All language subtitles for Its.a.Girl.2012.1080p.WEBRip.x265-RARBG2_English

This Indian woman has
killed eight of her
baby girls.

She would get pregnant in
the hopes of having a son.

But each time she'd deliver
a daughter instead;

and each time she'd
kill the baby because
she did not want a
daughter.

She wanted
a son.

Sadly, this woman's
story is not
unique.

In many nations,
particularly India
and China,

the three most dangerous
words heard at the birth of
a child are:

"It's a Girl."

Around the world,
the average gender
ratio

is 105 boys for
every 100 girls
born.

But in certain
regions in India
and China,

that ratio is as high
as 140 boys to every
100 girls.

And each year, that ratio
skews more and more
toward boys

as fewer and fewer
girls are born.

What is causing
this tremendous
shift

in the two most
populated nations on
earth?

In India and China,
most families prefer
sons to daughters.

Their cultures and
traditions have instilled in
them a belief

that sons bring
strength, blessing and
wealth to the family.

Daughters
do not.

In fact, daughters
in these cultures

are typically considered
drains on families and their
resources.

For instance, in
India, a
daughter's family

is usually expected
to pay an expensive
dowry

of property and
money to the
husband's family.

Families with
sons gain wealth
and
daughters-in-law.

Families with daughters
lose both their wealth to
dowry,

and their
daughters.

This cultural
preference for sons has
led many families

to rid
themselves of
female children.

Baby girls are
frequently
aborted,

killed immediately
after birth,

or
abandoned.

Those daughters
that do live,
though,

often become
victims of neglect
and abuse.

This mass
extermination of
female children
--

this
gendercide --

is the direct result
of cultures

which place a high
value on the lives
of boys

and a low value on
the lives of
girls.

Glory Dass runs
several orphanages
in Southern India.

Many of the girls in
his homes were
abandoned by families

who did not
want daughters.

This is an entire system, a
social machinery, that
says,

"We don't
want
females."

The killing of
females is
actually systemic.

That...it is not
just before birth,

but it's also after
birth, and different
stages of birth.

There's a huge
amount of female
infanticide.

Girls under the age
of five, five and
under,

have a very high
mortality rate.

Either they don't
get food,

or if they're sick,
they don't want to
spend on medicine.

It is
negligent
homicide.

They are just allowed
to die,

in a way that boys
are not allowed to
die.

In India today, the
devaluation of women and
girls is widespread.

Because of factors
like female
feticide, female
infanticide,

abuse
and
neglect,

one out of four girls
does not live past
puberty.

The mortality rates for
girls between the ages of
one and five

are 40%
higher than
those of
boys.

According to one
UN estimate,

there are up to 200
million missing
women

in the
world today
due to
gendercide.

We just came down to
Haryana to one of
our projects

to have a meeting with
the local community here.

This was arranged by
our Field Coordinator.

And in this meeting we
discussed various
topics

of female feticide,
of dowry,

of equality of girl
child and boy
child.

All the women said
that boys and girls
are equal,

and we don't have
anything against
girls and boys,

it's more our men who
force us to have a
male child.

Although there
was a hidden
tone

in which everybody said
that once you have a
girl child,

please do not
kill them,

and it's completely
incorrect to do
infanticide.

But, on the
other hand,

they were also talking
about not to have a
girl child.

So in a hidden tone,
they were supporting
female feticide,

and commenting
about, once you have
a child,

then you should not
kill them.

But your first child
- and everybody had
the same answer -

has to be
a boy.

Because you wish for
a boy,

as he will make sure
your family lineage
continues.

He'll make sure the
property of the
family remains in the
family,

and he'll make sure
the daughters, his
sisters,

will be in
safe hands.

In India, as girls grow
up into women,

their plight does
not improve.

More than 100,000
are murdered each
year

because they
fail to
produce sons

or because
their new
husbands or
in-laws

are not satisfied with
the dowry they've
received.

In 1961, the Indian
government outlawed
dowry

to prevent
such crimes,

yet the practice
still remains common
today.

And a majority of
dowry-related
crimes

are never
investigated
or prosecuted.

Maya and Raju had
four children - all
of them daughters.

As their eldest
daughter, Latika,
got older,

her parents worried
she wouldn't find a
man to marry.

After the man
agreed to marry
Latika,

Maya and Raju
collected what they
could

to put together as
a dowry.

