"Missing Girls" in Asia: Magnitudes, Implications and Possible Responses

American Enterprise Institute

September 17, 2008

[Edited transcript from audio tapes]

1:45 p.m.	Registration
2:00	Panelists:	Monica Das Gupta, World Bank
		Ambassador Mark Lagon, U.S. Department of State
		Laura Lederer, U.S. Department of State
	Moderator:	Nicholas Eberstadt, AEI
4:00	Adjournment

Proceedings:

Nicholas Eberstadt:  There are demographic developments in the [audio glitch] everybody can agree are positive.  One of those developments is the dramatic reduction, worldwide, with some exceptions, but a dramatic worldwide reduction in mortality and increase in life expectancy.  There are other demographic developments that people argue about in terms of their portent and implications.  One of these is the decline in fertility.  Another is a continuing global rise in population.  People from different perspectives have very different opinions whether these developments are positive or adverse.

But what we are going to be talking about today, I think, is a demographic development that almost everybody, no matter where they are coming from, regard as troubling or worse.  And this is the emergence of major gender imbalances between baby boys, young boys, young men, baby girls, female children, young women that we are seeing on the terrain, most particularly in Asia.  We’re going to talk, this afternoon, about the dimensions of this new phenomenon.  We’re going to talk about some of its consequences, co-relates, and implications.  We’re also going to ask about whether there are any bright spots in this troubling terrain, whether we see any signs of progress towards reversing this biologically unnatural situation that has emerged especially in some countries of Asia.  And we’re very lucky today to have an expert panel of U.S. Government officials and World Bank specialists who have been giving great attention to this truly modern problem.

Next to me is Dr. Laura Lederer from the U.S. State Department, previously working at the Kennedy School and at SAIS.  Laura will -- we have the bio statements for all of our panelists in your conference package.  Laura will be beginning our discussion this afternoon describing, sort of, an outline of the circumstances.

After Laura’s presentation, we’ll have Ambassador Mark Lagon.  I love to say Ambassador Lagon.  I knew Mark way back when.  Before his government service, Ambassador Lagon was a professor at Georgetown University and for some time earlier, I seem to recall that he may even have been associated with me as a colleague here at AEI.  It proves that there is life after AEI, which is reassuring for some of us.

And then after Ambassador Lagon, Dr. Monica Das Gupta from the World Bank will be specifically talking about some of the optimistic signs that we’ve seen recently in South Korea to the case where these gender disparities seem to be narrowing.  We’ll be discussing that.  Dr. Das Gupta is one of the truly well known researchers in this question of missing girls, internationally recognized by the work that she has done in this area over the last two decades of really path-breaking work.  And I think she is going to have really interesting findings for us.  After that, we’ve got a small enough group, we can open this up to kind of a seminar-style discussion.

But without further ado, Laura, why don’t you begin?

Laura J. Lederer:  All right, well, thank you.  First, I do want to thank you, Nick, and the American Enterprise Institute for hosting this event, and also Ambassador Lagon for encouraging and supporting the work on the link between sex selection and human trafficking.  I’ve been asked, as Nick said, to begin by just giving you a background on the problem.

And I want to start with an article that Amartya Sen wrote about 15 years ago in the British Medical Journal introducing the concept of missing women in Asia.  And at that time, the phrase referred to the early mortality of women due to biases in health care, food, income, education, and employment.  And he reached the conclusion, at that time, that the number of missing women worldwide was greater than 100 million.  Other scholars followed up similar demographic studies and got similar results.  Disaggregated data suggests that China has 44 million missing women, India 37 million missing women, and other countries in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, similar high numbers of missing women.

Now four years ago, Dr. Sen revisited the issue and he found that in the last decade, that this gap in mortality, the female mortality, has been substantially reduced as a result of programs that increased women’s access to sufficient nutrition and health care and reproductive rights and fundamental human rights.  But he noted, alarmingly, that these improvements were counterbalanced by a growing trend in sex-specific abortions of the female fetus.

