniques like ultra sound for detecting genetic abnormalities or other disorders. Any nursing home, registered medical practitioner or hospital that does the ultra sound test is required to state that it does not do sex determination. The State Medical Council can cancel a registration to a doctor, guilty of violating the law. Under the Act any person who seeks sex selection can face a three year imprisonment (on first conviction) and fined Rs. 50, 000.

The implementation of laws is just one facet of the war against female feticide. However, in India there is a big gap between the law on paper and its implementation and of every law there are hundreds of ways in which it is bypassed. Meanwhile, in a society that ideologues the boy being born a female is to be born less than human. All across India the birth of a son is announced triumphantly with the beat of a brass thali (plate) and the distribution of sweets and money while that of a girl is met with silence and dejection, if not condolence. In North India dowries are much bigger and dowry deaths more common. In many states marrying a daughter can reduce parents to penury.

The girl child cannot be looked in isolation. Her status is a product of general societal attitudes towards women at large. Women face higher risks of malnutrition, disease, disability, retardation of growth and development. They have no access of control over resources. Their work is invisible and hence undervalued. Their disabilities are powerfully reinforced through our culture, media, education and socialization process. A look at some of the proverbs and saying in local languages throughout India sums up these attitudes. A popular Telugu saying from Andhra is, “Bringing up a daughter is like watering a plant in another’s courtyard”. Another states, “If you tell lies you will get a female child”. Another states, “It is better to be born as a tree in a jungle than to be born a girl”. “It is easier to perform an Asvamedha Yagya (Horse sacrifice which the kings would perform in the past) than to perform a daughter’s wedding.” As a result of the cultural milieu women’s self-image as well as societies image of her is negative. She has no value as an individual, who contributes to the nation’s development. In this social context it is not surprising that the girl child like any other women has no value and her work is invisible and unrecognized (Pande, 2004).

The cycle of deprivation and disadvantage is further compounded by early marriage, premature pregnancies and its attendant risks. The dedication of girls as Devadasis, Jogins and Basavis in some regions of Andhra is singularly reprehensible violation of human rights as it makes young and innocent girls available for sexual abuse in the name of religion.The young Jogin does not marry and becomes the common property of the village and an object of sexual exploitation. According to a recent district wise survey there are 16,287 Devdasis, Jogins, Basavis in Andhra Pradesh, 80% belong to the Schedule Castes.

Girl children are entitled to have equal access of all resources of society. This entitlement is frequently denied. Discrimination that begins at the girl’s birth has a cumulative effect on inequality, producing despair and powerlessness. The beginnings must be made with the girl child herself. Unless the girl internalizes the concept and experience of equity, as an adult she may tolerate and even perpetuate gender disparity. At present the girl child is denied the very acquisition of an identity. The right to personhood is a primary right and must be extended to the girl child. Also her rights to dignity, health, education are not visibly supported by the family or society. There must be concrete action on this count.

A large number of girls don’t even attend school and among those who attend school the dropout rate is very high. This is because girls have to engage in domestic and child care activities when parents are at work. Nearly 80% of girls drop out from I to V class. Out of 100 girls who enroll in class 1 only 42 reach class V. Among Schedule Castes and Schedule Tribes, many of those who live below poverty line out of the 100 girls only 19 reach class V. Many of these girls work in unorganized sectors such as the beedi industry, agarbatti industry and garment making to name a few. Two characteristics of unorganized workers stand out: one, their being largely home-based, and the other the predominance of women and girl children. The unorganized sector represents gender division of labour because most of the women along with girls sitting at home do the works like beedi making, bangle making, agarbatti making, garments making and boys are not involved in it. In spite of this work most of the work of the girl child remains invisible (Pande, 2008).

3 . GENDER VIOLENCE

Another major issue that haunts the process of development and empowerment is the issue of gender violence. The many forms of violence against women and children are to be understood as gender violence. Only when we look at violence not as a private issue but a developmental and human rights issue, that will be able to see the question in its totality. Violence has an economic, social and political cost to society and is not a private affair. Gender violence is rooted in the theory that the cause of domestic violence is one person’s arbitrary belief in the right to exert power over another person, interpersonal interactions or interpersonal relations and is situated in the socio-economic and political content of power relations (Kelkar, 1991). In Indian families, most of the working-class women, even while facing violence, also face trivialization of reality in their lives. Middle-class women face another kind of censoring of the violence that they face within homes. The public private divide which operates very strongly in many middle-class women’s lives do not allow them to speak about the humiliation and violence they undergo. Both these trivializing as well as silencing are political acts which support a structure of oppression of women (Pande et al. 2008). Girls, who observe domestic violence, are more likely to tolerate abusive partners as adults, thus subjecting another generation to the same sad dynamics. The wife’s tolerance is explained in terms of traditional socialization or learned helplessness (Agnes, 1980; Ahuja, 1987 and Mahajan, 1990). Women tend to be the peacemakers in relationships, the ones responsible for making the marriage work.