And so Latika and
the man were
married.

Soon Latika got pregnant
and gave birth to a baby
girl.

This made Latika
happy, but upset
her husband.

Latika's husband
frequently drank
too much

and would
abuse her.

Latika though, not
wanting to worry
her parents,

didn't tell them
about the abuse.

Then, one day, Maya
and Raju received word

that Latika was in
the hospital.

By the time Maya
and Raju made it to
the hospital,

it was
too late.

Latika
was dead.

Latika's husband
had claimed she had
hung herself.

But Maya and
Raju didn't
believe him.

The police arrested
Latika's husband for
the killing of his wife

in what is
known as a
dowry death.

But after a few
weeks, they let
him go.

In India, courts
frequently ignore dowry
deaths

and other crimes
against women.

Now Maya and Raju worry
about Latika's baby girl -

their
granddaughter.

They worry for
her safety,

living with
the man who
killed Latika.

Homes where there
is tremendous
violence inflicted
on women,

are the same
homes where
violence

is killing girls of
five and under at an
abnormal rate.

So it is like the
female becomes one of
the inadvertent pawns

in this
resource
exchange, in a
patriarchy.

So you can buy her, sell
her, keep her or kill
her,

however
you want.

It's like with
any resource,

so that is the
complete
dehumanization of
females.

Dowry and infanticide
and feticide go hand in
hand.

The minute
dowry enters a
community

everyone becomes
greedy for
dowry.

They think this is another
way of getting huge
amounts of money.

And they demand
huge amounts in
dowry.

And if they're
entitled to get
dowry,

then they have
to give dowry as
well.

So that becomes reason not
to have girls and daughters.

And so that doesn't
matter whether you
are very poor,

or you're very rich
in India.

That same
logic applies.

If you're
very rich,

you're getting
foreign BMW's and
Mercedes in dowry,

but you have to
give that also in
dowry.

So the logic for
why feticide and
infanticide

are occurring
today are actually
more...

It is really
greed-based.

It is not based
on economic
necessity.

It is
greed-based,

it's every son is one
way of getting money
in,

and every
daughter less

is less outflow of
money from within
a family.

Poor families who want to
avoid paying expensive
dowries

frequently kill or
abandon their
newborn daughters.

Wealthier families
use ultrasound
machines

to learn the gender
of the child;

then, if the child is
a girl, commit female
feticide,

aborting their
baby because of
her gender.

Mitu's husband and
his mother

demanded Mitu get an
illegal sex
determination test

because they feared
the twins would be
girls.

When Mitu refused,
they locked her in her
room.

Knowing Mitu was
allergic to
eggs,

her husband and
his mother

baked a cake made with
eggs and fed it to
her.

When Mitu became ill,
she had to be taken to
the hospital.

There, Mitu's husband
and his mother

convinced the
doctor to secretly
perform an
ultrasound.

When the doctor
did, the ultrasound
revealed

that Mitu's twins
were both girls.

The demands for
abortion
intensified.

In a fit of rage, Mitu's
husband pushed her down
the stairs.

Then, she was locked in a
room - injured and bleeding -

in hopes she
would miscarry.

But Mitu was
determined to have
her daughters.

She escaped to
her parent's
house.

Eventually, she
gave birth to her
twin daughters,

though two
months
premature.

In order to curb the
growing practice of female
feticide, India passed

the Preconception and
Prenatal Diagnostic
Techniques Act in
1994.

The PCPNDT act made
it illegal

for a doctor to
determine a
fetus' gender

and for parents to abort a
child because she is a
girl.

According to the
PCPNDT, doctors with
ultrasound machines

must be registered
and are required to
report

whenever they
perform an
ultrasound and for
what reason.

But many doctors ignore
the law.

Families pay these
doctors under the
table

to discover
the gender of
their child,

in order to abort the
fetus if it is a
girl.

And though such
practices are illegal,

the government rarely
investigates instances
when the law is
broken.

As a result, sex-selective
abortion continues to be
common in India.

You will hardly hear of
any cases where it has
been enforced in any
state,

and there is absolutely
no accountability from
the top to the bottom.

Today, Mitu continues to
plead with the government to
prosecute

her husband, who forced
her to get the illegal
ultrasound

as well as the
doctor who
performed it.

Doctors make large sums
of money

for performing such
ultrasounds,
though.