As part of a program at the State Department entitled The Impact of Sex Selection on Human Trafficking, I traveled to India earlier this year to investigate a disturbing trend that combines new technologies, like ultrasound and early term abortion, with traditional practices and preferences, like the preference for male children.  Research indicates that Indian women are carrying to term and birthing many more males than females and demographers estimate that Indian women have roughly 6.7 million abortions per year.  Aborted girls outnumber aborted boys by 500,000 per year for a total of about 10 million more girls aborted over boys in the past decade.  And some doctors believe that as many as two million fetuses have been aborted simply because they’re female.

The 2001 Indian census shows that national sex ratio at birth, this is the comparison between the number of males and number of females born, is averaging 933 girls for every 1,000 boys.  However, in some states in India, especially the urban areas where sonograms are available, the SRB, it falls as low as 874 females for every 1,000 males and even as low as 776 females for every 1,000 males.  And currently, India has the lowest sex ratios of any country in the world.  If this trend continues, India would have a serious problem related to its birth ratio.

And there are a number of factors that combine to create this Indian preference for male children.  Monica, you may be discussing some of these.  I’m just going to very briefly say that it’s a Hindu belief that parents need a son to perform last rites in order for salvation to be achieved.  And in addition, daughters can’t perform these rites and they also have to be married off with a substantial dowry so the combination of these factors.  And the fact that sons are considered breadwinners who will look after parents and continue the family name, whereas daughters are considered a financial burden, contributes to the problem.

Now, while it’s true that the preference for boys in India is thousands of years old, research has shown that the boy to girl ratio in India didn’t widen precipitously until the advent of ultrasound in the 1970’s, 1980’s, which is allowing women to determine the sex of the child by the fourth month of pregnancy.  And so this is really a traditional practice and preference that is exacerbated by modern technology.  As you said, Nick, it’s a modern problem.

So India has been aware of this problem for some time and it’s been grappling to find a solution.  And the country has enacted some new laws, new policies, new programs.  And I’ve been testing new projects, and I’m just going to mention a couple of them.  In 1994, India passed the Prenatal Diagnostic Techniques Act, which bans sex determination tests for pregnant women and imposes fines for couples who obtain them and it provides prison terms for doctors who reveal the sex of the fetus to the parent, specifically for abortion purposes.  But unfortunately, until just recently, there had been no prosecutions under this law.  I’m told by our embassy that there is one new case, a Haryana health department raid on a maternity clinic that was run by an unlicensed doctor.  Officials arrested the doctor, seized a portable ultrasound machine and equipment used to terminate pregnancies.  So that’s a hopeful sign.

Another attempt by India was the Supreme Court Policy Statement.  In 2001, India issued -- the Supreme Court issued a policy statement calling on all the federal and state governments to draw up a national action campaign to enforce this prenatal techniques law.  And this included registering all the prenatal diagnostic centers in each state and called for the revocation of medical licenses of MD’s who are performing sex selection abortions, and setting up supervisory boards to make quarterly reports on the enforcement and implementation of the law and forming local committees to run educational campaigns.

Under this, one state, Tamil Nadu, created a “cradle babies program” in which empty cradles were placed in all the government centers across the state and couples could abandon unwanted female children without aborting or killing them.  Other states have tried educational programs and legal literacy programs.  And here’s an example, in 2007, the New Delhi municipal government sponsored a program that provided for every girl born in a government hospital, the couple would get a deposit of $114, which is about 5,000 rupees, and that would be placed in a bank account that would accumulate interest and could be cashed in once the girl reached the age of 18.  But this is a brand new program so we don’t really have any evidence of how well this is working yet.

Let me talk just for a moment about loopholes in the enforcement of India’s law.  The ban on the government medical center use of prenatal sex has led to doctors giving the results of sonogram to parents verbally so that that eliminates any paper trail that would provide evidence that there is a subsequent abortion.  And also, NGO’s, when I was there, said to me that results are sometimes delivered in code.  For example, if the doctor says to the couple, “You will have a fine footballer”, that means, “You’re going to have a baby boy.”  And in reverse, “I’m sorry.  It’s a cloudy day for you.”  Well, that means “It’s a girl.”  And the parents then know what to do.

