Posted on 07/21/2002 5:49:22 PM PDT by aculeus
BRAVE charity worker Sameer Sah holds aloft a graphic symbol of the evil that ignorant men do to innocent girls and young women.
It is a picture of a mentally subnormal girl of four tethered naked in the dirt by a rope round her neck because she is "possessed by demons".
Soon after Sameer took the photo he was attacked by villagers who smashed his camera and broke his collarbone and three ribs.
He escaped with his life after his driver dragged him to their car.
The girl, starved of food and water as she sat helplessly outside a local mosque, was not so lucky. She died nameless, unwanted and unloved, three days later.
Those in the hamlet of Koras Para, in Uttar Pradesh, India, who left her to breathe her last in the sun like a stray dog dressed up their cruelty in the guise of religion.
Being staked to a mosque, they said, would draw the demons from the youngster's soul. If she survived, it would be the will of God.
But they knew their guilt, realised their shame and tried to conceal it by attacking a courageous man seeking to expose the terrible prejudices that still scar this nation.
Sameer said: "There's no doubt they'd never have tied a mentally handicapped boy like that. But girls are different. Girls are still second place in so many areas of India."
In a country of more than a billion people much of life still revolves around women's "inferiority" - an attitude which has spawned rampant child prostitution, domestic abuse and incest.
In many parts of India a girl is considered an expense with no returns. It is believed her soul can achieve salvation only if a male performs the last rites over her and she never comes back as a female.
If there is a woman's role, it is simple. To tend the home and produce babies. Male babies. How does she keep producing boys? She has a sex determination test and if the child she is carrying is female, she has it aborted.
The cost of killing a female foetus is £4. In contrast, the wedding and dowry of a middle-class Indian girl can cost her family £3,000.
Largely as a result of this wave of abortions, and despite stringent laws, the country's sex ratio has fallen to 927 females per 1,000 males - one of the lowest in the world.
In Punjab the ratio is 793 females per 1,000 males, in Haryana 820 and Rajasthan 831. In Britain, the figure is 1,026 women to every 1,000 men.
Despairing, Sameer said: "Sometimes you wonder whether we are moving towards a daughterless nation. Some women have had up to six abortions."
Sameer, who works for Plan charity, is among those seeking to bring justice to the forgotten women who endure lives of pain in the shadows.
I accompanied him to a project north of Delhi where 110 former child prostitutes are forging a new life of hope and self-respect.
Each day they come to a sweltering compound in an area named Prahaldpur. Some work as tailors or beauticians, others sit on the floor making cheap jewellery. This is a co-operative where profits are shared, giving the girls enough money to bolster their fragile independence.
Nasreen, 19 with a son of five, told me: "I don't think about men. All I must do is stand on my feet. Until I came here two years ago I didn't know what life is."
HER story is stark: "I was married at 12. My father was a dope addict in the Muslim part of town. My husband Raisuddin was 10 years older. A drunkard and a thief."
I asked about the scar on the inside of her right arm and the other on her forehead. She said: "You are looking at my marriage. Beatings. Sticks. Knives. Fists.
"He went to jail many times and I just went to work in the local chemical factory to support the family. Then, one day, a woman approached me and said I could make more money in a couple of hours than I could in a month at work.
"She took me to her house, a nice house. She had a car. She gave me something to drink. Then she brought in a man who raped me.
"It was as simple as that. She told me that if I didn't continue to work she would tell the community.
"My husband? He didn't care how I got money as long as I gave it to him. Then one day I told him I'd had enough. He tied me down, poured five litres of kerosene over me, and said 'You agree to go back to work or I'll light this match'.
"There was no choice. By then, I was barely 14 with my child not yet born. Who was the father? Tell me."
Like so many girls thrown into this spiral of exploitation Nasreen had no one to tell of her plight.
They are isolated, alone, inward. They take drugs, and they die within. Nasreen reckoned to earn 500 rupees (£7.35p) a day. Half would go to Rani, her 50-year-old procuress who had 50 girls working for her.