One of the major problems of recent times is the alarming proportion of trafficking of women and children for the purpose of sexual exploitation. In today’s world hundreds of women and children are trafficked in the name of jobs, domestic work, films role or marriage. Today trafficking generates more money than even arms trade or drugs trade. Trafficking for commercial sexual exploitation is one of the worst forms of human rights violation. Adolescent girls from marginalized families are the most vulnerable. Our girls are our wealth and the future women who should be nurtured and need protection. Hence we need to wake up to this issue and take it with all seriousness it deserves. Trafficking of women and children has severely negative consequences for women and societies involved. It is an issue that involves both gender and basic human rights abuses. The problem is complex, deep, insidious, corrupt and multifaceted involving criminal enforcement challenges at the dark realm of human race. It is the vilest form of crime since it consists of using persons as merchandise that becomes the source of gain for both the trafficker, the one who sells the person and the one who buys her in order to profit from the prostitution. The nature of this work is such that there are chains of people who live out of the sexual exploitation of a single woman or girl. Trafficking is prevalent at various levels, local, inter-district, inter-state and cross-border. It is estimated that there are at least 8 million women and children in prostitution. About 25% or some 2 million of them are children. More chilling is the fact that not only is child trafficking on the increase, but also that the age at which they are victimized is also fast declining. Today trafficking in women has emerged as the most important issue on women’s agenda-violence against women (Pande, 2016).

4 . GLOBALISATION AND WOMEN

Most of the economies of the developing world are now in the process of restructuring from an inward looking and state directed policy regime to an outward looking economy in thedirection of free market and liberalization. India had adopted the New Economic Policy in 1991 in the wake of debt crisis, as an essential part of the structural Adjustment Policy urged by the IMF and the World Bank. It was believed that this would make India to overcome its foreign exchange deficits, encourage foreign investments and strengthen the balance of payments. The World Bank gave substantial loans to tide over the crisis. The globalization of trade and commerce was part of this package. Though, these reforms focused mainly on industrial, fiscal, financial and external sectors, it was anticipated that a market determined exchange rate regime, reduction of protection to the industry and removal of restrictions on agricultural exports would benefit the agricultural sector. It was also expected that the new multilateral trading regime would enable India to increase its share in world exports of agricultural and agro based products.

In the global system, marked with widening income disparities, economic growth disparities, human capital disparities (life expectancy, nutrition, infant and child mortality, adult literacy, enrolment ratio, etc.) disparities in the distribution of global economic resources and opportunities, the disturbing question arises as to protect the interests of the poor and under privileged. The dominance of rich nations, multinational corporations and international capital over markets, resources and labour in the developing countries through trade, aid and technology transfer has greatly weakened the capacity of nation states and governments to promote human development and offer protection to the poor people. If the global opportunities continue to be unevenly distributed, the consequences of the most pressing problem, poverty, would increasingly overflow national frontiers (UNDP, 1995).

Globalization has been described as the gradual elimination of economic borders and concomitant increase in international exchange and transnational interaction (Dolan, 1993). Globalization has been identified with economic reforms, structural adjustment programs, New World trade order and the opening up of the commercial markets and the global communication village and the world increasingly becoming similar and smaller. In the context of women this would mean a better social and economic status. But it has a growing interdependence and interconnectedness, necessarily lead to women’s development but a lot of statistics in India, shows that it is not necessarily.

Globalization gets manifested in many ways. These include increased collaboration between companies in production and research, greater use of international financial markets, spatial spread of production activities to utilize local factors, cost advantage and gain access to new markets, increased intra-firm trade and trade in semi-finished parts, increased merger and acquisitions and greater use of international labor market for specialized and senior management staff (Gibson, 1994). It is necessary to look at globalization in terms of its impact on the entire economy and society but with a perspective that is sensitive to women’s needs and conditions because women comprise about half the sub-continents population. Gender has been increasingly acknowledged as a critical variable in analysis and development planning. Gender is an expression of power in social relationship between men and women. Gender as a power relation derives from institutional arrangements which provide men of a given social group, with greater capacity than women from that social group to mobilize institutional rules and resources to promote and defend their own interests (Kabeer, 1994). The analytic concept of gender is meant to challenge the essentialist and universal dictum that, “biology is destiny” (Stolcke, 1993).