In addition, the law is written so that it only applies to government hospitals and medical centers.  And so, private ultrasound and abortion clinics have begun to spring up in every city and town and village, and unscrupulous abortion clinics prey on parental fears of the cost of the dowry for a grown daughter and promise very quick and discreet results.  These clinics have multiplied even in areas that are so poor that they don’t have potable water.

Let me talk just for a minute -- do I have two more minutes?

Nicholas Eberstadt:  Sure.

Laura J. Lederer:  To talk about China.  China also has a serious sex birth ratio imbalance.  For over 40 years, China enforced a strict one-child policy -- I think we all know this -- in an attempt to address overpopulation and poverty.  And in a country where there is a strong traditional preference for boys, again, Chinese couples abort the female fetuses in hopes that the next pregnancy will be a boy.  This situation has created a growing gender imbalance also in China, one that has the potential, actually, to impact China’s future stability.  And just a few stats, in 2005, China’s sex birth ratio for newborn babies was 118 boys to 100 girls.  That’s nearly a double jump from 110 to 100 about ten years ago.  And in some regions, such as the southern provinces of China, the ratio has ballooned to 130 boys for every 100 girls.  And just to give you a comparison, the average for industrialized countries is about 104 to 107 boys for every 100 girls.  So this is an enormous gap and a growing gap.

Last year, the British medical journal Lancet estimated that the male-female gap in China is about 50 million right now and that if the trend continues, China’s men will outnumber its women by 300 million by the year 2020.

Now Ambassador Lagon is going to discuss the way that these gender imbalances, as a result of sex selection impact, directly impact human trafficking on the demand side.  And so I’ll turn it over to you, Ambassador Lagon, and then hopefully, we’ll have time for a discussion of some of the recommendations for possible programs and ways, paths in the future.

Mark P. Lagon:  Great.  Well, it’s great to be here with you and back at AEI.  Thank you for taking the time to come and join what I hope will be a fruitful discussion.  I especially want to thank Nick.  It’s nice to work with a friend and a former colleague here at AEI and I’ve always learned a great deal by reading what you write.  They are so much wise and looking at demography, looking at the basic trends in the world of population and they shape contexts enormously, and you’ve done a lot in that area that’s so worthy. 

Thanks, Laura, for the overview, leading into questions of implications and, hopefully, a discussion of recommendations.  It’s a pleasure working with you on this project and others where we can look at a secular trend which has an effect directly on human trafficking, the reason I’m here.  And I’m looking forward to hearing from Monica Das Gupta about possible responses and the story of South Korea, for reasons for hope.

You may wonder why I, as the point person for the U.S. Government on fighting human trafficking, would want to speak in an event on gender gap, gender imbalance in some Asian countries.  Well, since we started producing it, our annual Trafficking in Persons Report, and there are copies outside which I’d urge you to grab one of, if you’d like.  The report has noted a disturbing trend of the gender imbalance as a factor that exacerbates the demand for trafficking victims, particularly for women and girls as brides or for exploitation and commercial sex.

Forced brides are considered victims of trafficking when these women are kidnapped, sold unwillingly by family members, or deceived by promises of lucrative jobs.  Even in situations where a woman crosses a border voluntarily or initially consents to a marriage, she can legally become a victim of trafficking if she later withdraws her consent and is held against her will.

More generally, as a context, the U.S. intelligence community estimates that some 800,000 people are trafficked across the international borders annually, 80 percent of the victims being female, some 50 percent of them minors.  The majority of the transnational victims are women and girls trafficked into commercial sexual exploitation.  Women and young girls are often trafficked into brothels, physically and sexually abused as domestic servants, or forced into marriages.  Human trafficking is best understood as a dehumanizing crime that treats people as mere commodities.  And it involves a supply side and a demand side.  On the supply side, criminal networks, corruption, lack of education and, importantly, poverty make people vulnerable to the lures of trafficking, to the force, fraud, and coercion of the traffickers.  Significant efforts are being made to address the “push factors” on the supply side.

