Où sont les femmes?

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Un conseil: écouter la chanson en lisant les articles, ça fera "passer la pilule" (c'est le cas de le dire...)



Démographie: l'avenir incertain d'une planète remplie d'hommes

Par Giles HEWITT

NEW DELHI, 28 oct 2011 (AFP) - A l'heure où la population mondiale franchit le cap des sept milliards, des experts craignent que le déséquilibre des sexes favorise l'émergence d'instables "pays de célibataires" se menant une concurrence acharnée pour trouver une épouse.

Les conséquences exactes de ce que le démographe français Christophe Guilmoto qualifie de "masculinisation alarmante" dans des pays comme l'Inde ou la Chine, à cause des avortements sélectifs, restent encore incertaines.

Mais de nombreux experts estiment que dans cinquante ans, la pénurie de femmes aura sur la société un impact similaire à celui du réchauffement climatique, invisible mais bien réel.

Derrière ces avertissements, se cachent des statistiques irréfutables.

La nature fournit des chiffres invariables: il naît entre 104 et 106 garçons pour 100 filles et le moindre changement de cette proportion ne peut s'expliquer que par des facteurs anormaux.

En Inde et au Vietnam, le chiffre est d'environ 112 garçons pour 100 filles. En Chine, la proportion passe quasiment de 120 pour 100, quand elle n'est pas de 130 garçons pour 100 filles dans certaines régions.

Et la tendance se propage: en Azerbaïdjan, en Géorgie, en Arménie, les ratios à la naissance sont tous de l'ordre de plus de 115 garçons pour 100 filles. En Albanie et au Kosovo, on constate le même phénomène.

La prise de conscience mondiale remonte à 1990 lorsque le prix Nobel indien, l'économiste Amartya Sen, publia un article au titre choc: "Plus de 100 millions de femmes sont portées manquantes".

Les démographes estiment que ce chiffre a désormais dépassé les 160 millions, résultat de la préférence traditionnelle pour les fils, de la baisse de la fertilité et, plus important, des échographies bon marché permettant d'avorter s'il agit d'une fille, en toute illégalité.

Même si le ratio à la naissance revenait à la normale en Inde et en Chine d'ici les dix prochaines années, M. Guilmoto estime que dans ces deux pays, le mariage resterait pour les décennies à venir un casse-tête pour les hommes.

"Non seulement ces hommes vont devoir se marier à un âge plus avancé, mais ils risquent de devoir rester célibataires dans des pays où presque tout le monde avait l'habitude de trouver une femme", analyse-t-il.

Certains pensent que ce nouveau contexte pourrait accroître la polyandrie (une femme avec plusieurs époux) et le tourisme sexuel tandis que d'autres anticipent des scénarios catastrophe où la prédation sexuelle, la violence et les conflits seraient les nouvelles normes sociales.

Voici quelques années, les politologues Valérie Hudson et Andrea den Boer ont même écrit que les pays asiatiques majoritairement peuplés d'hommes représentaient une menace pour l'Occident.

Selon eux, "les sociétés au fort ratio hommes-femmes ne peuvent être gouvernées que par des régimes autoritaires capables de supprimer la violence dans leur propre pays et de l'exporter à l'étranger via la colonisation ou la guerre".

Mara Hvistendahl, journaliste pour le magazine Science et auteur d'un récent essai intitulé "Sélection non naturelle", objecte que les risques de guerres à grande échelle sont peu probables, rappelant notamment que l'Inde est une démocratie.

Mais elle admet qu'historiquement, les sociétés où le nombre d'hommes dépasse celui des femmes ne sont pas agréables à vivre", évoquant des risques d'instabilité et parfois de violence.

Des agences des Nations unies ont mis en garde contre une corrélation entre la rareté des femmes et une hausse du trafic sexuel ou des migrations de population pour se marier.

Mais peu de solutions ont jusqu'à présent été avancées.

Pour M. Guilmoto, la priorité aujourd'hui est de s'assurer que le problème soit rendu public, et pas seulement dans les pays émergents.

"En Europe de l'Est, les gens n'ont absolument aucune idée de ce qui est en train de se passer", prévient-t-il.

Indian village suffers for lack of women

By Vivek Prakash

SIYANI, India, Oct 12 (Reuters) - Nearly two dozen men building a temple in this remote farming village lay down their tools at midday and walk through the dusty streets to a shed where they are joined by another group of men -- and start eating a meal cooked by a man.

They live, eat and sleep together, sharing mattresses on the bare floor of an empty room the way a married couple usually would. All but a handful are unmarried -- a living example of India's rapidly worsening gender imbalance.

Census data released earlier this year revealed there are 914 girls for every 1,000 boys born - a sharp fall since 2001 when the ratio was 933 girls for every 1000 boys.

"I have been looking to marry since I was 15," said Vinodbhai Mehtaliya, a 23-year-old Siyani farmer.