In every form of activity be it agriculture or allied activities, domestication of animals, fishing, weaving, garment making, women contribute substantially to the value addition of the final product and yet their work is perceived by all as subsidiary, unskilled and often as skill only of domestic value. These women are burdened twice with double burden of work and are vulnerable to exploitation. Though, not a homogeneous group by way of caste, class or economic activity, deprivation and discrimination is common to all the workers in this area. They suffer from lack of opportunity to work, low and discriminatory wages and exploitative conditions resulting in casualization. They lack social security, face occupational health hazards, and do not have access to new technologies, skills and knowledge (Shramshakti, 1988).

Globalization has created a vast divide between the haves and the have-nots. There is strong evidence to show that the contemporary process of globalization with emphasis on technical change in agriculture associated with higher capital intensity, greater mechanization of production and postharvest operations, the development of crop and livestock with varied characteristics geared to the requirement of commercial commodity production has been accompanied by changes which women experience in a unique ways. This includes the loss of knowledge, skills and production contributions (Jigging, 1986)

With the process of commercialization women’s traditional land rights are eroded. Land reform programs as well as the tendency towards the breakup of communal land holding especially ideas of tribal and customary tenures have led to the transfer of exclusive land rights to males as head of households. The ‘head of the family’ concept which is used as the basis for land redistribution, has historically ignored both the existence of the female headed households and the rights of the married women to a joint share in land. The ecological decline in common report resources and the decline in access to what remains due to force of privatization has meant that women work harder and are less able to fulfill their multiple roles in the maintenance and care of the farming system and the farm household. Thus a growing imbalance exists between women’s access to land, labor capital, services and facilities on the one hand and demands of production on the other.

The rhetoric of globalization promises to remove backwardness through a worldwide exchange of information and skills in order to establish a truly cosmopolitan culture. There is an underlying belief that mutual cooperation and concern for social justice is automatically cared under this system. In actual practice since the global order is based on unequal power relations these concerns are put in hold. Globalization creates ghettoization of the weaker nations and the weak among them. Globalization seems to increase choices as trade but only for those with money and access to the market. Due to the existing difference between women and men’s access to knowledge, skills, responsibilities and concerns and control over resources they are affected widely by the global process. Since women in many sectors have none but to continue to bear the brunt of gender and class inequalities, experience increasing marginalization and pauperization.

These growth-oriented policies have taken away whatever control women had over traditional occupations and denied them better avenues of employment. In the shift from welfare development to economic development the worst hit has been women, because a large number of women are in an informal sector. Globalization has only widened the gender disparity and increased feminization of poverty.

Globalization has also decreased the control of women over resources. It has led to displacement and when both men and women land up in urban slums it affects the women more due to lack of sanitation and increase of violence. In this process, the knowledge of traditional medicines, herbs and plants have been destroyed. Hence we need a holistic approach to development and empowerment approach based on equality, love and respect and starts from the family rather than an approach which is based on power and privilege of men and boys and weakness and subservience prescribed for women and girls.

Today there is an irreversibility of the reform process. The logic of global economy as well as India’s interests dictate that India become proactive in its liberalization policies. India must liberalize not because it has no choice but because it is the best choice. Moreover, this can alone make the country rich and prosperous and create any hope of conquering poverty. (Desai, 1999). The realities of the transitional period and the costs to vulnerable sections of societyhave to be recognized by the policy makers and some social safety nets to be created. The agricultural reforms must be sensitive to gender needs. The existing policy package consists of Minimum Support Price for selected agricultural products and procurement of few food products and the supply of food grains and a few essential items through the public distribution system (PDS) need to be reviewed. The ideas of a minimum support price and crop insurance to reduce production risks will go a long way in helping the farmers. The PDS should target the poor and the people living below poverty line. Direct market interventions in the form of purchase, storage and distribution by government agencies must be avoided and increase the farmers especially women’s access to the market via better roads and transport facilities, storage, packing and agro processing facilities. The goal must be sustainable agricultural development. It is imperative for the government to prioritize food security. It is very important to develop safety nets to minimize the adverse distributional consequences of globalization. Legal frameworks should be altered to ease women’s access to and control of resources. The granting of land rights to women, rectifying the discriminatory inheritance laws, labour market legislations and laws to protect common property will go a long way in altering the social conditioning of gender.

Sustainable human development must be at the top of the priority agenda. There is a need to look at development with a human face. The most important goals must include universal access to basic education, primary health care for all, elimination of serious malnutrition and provision of safe drinking water. Women’s concerns need to be explicitly incorporated as integral elements of the objectives, content, monitoring and international support for structural adjustment. There is a need to take into account women’s special needs in the contribution to economic production, such as household management, child rearing, and community organization in addition to their contribution to agriculture. We need to view human beings as having intrinsic value and not just an instrumental value. The right to a life of dignity is a basic human right. Hence there is a need to change the total perspective. Development and Empowerment will have no real meaning till we focus on the issue of the Girl Child, Gender violence and Globalization.

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Conflict of Interest

References