But at the same time, we need to look at the demand side of the equation, which is very powerful.  A major consequence of the widening gender imbalance is increased demand for forced marriages and prostitution.  The fact that several million more men than women are in the marriage market in countries with a gender imbalance has created a marriage squeeze and a pressure for men to find women to marry.  Current imbalances in the sex ratio often leave low income men spouseless in mostly rural communities where it’s an economical and cultural imperative that they marry.

The social pressure and the economic necessity to marry causes some who couldn’t find marriageable women to buy brides, usually from other regions within the country or sometimes from neighboring countries.  The need to buy kidnapped brides because of the shortage of marriageable females opens another outlet for human traffickers to make a profit on women imported from elsewhere.  Without the demand, there would be less room for the dehumanizing crime of the trafficker.

A pronounced deficit of brides can be seen in certain areas of India and China in particular.  Data from India's 2001 census shows that there were only 933 girls born for every 1,000 boys, due largely to the perception that a girl child is an economic liability.  And it’s in a country with a strong patriarchal society, and the dowry demands that Laura alluded to by potential grooms are also a factor.  Internally in India, sources report a pattern of girls trafficked from Bihar, from West Bengal and Assam to more prosperous states of Punjab and Haryana, and those latter states have an acute gender gap.  Additionally, there are some cases of women from Nepal, from Bangladesh, and other areas of India that have been bought or kidnapped as brides for so-called "bachelor villages", where the problem with the gender imbalance is so acute.  The lack of women contributes to greater demand for prostituted women and girls, again, fueling the demand for victims of trafficking as well.

The People's Republic of China continues to enforce its one-child policy in which most couples are limited to having one child only.  Combined with a traditional son-preference and the availability of sex-selection technology, China faces a generation characterized by gender imbalance.  In the PRC, trafficked women either sold by family members or kidnapped from their villages are forced into marriage, into prostitution, or to serve as mistresses.  The trade of women and girls for sexual exploitation is a clear trafficking challenge for the Chinese government.  Although prostitution is illegal, the burgeoning illicit sex industry creates vulnerability to sex trafficking within and across China's borders.  Forced brides are commonly trafficked domestically from poor areas of China's inland provinces, where poverty renders women more vulnerable to trafficking.  Traffickers generally sell these girls and women in provinces with large female deficits, and we can get into specifically which provinces those are in the discussion if you like.

Neighboring countries such as Burma, Vietnam, North Korea, and Russia are also source countries for women trafficked into China.  In some instances, vulnerable women from North Korea and Vietnam are kidnapped or tricked by traffickers, and subsequently sold into marriage, sometimes for as little as $250 to $800.  Sad.  A price tag on a human being and so low.  The buyers are typically poor Chinese farmers.  North Korean women are particularly vulnerable given their disincentive to return to the repressive DPRK.

Let me offer just one woman's story, as an example, noted in this year's Trafficking in Persons Report.  Nineteen-year-old So-Young [phonetic] stands at less than five feet tall after being chronically malnourished in North Korea.  A refugee, she crossed illegally into China with hopes for a better life, but found instead a nightmare of sexual exploitation.  An employer, so-called employer, offered her approximately $1.40 a day in exchange for work, money that So-Young planned on sending back to her family.  Alone in a foreign country and unable to speak the language, vulnerable, she was an easy target for traffickers.  Deceived by the empty promise, So-Young spent the next several months being passed between handlers who hoped to sell her as a bride.  Once she was sold, her new husband raped her multiple times before she was able to escape.  So-Young's situation isn’t unique.  The phenomenon of North Korean women trafficked into and within China for forced marriage is well-documented by NGOs and international organizations.

The core principle of any effective anti-trafficking strategy is the protection of victims.  Trafficked brides face many challenges in receiving protection and services that they need.  They are often discouraged from reporting their situations or running away because of social and economic pressure to remain in a marriage, lack of familiarity with the area to which they’ve been trafficked, police or official complicity that compels the return of runaway brides, laws which re-victimize trafficked women by classifying them and prosecuting them as illegal aliens, and the social ostracizing and discrimination that they would likely face if they returned home after their fate.