A decades-old Indian preference for male children, who are seen as breadwinners, has led to the skewed ratio, aided by cheap ultrasound tests that assist in sex-selective abortions and female infanticide.

Siyani, in the western state of Gujarat, shows the decline. Here, some 350 men over the age of 35 are simply unable to get married -- out of a total population of roughly 8,000.

"I'm lucky I got married 20 years ago" said 42-year-old Laljibhai Makwana, who works as a diamond polisher in one of the village's small workshops. "If I was young here today I would never get married."

The absence of women is obvious in the village's bumpy, tiny lanes, where cows wander freely, especially in the evenings.

"There is little industrial development or infrastructure here, so people are poor and uneducated," said Prashant Dave, the 41-year-old owner of a small flour mill who said he was lucky to be married.

"There are too few women and they leave for better prospects."

Among the group of men living together, men perform all the tasks which are traditionally the domain of women: sweeping, cooking and cleaning. (au moins ça a un bon côté!)

The situation has also led to another reversal in custom, with some women and their parents asking for a lot of money from men to allow men to marry them, an inversion of the usual dowry system in which the woman's family has to pay the man's. et pas qu'un seul apparemment!)

At sunset, as the day's work ends, groups of unmarried men gather around the village tea stalls and tobacco shops, lacking wives and families to go home to.

"I've given up looking," said Bharatbhai Khair, who is single at 45 and has been trying to marry for 25 years.

"The women want more money for marriage than I can afford."

FEATURE-"Wife-sharing" haunts Indian villages as girls decline

* Illegal abortions lead to decline of women

* Cases of sexual exploitation of girls rise

* Changing deep-rooted patriarchal views a challenge

By Nita Bhalla

BAGHPAT, India, Oct 27 (TrustLaw) - When Munni arrived in this fertile, sugarcane-growing region of north India as a young bride years ago, little did she imagine she would be forced into having sex and bearing children with her husband's two brothers who had failed to find wives.

"My husband and his parents said I had to share myself with his brothers," said the woman in her mid-40s, dressed in a yellow sari, sitting in a village community centre in Baghpat district in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh.

"They took me whenever they wanted -- day or night. When I resisted, they beat me with anything at hand," said Munni, who had managed to leave her home after three months only on the pretext of visiting a doctor.

"Sometimes they threw me out and made me sleep outside or they poured kerosene over me and burned me."

Such cases are rarely reported to police because women in these communities are seldom allowed outside the home unaccompanied, and the crimes carry deep stigma for the victims. So there may be many more women like Munni in the mud-hut villages of the area.

Munni, who has three sons from her husband and his brothers, has not filed a police complaint either.

Social workers say decades of aborting female babies in a deeply patriarchal culture has led to a decline in the population of women in some parts of India, like Baghpat, and in turn has resulted in rising incidents of rape, human trafficking and the emergence of "wife-sharing" amongst brothers.

Aid workers say the practice of female foeticide has flourished among several communities across the country because of a traditional preference for sons, who are seen as old-age security.

"We are already seeing the terrible impacts of falling numbers of females in some communities," says Bhagyashri Dengle, executive director of children's charity Plan India.

"We have to take this as a warning sign and we have to do something about it or we'll have a situation where women will constantly be at risk of kidnap, rape and much, much worse."

SECRET PRACTICES

Just two hours drive from New Delhi, with its gleaming office towers and swanky malls, where girls clad in jeans ride motor bikes and women occupy senior positions in multi-nationals, the mud-and-brick villages of Baghpat appear a world apart.

Here, women veil themselves in the presence of men, are confined to the compounds of their houses as child bearers and home makers, and are forbidden from venturing out unaccompanied.

Village men farm the lush sugarcane plantations or sit idle on charpoys, or traditional rope beds, under the shade of trees in white cotton tunics, drinking tea, some smoking hookah pipes while lamenting the lack of brides for their sons and brothers.

The figures are telling.

According to India's 2011 census, there are only 858 women to every 1,000 men in Baghpat district, compared to the national sex ratio of 940.

Child sex ratios in Baghpat are even more skewed and on the decline with 837 girls in 2011 compared to 850 in 2001 -- a trend mirrored across districts in northern Indian states such as Haryana, Punjab and Rajasthan and Gujarat in the west.

"In every village, there are at least five or six bachelors who can't find a wife. In some, there are up to three or four unmarried men in one family. It's a serious problem," says Shri Chand, 75, a retired police constable.

"Everything is hush, hush. No one openly admits it, but we all know what is going on. Some families buy brides from other parts of the country, while others have one daughter-in-law living with many unwedded brothers."

Women from other regions such as the states of Jharkhand and West Bengal speak of how their poor families were paid sums of as little as 15,000 rupees ($300) by middle-men and brought here to wed into a different culture, language and way of life.

"It was hard at first, there was so much to learn and I didn't understand anything. I thought I was here to play," said Sabita Singh, 25, who was brought from a village in West Bengal at the age of 14 to marry her husband, 19 years her elder.