Nasreen said: "Some of the clients were rich people. Many were Sikhs, who treated us with contempt. Then there were the truck drivers..."
And there lies a terrible irony. In an attempt to decrease Delhi's congestion and pollution, officials banned lorries from entering the city in daylight.
Life for the 14 million population improved. But a problem solved has created other, darker problems.
As the drivers spend daylight in huge lorry parks ranged round the city they are a ready market for sex.
Pimps and procuresses dispatch their girls. Police are paid off. The drivers have their fill. Then they travel home laden with HIV/Aids.
By 2005, India will have more sufferers than the continent of Africa.
By 2010, there will be 30 million patients. That will lead to boundless numbers of orphans and desperate girls. Vast misery is being packaged now for another time.
Sunita, now 16, was 12 when she went to work as a housemaid. Her boss's son eventually asked her to join him for a restaurant meal. She said: "Then he took me to the Japanese Park in town and sc****d me. I knew nothing except that it happened. That's when it all began.
"Before long he was f***ing me twice a week with three of his rich friends. There was nothing I could do. I was trapped.
"They made me do all sorts of things. But they said if I mentioned anything they'd kill me. I couldn't tell my family. They are Muslim. Anyway, my father didn't care as long as the money came in."
Sunita, like Nasreen, was finally freed from her ordeal after a chance meeting with Giri, a local Plan community worker. "Thank God for him," she said from the heart.
I meet a lady doctor who checks the women each month. She told me: "The incidence of sexually transmitted disease is very high.
"Sodomy is common. Often it is committed by the father so he can boast that his child is still a virgin."
SHE points to some of the younger children in her care. Girls aged 11, 12 and 13.
They were all working as prostitutes and their stories were all the same - a father drunk, a mother with too many children...
Sameer said: "It's a combination of many factors - dowry, education, the family. Only sustained awareness campaigns and tough laws can root out this terrible trend."
Campaigns. Laws. But most of all the need for equality between men and women in a nation destined to be the most populous on earth.
Not a little girl left dying beside a mosque or legions of exploited young women. Equality - from the cradle to the grave.
PLAN works with communities in India and 44 of the world's poorest countries for a better future for their children. To make a donation towards its work, or to sponsor a child, call freefone 0800 526848 or visit www.plan-uk.org
Self limiting behavior. Eventually, women will become valued simply because there won't be very many of them.
I'd suggest you modify the title to read "Muslim and Hindu Alert". These horrific acts are being perpetrated by both.
The only people doing relief work, for the most part, are Christians. The rest refuse to offer help and relief because that would interfere with a person's karma, or some such thing.
Setting aside questions of morality, its a bad idea. A populous country that is woman-starved is ripe for a policy that will put the excess men to use in an aggressive, pillaging army.
India, Pakistan, China and other places are rapidly adjusting the ratio to what was "normal" just a few hundred years ago.
Although females will become more valuable, this will not apply uniformly across all social classes. The wealthy and powerful will protect their females, and will be able to acquire any replacements they might need with ease.
Military classes will also be able to protect their females.
At the bottom of the barrel, which actually starts pretty high up in these impoverished lands, the fate of women will be much different. They will be "shared". Most of the reports indicated in the article leading off this thread are fair descriptions of such "sharing".
Raghead vermin murder yet another innocent...disgusting beyond description. "Guise of a religion," aye! This is no damned religion. Never has been and can never be. It's the world's largest insane death cult, nothing more. The poor little one is described as being mentally subnormal, but if it was necessary to restrain her to keep her that close to a damned mosque, then I say she's in command of far greater faculties that the average run-of-the-mill ragtop, who go to these centers of savagery quite willingly. And if this so-called "therapy" is so effective, then it should immediately be used on every imam, ayatollah, voodoo-wudhu headcheese Islamaniac cleric everywhere; once the inevitable happens, their souls may not have lost any demons, but the world surely will have. Good riddance.
Neither was I. Revolting.
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