Ending all forms of modern-day slavery, which is what human trafficking is, involves a multi-faceted strategy.  And it’s true, in the cases, they are pertinent of the social phenomenon we’re talking about today.  We try to continue to engage governments, urging them to first, prosecute traffickers and those who would exploit vulnerable women and girls for forced marriage and commercial sex; secondly, protecting the victims who shouldn’t be treated as criminals or disposable people, but must be protected from further trauma; and thirdly, preventing the trafficking of victims in the first place by raising public awareness, training law enforcement to recognize signs of trafficking, and reconsidering the policies that may fuel the trade in people.

Thanks for the opportunity to shed some light on the disturbing trend of missing girls.  That trend helps perpetuate trafficking due to the scarcity in females.  And its adverse effect on the global fight against trafficking in persons is palpable.  Concerned actors from the international community, government, and civil society like you are important players in moving towards a goal in which we don’t only mitigate and regulate the problem of human trafficking, but appropriately, eradicate and abolish it as slavery.  Thank you.

Monica Das Gupta:  I’m going to talk about how the sex ratios at birth in South Korea rose very sharply for a while and then came back down.  But before I get there, I’m going to tell you a few things about India and China.

So first, I’ll tell you something about the geographical distribution of the missing women.  Then we’ll talk a little bit about why you get this deficit of children in East Asia and in India, a bit about the levels and trends, and then we move on to South Korea.

Now, basically, around the world, around the developing world, there is no -- around most of the developing world, Latin America and Africa, Southeast Asia, there is no discrimination against girls.  You get a little bit of it in North Africa and on aggregate in South Asian countries and you get a lot of it in terms of the -- this is juvenile sex ratio so it’s the sex ratios of children aged naught to four.  China and South Korea and Taiwan, those are the places with the highest sex ratios of children. 

The picture looks quite different when you look at it in a more disaggregated way for India and China.  In India, you see that in the northwestern states that Laura was talking about, you get very high levels of discrimination against girls.  This is again juvenile sex ratio so it’s the sex ratio of children aged naught to four.  But in the rest of India, it’s, sort of, lesser or almost nonexistent.

In China, it’s concentrated in the, sort of, heavily Han populations around the coast at north so it's a little bit in the interior.  But there are very large parts of China where there’s negligible discrimination against girls.

Interestingly, this is just a more disaggregated version of the map you just saw.  The missing girls are mostly, as you saw, in the coastal areas.  This is now children aged zero to 15.  But when you look at where the potential missing brides are, the sex ratio of people aged 20 to 30, they’re in the poorer, more remote areas which actually didn’t have, as you saw, any specific discrimination against girls.  So what’s going on is that the richer areas are able to attract brides from elsewhere.  That’s quite an achievement.

Nicholas Eberstadt:  We always like to keep you on your toes.

Monica Das Gupta:  And just to give you a sense of how this looks historically, this is in China 1920 to 1990, the sex ratio of boys to girls, by the period of birth.  So basically, what you find is that during the Civil Wars in the early part in the ’20s in China, there was sort of high sex ratio.  It ought to be around zero because this is surviving children.  So they are somewhat elevated during the Civil Wars.  With the Japanese invasion, it goes through the roof.  You get a shortfall of, I don’t know, maybe 17 percent of girls at its peak then it comes down with the end of the war and a pretty, sort of, an era of strong Communist gender-egalitarian ideology.  And then once again, with the fertility decline, it starts increasing, and as Laura said, it’s now up, quite basically, if you extrapolate between then and 2000, it’s gone up quite a bit.

But just to let you know that this is not a recent phenomenon, it’s been there through history when times are harder, when parents have to make harder choices either because of war or because they have fewer children, there is more discrimination against girls.

So why do we get this?  Well, there has been an argument that a lot of China’s high sex ratios resulted from Hepatitis B.  And this has been pretty conclusively disproved.  So unless anybody is specifically interested in it, I’m not going to talk about it any further.  That’s a biological cause.

