Lifting the veil on Asia's gender imbalance

She has only ever had one husband. At least that’s what Priti, 32, tells people while surrounded by her young daughters in their thatched hut on a wind-swept cliff overlooking the Firozpur-Jhirka valley in India’s northern state of Haryana. 

The reality is rather more complicated. For one thing, Priti is not her real name; she has asked not to be identified to avoid being stigmatised.

She was sold as a bride for 10,000 rupees (Bt5,400) at the age of 12. Her buyer, after raping her for six months, sold her on to another man, with whom she eventually had nine children.

“I was sexually exploited and always reminded that I was bought,” she says of her children’s father. “It was hell.”

Now widowed, she is struggling to feed her children on her earnings as a construction labourer. Last year, her eldest daughter turned 12, an age that piques the interest of bride traffickers. Fearing the worst, she did the only thing she could to keep her safe. 

She married the child off.

Not enough girls are being born in Asia. According to the United Nations Population Fund, more than 117 million women are “missing” – the product of a cultural preference for sons, coupled with birth restrictions, lower fertility and medical advances that have made sex-selective abortion readily available.

Sex ratios are so distorted that India and China – the two most populous nations in the world with more than 2.5 billion people between them – are grappling with the growing tens of millions of young men coming of age with shrinking chances of marriage. The same menace is creeping up in the emerging economy of Vietnam.

 

Rising exploitation

Without medical intervention, most communities tend to produce 104 to 106 boys for every 100 girls, as nature compensates for the higher male mortality rates. But in China, where the abortion of female foetuses spiked during the three decades of one-child policy, the ratio of baby boys to girls was 115.9 last year . 

The latest equivalent figure in India is 110.01, according to its 2011-2013 sample registration system, while Vietnam’s hit 113.8 in 2013. 

Singapore’s ratio last year was 105.6.

Recent United Nations simulations for India and China suggest that in 15 years, there could be three men seeking to marry for every two available women. This mass involuntary singlehood portends deep changes in societies where marriage marks entry to adulthood and confers social recognition.

More alarmingly, it is also spawning new forms of cross-border exploitation, where poorer women are kidnapped, duped, or sold for marriage in distant regions, to be virtually enslaved in households where they are sometimes forced to serve both their husband as well husband’s brothers. 

Fraudsters in China are starting to prey on desperate men, promising brides who later run away with valuables. Thousands of children have been kidnapped in China, prompting Beijing last month to propose new laws that would bring criminal proceedings against buyers of kidnapped children. 

Policymakers are also fretting about the unrest that millions of unmarriageable men may create, and the violence competition for women may unleash.

“Everyone thinks: ‘It doesn’t matter, I want my boy’,” says Australian National University economist Jane Golley.

But the repercussions are starting to dawn on couples, especially in China where men are expected to pay for marital homes. In 2009, scholars Wei Shang Jin and Zhang Xiaobo found that housing prices tend to be higher in the parts of China with higher sex ratios. Men and their families who were competing for brides were bidding up prices.

Parents are feeling uneasy about what it is going to take to find their sons wives.

“I am beginning to worry about my son’s future,” admits Li Ya’nan, a 34-year-old mechanic in northeastern Jilin province who aborted a girl before giving birth to a boy, now five. “The only thing I can do is to ensure that he gets as much education as possible to land a good job, so that women find him a good catch.”

The rural poor feel the greatest impact of rampant sex-selective abortion. In the tea plantations in West Bengal, for example, girls who work as tea leaf pickers, earning 120 rupees a day, are easily lured by the promise of better jobs or medical care. They are sold for 10,000 to 200,000 rupees (Bt5,400-Bt10,800) as brides, called molki (bought), given new names and prevented from escaping. 

It’s the same story in northern Vietnam, where young women are coerced across the border to be auctioned off. 

The men bearing the brunt of female foeticide are found in places like Yang Si Miao, a hillside village of small-scale farmers in China’s Shaanxi province, where cellphone signals do not reach. There live men like Li Daohong, 35, too poor to buy a bride and too despondent to try matchmaking.

Li broke up with his last girlfriend, from a more developed village, 11 years ago. They were planning to get married and he had brought her home to meet his parents. “The moment she set foot in this village and saw the surroundings, she said ‘No, this will not work’,” he recalls. “She left after one night. It was a big blow because I really liked her.”

Later, she asked him to move to her village should they marry. He declined, refusing to abandon his parents.

But it is not always the case that the woman gets to choose. The scarcity of women does not automatically raise their value or status, sociologist Ravinder Kaur from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi explains. “It might lead to greater violence around marriage and sexuality, as in current spate of honour crimes.”

