By Amber Van Schooneveld - for Compassion Australia

How many women do you know who attended secondary school? They are a minority. How many women do you know who own property? They are a minority.

There is often a subtle attitude that the push for women’s equality is a thing of the past. That we have succeeded in creating a world where women can enjoy equal rights and opportunities. 

But this idea is alarmingly and starkly different from much of the worldwide reality.

Along the edge of Bannerghatta National Park, where Indian tourists come to see the tigers, there sits a community of dilapidated homes huddled together. What the tourists hope to see, the community fears, as wild animal attacks keep this community already plagued by unemployment and scarcity constantly on edge. 

As if guarding this community from the ominous grasses that surround it, tall, graceful, oleander trees stand. I think their white flowers are lovely as I brush past on the way to visit the home of a mother.

A man guiding me points at the tree, and says:

“That’s what they use to kill the girls.”

We make our way to a cement home and a beautiful woman in lime green waits outside for us. Her daughter, Savitha*, hangs shyly behind her leg, unsure about these foreign-looking visitors.

Savitha is a toddler and looks healthy, though I notice she wears a hearing aide, something that looks as out of place in this isolated village as I do.

But Savitha is a part of Compassion’s Child Survival Program. Here, this little girl who was born without the ability to hear gets the medical care she needs and her mother learns how to care for her.

We sit down on her cement porch and talk to the mother about her life. She says that being part of the Child Survival Program has helped Savitha. In fact, she says her daughter wouldn’t be alive had it not been for the program. I figure she is speaking metaphorically.

But she continues, “A normal girl child will not live in this community. I have a dumb and deaf baby. Because of Compassion she got the hearing aide. Otherwise, I think [my family] would kill off my child. My family wouldn’t accept the female girl. They would kill her.”

In the second she says this, my world develops one big crack. I’ve read the statistics of an ugly world, but how do I handle this? From the porch, I see her family members working in the house. The ones who might have done it. Who might have learned from their community how to take the sap from the lovely oleander trees to poison their unwanted girls.

In India, for every 1000 boys, there are 927 girls, according to the United Nations Population Fund. While in some regions of India, there is no imbalance between male and female, in others there are fewer than 800 girls per 1000 boys.

Every single year approximately 300,000 girls go “missing,” thanks to sex-selective abortions and female infanticide. Families will use abortion, suffocation, starvation, poison and drug overdose to lose them from the weight of a girl child. 

Burden not blessing

Far from many of our experiences, in India, girls are sometimes considered a burden to their parents. A girl can’t inherit your land. She can’t perform your funeral rites. She’s got to be married off at great price to you in her dowry. She’s a very poor investment.

Some think this is a crime of poverty: without enough dinner each night, the families choose to downsize. But rates of female feticide are even higher in some wealthy areas of India.

According to AS Dinarkaran, a former project manager for the Welfare Center for Women and Children in India, this practice “will lead to a social catastrophe: a nation without girls”. In fact, in some areas where women are scarce, men resort to trafficking kidnapped brides in.

The Indian government has not been silent on this issue. To prevent female infanticide, it is illegal to find out the sex of a baby before birth. Dowries have also been made illegal in response to the violence that accompanies the practice, such as bride burnings when a family or bride fails to pay the price or comply with the in-law’s demands.

But culture changes slower than laws. The subtle attitude that girls are simply not as valuable as boys dies hard. Girls are often fed less, valued less and are less likely to be sent to school so the family’s money can be concentrated on a more promising boy.

The reality for girls

Why does this cement home in an obscure corner of the world matter? Because it’s indicative of much of the world.

Women didn’t achieve equality long ago, and the girls in India are not a blip.

Consider these statistics from the International Centre for Research on Women and UNICEF:

• Only 43 per cent of girls in the developing world, and 17 per cent of girls in sub-Saharan Africa, attend secondary school

• One girl in seven marries before 15 in the developing world, often to a much older man

• Girls aged from 10 to 14 are five times more likely to die in childbirth than women aged 20 to 24

• 150 million girls under 18 suffered forced intercourse or other forms of physical and sexual violence in 2002

• Women own less than 15 percent of land worldwide, though in places like Cameroon, they do more than 75 per cent of the agricultural work.

The hope for today

Women in the world today, not 40 years ago, need to be liberated from oppression, violence and injustice.

Women are human, creations of God in His image. “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27). That should be reason enough for us to take action.

But we should care about girls for another reason too. Women can be one of the most powerful forces God can use in transforming this world.

When women and girls earn income, they will reinvest 90 per cent of their earnings into their families, compared to the 30 to 40 per cent a man will, according to Nike Foundation’s Girl Effect. Higher rates of education for girls translate to lower infant and child mortality rates. For every extra year of primary school a girl receives, her wages as an adult rise by an average of 10 to 20 per cent. A girl who has been educated for seven years marries an average of four years later than an uneducated girl and has 2.2 fewer children.

When we invest in a girl—educate her, empower her, teach her she’s valuable and has great potential—she can be the one to change her society. She can speak up for the rights of her sisters, educate her family on how to raise a healthy baby and invest her resources in improving her family’s life. Don’t overlook the girl: she is one of the world’s greatest natural resources.

Find out more about our http://www.compassion.com.au/cmspage.asp?intid=260">> Child Survival Program or http://www.compassion.com.au/child_list.asp?strcountry=&intgender=1&intage=&intday=&intmonth=&imageField.x=46&imageField.y=6">> sponsor a girl

*Name changed to protect the identity of the child.