Then there’s the cultural and economic causes, which are basically what pretty much all the literature has focused on and all the public policy in these countries have focused on.  What you get is that in some cultures, females are excluded from being useful to their parents and so parents value sons more highly than daughters.  And those are the very strongly patrilineal cultures.  And in other cultures, such as in Southeast Asia, who inherits, who you live with, who you derive support from is much less gender-determined and there’s much less son preference.

These three parts of South Asia, Korea and Han China and Northwest India, have interestingly virtually identical kinship systems, which just completely marginalize women and preclude the possibility of women being able to take care of themselves and take care of their parents.  Basically, lineages are very, very important in all these three settings.  They control property, they control access to land, and they recognize only the male line.  Only men look after their parents.  And in Korea and China, they also look after their lineage ancestors.  And women basically bear children and work for their husband’s lineage, but they’re not part of society as defined by the lineage.  And this is a very sharp contrast to Southeast Asia, as I said.

Just to give you an idea of what that looks like, this is a survey in the ’80s.  They looked at people in the Philippines and in Taiwan.  If they were living with married children, who were they living with?  And in the Philippines, basically, it was 50-50, whether you were living with a married son or a married daughter.  And in Taiwan, it was overwhelmingly with married sons.  Very few lived with married daughters.  And mind you, this was Taiwan in 1989, already pretty developed, urban, et cetera.

So what are the levels and trends in the missing women in East Asia and India?  This is just the censuses from 1950 to 1990.  You can see in China, the rates started going up sharply during the ’80s.  Similarly in Korea.  And this was when the sex-selective abortion technology became more available, as well as fertility was declining sharply in both countries.  There wasn’t a one-child policy in South Korea.  It was left to voluntary fertility control, but there was a very strong -- people were being strongly urged to reduce fertility and they wanted to reduce fertility.  And that, combined with new technology, put pressure to have fewer daughters.  If you’re only going to have one child, not two children, you obviously can’t afford to have both of them be daughters.

In India, on aggregate, yes, the same thing, you see the same pattern, that it goes up in the ’80s.  But the overall levels are very much lower because, as you saw, India is very heterogeneous.  But on the right-hand side is Northwest India, those two states of Punjab and Haryana, which are not, as you can see from the aggregate figures, are very large part of the population of the country.  But the discrimination is very, very sharp.  It’s higher than the East Asian levels.

Now interestingly, when you look at the 2000 census, if you look at the 1990 census, South Korea was way above anybody else, right, any of the countries, unless you looked at sort of subsectors of the countries in the case of Northwest India.  But by 2000, India and China carry on increasing, South Korea comes down, and this is the interesting thing.

So what lessons could we draw from this?  You get a very clear reversal of the trend of sex ratios at birth rising sharply in South Korea.  It comes down and it stays down.  If you look at the 2005, it’s coming back down on aggregate almost to a normal level, and that within a space of ten years.  So what’s a lesson for China and India?  Do they have to wait until they become as urbanized and developed as South Korea?  Or is there any hope that they could accelerate the pace of change in son preference through policies?

I didn’t talk at all about banning abortion because, I mean, for the reason that Laura pointed out, I mean, you can try banning, all these countries have tried to ban abortion.  But what it means is women go elsewhere and often get poorer care.  It doesn’t seem to noticeably make a difference in terms of the number of girls aborted.  So I’m just talking about parents changing their son preference, parents beginning to think of girls as being of equal value to boys.  So what does South Korea teach us about that?  So why did son preference decline in South Korea?

Firstly, if you look at the reported -- they have these very nice surveys every few years in which they ask people all kinds of questions.  And they’ve had the same question with the same wording, which is, “Is it imperative to have a son?”  And this is how the trend has looked, it came down very sharply in the early 1990s and it’s by the mid-1990s that you see that the sex ratios at birth have started coming down.

Now just taking that one question, we looked at what are the odds of saying, “Yes, it’s imperative to have a son,” how does it relate to education, residence, et cetera.  And you find what you expect that more educated women feel less pressure to have sons.  A husband’s education makes some difference but less.  Now, whether you live in a small city, in a metropolis makes a large difference.  People who live in urban areas feel less pressure to have sons, especially if they live in a larger urban area.