And the courts favor
doctors and hospitals
in such cases.

This fight has been
going on for years.

The female
gendercide
prevalent in India

is also widespread
in its neighbor
China.

Like India, China is
a patriarchal nation

with a strong
son-preference
culture.

But the Chinese
government has created
a policy,

which ultimately
encourages
gendercide.

In response to
fears of
overpopulation,

China introduced
the One-Child
Policy in 1979.

The law restricts
most Chinese couples
to one child.

Rural families,
though, are allowed a
second child

if their first is
a daughter...

so they can try for
a son.

Enforcement of the
policy is strict
and harsh.

Families found in
violation of the policy

may be subject to
forced abortion or
forced
sterilization.

Li and her
husband lived in
a rural village

with their
two
daughters.

They were allowed
two children

because their first child
was a girl.

But their families
desperately wanted them
to have a son.

So, though it was
against the law,

Li and her husband decided
to have a third child,

in the hopes that
it would be a boy.

When they found out
that they would be
having another girl,

their parents told
themto get rid of
the baby.

Another
daughter would
do them no
good.

But Li and her
husband wanted to
keep their child.

In China there is
a system of paid
informants,

where women who
are illegally
pregnant

can be informed
on by their
neighbors,

their friends,
their co-workers,
their
supervisors...

just walking down the
street and looking a little
bit bigger.

These are
paid
informants.

So then, the
family planning
office

keeps track of all
these women who are
illegally pregnant

and then they will
have a family
planning raid

on their
neighborhood,

where they will do a sweep
of that particular
neighborhood

and just drag out all
the women who are
illegally pregnant

and bring them down to
the family planning
office

and force
them all to
have
abortions.

The Chinese
One-Child policy

is enforced by
the Family
Planning Police,

a militant order that
monitors and arrests
families

in violation of
the policy.

The Family Planning Police
heard Li was pregnant with
her third child,

so they forced
their way into her
home.

To save the life of
their baby girl,

Li and her
husband went
into hiding.

Eventually, Li gave
birth to their
daughter.

But because
their child was
born illegally,

they had to
remain hidden.

So they
fled again.

This time to a
distant region,

leaving behind their
three daughters with
different relatives.

Today, Li and her
husband workn a
distant, far-off
factory,

earning what they can to
send home to provide for
their daughters.

They miss their
children, but they
also understand

that if they were to
return to their
village,

they would be
arrested and
severely punished

by the Family
Planning Police.

The One-Child
Policy was
enforced

through financial
punishment on
parents.

Now, during the 80s
these financial
punishments

implied that parents were
denied some of their
income

to the tune of 10% of
income from both parents
for 14 years

until the child
reached 15
years old.

And in recent years, the
One-Child Policy
punishments

have become even
more severe...

Two to three years
of family income

for parents to have
at least one kid.

Some of these parents
have decided to have
a kid

in spite of
the policy.

But for many
parents, they were
forced to choose

between a financial
punishment they could
not afford,

or not having
a son,

which is something they
also couldn't deal with.

And so for those
parents, they
were choosing

between financial ruin
or engaging in
sex-selective abortion.

In China, a new
population of illegal
children are
emerging.

These children have
no official
existence;

they are ineligible for
education and health
care.

And when they
grow up,

they can not officially
be married, own land,
or hold a job.

They have no future
in China.

According to the
World Health
Organization,

500 women a day
kill themselves in
China

and countless more
attempt it.

China has the
highest
female
suicide rate

of any country in
the world.

Could this epidemic of
female suicide in
China

be related to
forced abortion,
forced
sterilization,

and female
infanticide?

How does a woman
feel about herself
as a woman

if she has killed her
daughter just because she's
a girl?

How does that make her
feel about herself?

How does that make her
feel about her own right
to live,

to draw breath on
this earth?

Right now, we're on the cusp
of an explosion in the sex
ratio

amongst the sexually
mature population
age groups.

So Chinese marriage
markets are on the verge
of collapse.

These bare
branches are a
growing problem.

Each year, 1.1 million
more boys are born than
girls in China.

And currently there are
37 million more men
than women.

That means there are 37
million fewer women for men
to marry.

As finding a woman
to marry

becomes more and
more difficult
for men,

child trafficking has
increased
dramatically.

Girls are stolen or
purchased by
families

so they can be secured as
future brides for their
sons.