The shortage of women in Haryana – which has India’s worst sex ratio at 115.7 – for example, has increased the chances of inter-caste marriages or unions that contravene strict social codes policed by the khap panchayats, or the unelected caste councils who are influential despite having no legal standing. These can have deadly consequences. In 2013, 20-year-old Nidhi Barak was lynched by her own family, while her fellow villager Dharmender Barak, 23, was beheaded in an “honour killing” after the couple tried to elope. They belonged to the same clan, which meant they were regarded by the villagers as siblings who could not marry.

 

Avoiding detection

Both India and China, which have in place a patchwork of legislation to curb sex-selective abortion, sounded the alarm this year.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, while launching new programmes to aid girls in January, called the thinking behind female foeticide a “mental illness”. 

That same month, China’s National Health and Family Planning Commission declared that its sex imbalance at birth was “the most serious and prolonged” in the world. In May, Beijing proceeded to launch a new campaign against already illegal prenatal sex tests and sex-selective abortions.

Past campaigns have had little effect. Errant doctors, banned from revealing the sex of the foetus, use coded forms or coded phrases words instead. “It may be a good soccer player,” they say in India, or simply “congratulations”. Illicit technicians give ultrasound tests from the backseats of cars in China. Couples have no qualms visiting gynaecologist after gynaecologist until they find someone willing to perform the procedure.

And globalisation has made evasion easier.

There have been cases of pregnant women from mainland China who sent their blood samples to Hong Kong to identify the sex of their foetus. Indian and Chinese couples have been known to travel to Thailand – a bustling medical tourism hub – to screen embryos for sex.

Cross-border travel and commerce are developing too rapidly for meaningful enforcement, while prenatal technology is moving so far upstream it is possible to choose a male baby without claiming another life – or what most people would consider as a life. One of the most recent advancements allows sperm bearing the Y-chromosome which produces male babies to be sorted out before being implanted into a womb.

Enforcement is hard because patriarchal notions are so deeply embedded that women have taken up the cudgels against baby girls themselves.

“All my friends who went through abortions thought hard about it,” says Nguyen Thuong Hoai, a receptionist in Ho Chi Minh City. “But they desperately needed sons, or … their husbands would try for sons with other women.”

Over in Haryana, the president of Dhankar khap panchayat, Dr Om Prakash Dhankar, claims that the men are left in the dark. 

“The women they have their own network and they do the tests and get the foetuses aborted,” he said. “The men don’t get to know at all.”

In an environment where women are veiled in public, and held to blame – sometimes fatally - for not producing sons, they are likely doing it for their own survival.

 

Lag effect

The good news in China and India is that sex ratios at birth are dropping. In the 2010-2012 period, India registered a ratio of 110.13. During the next count in 2011-2013, the figure had dipped slightly to 110.01. China’s ratio of 115.9 last year was a big improvement on the 121.2 recorded 10 years ago.

In contrast, Vietnam’s ratio has steadily climbed from 110.5 in 2009 to 113.8 in 2013. The country is being squeezed at both ends – while baby girls are being killed before birth, rural women are leaving for foreign grooms in thinly disguised bride-buying arrangements.

Some parts of Vietnam now bear the same acutely lopsided sex ratios that afflicted China a decade ago: In the central Quang Binh province, the figure hit 129.6 in 2013.

“We have tried so much but can hardly change the mind and the culture of Vietnamese, who prefer sons to daughters,” says Dr Duong Quoc Trong, who heads the Office for Population and Family Planning in Vietnam’s Health Ministry. 

“The gender imbalance now is so serious that Vietnamese men can hardly to get a wife in the near future, maybe from 2025 onwards.”

“One son counts, 10 daughters are nothing,” goes a Vietnamese saying. Dr Nguyen Thi Thao from Hanoi’s Central Obstetrics and Gynaecology Hospital sees this attitude up close in the pregnant women he treats.

“Many of them feel disappointed after knowing that they will have a daughter. Some even feel angry or afraid and don’t want to talk to their husbands,” he explains. “Instead, they begin asking me about the method of abortion and fee.”

Yet there are signs of change.

Sociologists say that education, economic development, urbanisation and lifestyle changes are chipping away at the old notions that made sons desirable in the first place. Mechanisation has reduced the need for manual labour. And while sons are seen as essential to carry on the family name and conduct funeral rites for their parents, there’s no longer the certainty they will support their parents in old age. 

“We have reason to be optimistic, not because government programmes are going to be effective, but because society has changed and is changing,” says sociologist Wang Feng from the University of California Irvine. 

But this scenario is likely decades away. 

In the meantime, in villages like Yang Si Miao, the worries are far more personal in nature. Zhou Qinglian, 60, keeps awake at night wondering what lies ahead for her son Li, who is still unmarried after his girlfriend left him 11 years ago.

“There’s nothing I can do,” she says. “I can only say anyone who marries my son won’t have to worry about suffering… If someone marries my son, I would yield to them on everything.”