Now here’s an interesting variable, that the husband is the only son of his parents.  The rule in South Korea, I mean, the kinship systems across these three settings, Northwest India, Han China, and South Korea, are virtually identical but there are few little tweaks here and there.  The South Korean tweak is that the eldest son is primarily responsible for taking care of the parents and the ancestors, whereas in China, it’s not so clear whether it's just the eldest son.  There is less stress on being the eldest son.  It can be other sons.  Now if the husband is the only son of his parents, they’re under very significantly greater pressure to have a boy.  And the most interesting one is the bottom one, which is the year of the survey.  What you see is that much more than education or urban/rural residence, just the fact that you were surveyed in 2003 as opposed to 1991, there has been a secular trend downwards in the reported intensity of son preference controlling for everything else.

Similarly, we looked at the changes in the odds ratio between 1991 and 2003, and you see that basically, it’s like 33 percent less.  The odds ratio is about 33 percent in 2003 of what it was reported in 1991 for all the variables, except rural areas where it’s much lower.  So what you’re getting is a convergence across rural and urban South Korea, where rural people are converging very rapidly with the values and attitudes of urban people, which is especially interesting because there was a massive urbanization during that period in South Korea.  So you were getting massive numbers of young people moving into urban areas.  They were the ones who were more upwardly mobile and so on.  So these are the ones who are left behind who are less educated and you might expect them to sort of diverge more in values that were converging very fast.

So then if you look at decomposing the changes and the intensity of having to have or reporting that you had to have a son, the relative contribution of just mechanical increases in the percentage of people who were educated and living in urban areas is about a quarter of the total change between 1991 and 2003.  And about three quarters of it is just change in social norms.  It's just -- it’s a secular trend across the country.  And that’s very interesting because what it implies is that we’re talking about an attitudinal change sweeping across the population.

Now what do we know about India and China in this context as compared with South Korea?  Well, first, they’re less industrialized, they’re less educated, lower proportion of urban than South Korea, though China is catching up fast.  It makes a lot of difference because if you live in an urban area, if you’re educated, and if there are industrial jobs available, you have independence from the lineage, economic independence, and it gives you exposure to new ideas.  Urbanization gives you other things.  Basically, it means that sons may live and work anywhere, not necessarily where you live.  And daughters equally may live and work anywhere, including near where you live and no longer need to be so far away.  And people live and work in urban areas in impersonal settings, in apartment buildings, in offices where they’re not surrounded on a daily basis by their lineage kin and the pressures that the lineage kin can bring on them to have sons to continue the family line.

Offsetting this a little bit perhaps in India and China is the fact that there are high levels of non-farm employment available in rural areas or non-urban areas at least and a high level of circular migration so you can get some spread of ideas.

Another way in which they differ, which is important, is that South Korea had very conservative public policies.  I think it was just two years ago that they finally did away with the last vestiges of the Family Law which had prevented women from being heads of household.  I mean, the Family Law was really pretty draconian in its entirety.  There was no question of women inheriting then they sort of made that possible in the 1990s under a lot of pressure, but for decades, this Family Law basically made sure that women remained entirely marginal, socially speaking.

By contrast, both China and India have had strong gender equalizing policies, which obviously aren’t something that work overnight.  But nevertheless, these policies have been in place to make for equal inheritance between the sexes.  Not easily done if people can write a will, but nevertheless, the fact that it’s there on paper, allowing it to happen, that certainly, in both countries, women can be heads of households and so on.

There have been massive media campaigns to let women know what their legal rights are.  And more specifically, on son preference, there have been media campaigns to change the perception that sons are more valuable than daughters.  And these are targeted media campaigns.  Outside of these targeted campaigns, there’s everything under the sun, advertisements, soap operas which portray women as, sort of, active in the public sphere, as it being acceptable for girls to care for their parents and so on.