They searched the
surrounding
villages,

handing out fliers with
their daughter's picture.

For months there was
no sign of her,

and the longer she was
gone, the more her parents
worried.

Then someone
in another
village

said she had seen a
child looking like the
little girl

living in a
nearby home.

The parents
went with the
police

to the home the
caller had reported.

Inside, they found
their daughter,
healthy and unharmed.

The police arrested
the residents who
had kidnapped her.

The couple is believed to
have stolen the little
girl

to provide a future
bride for their
son.

It's estimated that
there are approximately

70,000 children every
year that are stolen away
from their parents

and trafficked to
other parents,

who have not been
able to have a
second child

through the
birth process,

so they want to traffic a
child into their
families.

Most families want
brides for their sons,

but few families want
daughters for
themselves.

Because of this, hundreds
of thousands of baby girls

are orphaned or
abandoned in China
each year.

Some people would
regard allowing
two children

instead of
one child

as being a solution
to the One-Child
policy.

That is not
a solution.

The issue is
not how many
children

the government
allows a woman
to have.

The issue is the
coercion with which they
enforce the number.

So whether it's one
child or two children,

a woman is still going
to have to have a
pregnancy permit,

and a birth
permit to have
that child.

Whether it's their first
child or their second
child,

or they may be
subject to
forced abortion.

Just reversing the One-Child
policy will only mitigate
the problem,

but the long-term
solution is for
some parents

to be okay with not
having a son.

Son preference comes
from cultures that
devalue women.

They feel that women
are just not as good as
men.

And women have been
beaten down by these
cultures;

and these cultures have
been devaluing women for
thousands of years,

can't always stand
up for themselves.

And that's why women who
come from cultures that
value women,

where women
are equal,

we need to stand up
for our sisters

because they
cannot stand up
for themselves.

It is a violation
of human rights

when babies are
denied food or
drowned or suffocated

or their spines broken
simply because they
are born girls.

It is a violation
of human rights

when women are
doused with
gasoline,

set on fire and burned
to death

because their marriage
dowries are deemed too
small.

It is a violation
of human rights

when women are denied
the right to plan their
own families;

and that includes being
forced to have
abortions

or being
sterilized
against their
will.

If there is one
message that echoes
forth from this
conference,

let it be that human
rights are women's
rights

and women's
rights are
human rights -

once and
for all.

Sadly, since this
address in 1995,

very little has been
done either socially or
politically

to stop
gendercide
around the
world.

The right to life is
what defines us as
humans.

That as a human being
your most fundamental
right

is the right to
life and existence.

And it's
unconditional;

you don't ever justify
why someone has the right
to live,

like we do now
with women.

So there are sites
that say,

oh, but if you kill
women, who will have
the babies?

Well, like I said
before, that I've
argued -

does that mean that you
kill women who don't want
to have babies?

Women are so beautiful,
why do you want to kill
them?

Well, if they are
ugly do you then
kill them?

The right to life is
an uncontested right.

But the fact that we have to
justify why women shouldn't
be killed -

that is a
dehumanizing argument
in itself.

So I think that...
somewhere there has been a
huge shift

in the female genocide
from the human's rights
basis.

So we are
treating women
like pandas

or any other
wildlife animal that
is going extinct

and that we
should raise for
the conservation.

So when you
say something,

like you show a
picture of a little
girl

and you say save the
girl child

and you have many
people say, yes, save
the girl child,

who are we
addressing?

Who are we
talking to?

Who is going to save
the girl child

and whom are you
going to save the
girl child from?

You do not get to this
scale without much of the
population

being involved in
some way.

Either it's happening
in the families in
terms of feticide,

dowry
violence,

or they're involved
in the police or
courts,

or their turning a
blind eye

when it happens in
their neighbors
house

or their
neighborhood.

Everybody is
involved,
perpetuating
a system,

turning a blind
eye, aligning for
it to continue.

So it is when you
say. "Save the
girl child,"

nobody is listening.
Who's listening?

When you turn the
mirror around

and unless we take a
good, hard look into
our psyche,

into our moral conscience
and you realize that as a
nation

we have need for
examination, for shame
and for change,

for actually
confronting it within
ourselves,

nothing is going
to change.

There needs to be an
assumption of responsibility,

that there is something
that we have allowed to go
horribly wrong

and we are each
responsible for it.