"I've got used to it," she says holding her third child in her lap. "I miss my freedom."

Such exploitation of women is illegal in India, but many of these crimes are gradually becoming acceptable among such close-knit communities because the victims are afraid to speak out and neighbours unwilling to interfere.

Some villagers say the practice of brothers sharing a wife has benefits, such as the avoidance of division of family land and other assets amongst heirs.

Others add the shortage of women has, in fact, freed some poor families with daughters from demands for substantial dowries by grooms' families.

Social activists say nothing positive can be derived from the increased exploitation of women, recounting cases in the area of young school girls being raped or abducted and auctioned off in public.

UNABATED ABORTIONS

Despite laws making pre-natal gender tests illegal, India's 2011 census indicated that efforts to curb female foeticide have been futile.

While India's overall female-to-male ratio marginally improved since the last census in 2001, fewer girls were born than boys and the number of girls under six years old plummeted for the fifth decade running.

A May study in the British medical journal Lancet found that up to 12 million Indian girls were aborted over the last three decades -- resulting in a skewed child sex ratio of 914 girls to every 1,000 boys in 2011 compared with 962 in 1981.

Sons, in traditionally male-dominated regions, are viewed as assets -- breadwinners who will take care of the family, continue the family name, and perform the last rites of the parents, an important ritual in many faiths.

Daughters are seen as a liability, for whom families have to pay substantial wedding dowries. Protecting their chastity is a major concern as instances of pre-marital sex are seen to bring shame and dishonour on families.

Women's rights activists say breaking down these deep-rooted, age-old beliefs is a major challenge.

"The real solution is to empower girls and women in every way possible," says Neelam Singh, head of Vatsalya, an Indian NGO working on children's and women's issues.

"We need to provide them with access to education, healthcare and opportunities which will help them make decisions for themselves and stand up to those who seek to abuse or exploit them."

Indian girls called 'Unwanted' get name change

MUMBAI, Oct 21, 2011 (AFP) - More than 100 Indian girls named "Unwanted" by their parents are to get new names this weekend as part of a campaign to tackle bias against women that has led to the country's huge gender imbalance.

About 150 of more than 200 girls called "Nakusa", which means "unwanted" in the local Marathi language of western Maharashtra state, will get rid of their first name for good on Saturday under an initiative in the district of Satara.

"We've identified 222 Nakusas," said district health officer Bhagwan Pawar, who has been behind a drive in the area to combat negative attitudes towards girls.

"The most probable reason for them being called 'Nakusa' is that they were the second, third or fourth child in that family and the parents wanted a boy," he told AFP.

Girls, particularly in poorer, rural areas of India, have traditionally been seen as a financial burden on their families because of the dowry that has to be paid when they marry.

In contrast, boys are viewed as heirs, future wage-earners and family heads.

"Many of these girls that we've identified don't want their name. They feel very bad about it, so there is a psychological impact," said Pawar.

"We will change their names and we will award them with certificates with the signature of the district collector (local government official) and myself. All their school documents and official records will be changed."

A preference for boys has led to a rise in the abortion of female foetuses in India as well as the neglect and even murder of baby girls, meaning millions of women are effectively "missing" from the population.

India has made the use of ultrasound scans to inform parents-to-be of the sex of their unborn child illegal, but a lack of enforcement means the practice continues.

One study published in The Lancet medical journal suggested that as many as half a million female foetuses are estimated to be aborted each year in India.

In April this year, 15 female foetuses were found on a rubbish dump in the eastern city of Patna.

In Satara, 190 kilometres (120 miles) from the state capital Mumbai, the sex ratio is 881 girls for every 1,000 boys -- well below the rural average of 919.

The national average of 914 is the worst since India became independent in 1947 and lags the global benchmark of 952.

Nature provides a biological standard for the sex ratio at birth of 943-962 females for 1,000 males. Any significant divergence from that narrow range can only be explained by abnormal factors, say population experts.

Sudha Kankaria, an activist who runs the local Save Girl Child charity and who has been involved in the renaming project, said the "Nakusas" of Satara were living examples of prejudice.

Because of their first name, many girls had poor self-esteem, were embarrassed and discriminated against, with the risk that they will pass on their insecurities to their own daughters, she added.

"It's a vicious circle and we should break it. With this project, we are benefiting two people: the Nakusas and the future Nakusas," she said.

Some girls have already changed their names in recent weeks, said Kankaria, adding that she has been working to introduce a pledge into the Hindu marriage ceremony for local couples to welcome and honour baby girls.

The first Nakusas to change their names were two young cousins, now called Aishwarya and Sunita.

"I didn't choose this name but it is nice," eight-year-old Aishwarya told the Times of India newspaper last month. "(My friends) still call me Nakusa because they have become used to it.

"But whenever anybody calls me Nakusa, I correct them," she added.