And there is a very interesting study by Jensen and Aster [phonetic] which finds that the media is powerful in shaping ideas of gender equity.  This is using some Indian data.  They find that when cable television is brought into an area, you find a significant increase in reported female autonomy and female school enrolment and significant reductions in reported son preference and other things, like whether you think it’s all right to have wife beating.  The effects are stronger in communities where the reported attitudes were less gender equal before the advent of cable television, and of course, when individuals report actually watching television, as opposed to the fact of television being generally available to people around them.

But the fact that it works, even if they’re not watching television, implies something about the power of communication within a community.  And these results are in line with a large literature from across the world showing that media exposure alters attitudes to all kinds of things and all kinds of behaviors.  I mean, the advertising world doesn’t need to be told about that.

Conclusions: what are the lessons one can draw from the South Korean case for China and India?  Well, what clearly happened in South Korea is that very rapid increases in education and urbanization triggered a decline in son preference.  It triggered it but the critical factor was a rapid diffusion of these new social norms, such that uneducated people in rural areas came rapidly to converge in their attitudes with their educated urban counterparts.  And this suggests that the Chinese and Indian governments have adopted the right approach by focusing heavily on interventions that seek to accelerate the process of change of social norms so that parents value boys and girls more equally.  And it offers a hope that in these countries, public policies will succeed in bringing down son preference even before they reach South Korea’s levels of development.  Thank you.

Nicholas Eberstadt:  Well, thank you.  Thank you all very much.  I think you’ve set the stage for us, very well, for our broader discussion.  I’d like to misuse my prerogative as moderator to pose two questions first to our panel, one question to Monica, another question to Laura and/or Mark or to both of you.

Monica, you’ve described, I think, in quite a compelling manner, the fact that social norms were changing in South Korea and that this change in social norms was powerfully connected with this downward trend in unnatural sex ratios at birth.  As I recall, actually last year, the announced sex ratio at birth in South Korea was a little bit over 107.  It was heading practically towards ordinary human biological norms.

What in particular was going on in South Korea?  What were the changes in civil society that were happening?  Were there signposts or things, interventions from civil society or from the government that seemed to have been having a big impact here?

And Mark and Laura, I wanted to ask you to respond to what we might see as standard Western economic reasoning about the shortage of girls and women.  Some of the most eminent American economists have suggested that the shortage of women is a problem of scarcity, that economics deals with the problems of scarcity, and that this is a problem that would solve itself because the value of women would naturally increase with scarcity.  This would tend to make women -- have to bring more power and autonomy to women, to make women more desirable as children for parents that we would see an equilibration process unfold ordinarily with any such process as this.  How would you respond to that argument?  That particular argument actually came from Nobel Laureate Gary Becker.  But how would you respond to that from what you see in your work in Asia?

Monica Das Gupta:  Oh, well, no, yours is much more interesting.

Ambassador Mark Lagon:  Why don’t you start and I’ll follow?

Laura Lederer:  I have heard that argument, that like any other commodity, that when it’s scarce, it becomes more valuable.  Unfortunately, I don’t think that is what we’re seeing on the ground in India and in China.  What we’re seeing is more of the force, fraud, and coercion in the bridal arrangements, more and new kinds of trafficking, combined sex trafficking and labor trafficking where the woman has to both go out and work in the field and then come in and service the man, polyandrous arrangements where men get together and share a commercial sexual exploitive situation with women.  We’re just seeing all these new kinds of combinations and I think it’s too early right now to know whether there’s going to be a boom in this.  But I have to suggest that with ten million more men than women currently in India and 50 million more men than women currently, and these are all men who are in there, teens, 20’s, even 30’s that cannot find mates, that we’re going to see a lot of movement, migration, and new forms of trafficking.

Ambassador Mark Lagon:  Well, add that if there is a self-correction mechanism from the marketplace, it’s too long to wait for it to occur.  The effect is so corrosive and in the case of human trafficking, dangerous, that to wait and not proactively try and deal with the social norms issues that Monica has been raising is really unwise.  There’s an interesting combination of technology and ability to identify whether your child that’s on the way is going to be a boy or a girl and alas, do something about it and a traditional cultural norm of preferring boys.  And I think you need to address both, better enforcement of laws that try and deal with the technological side, including in India, but more importantly, addressing the social norms side.

I’m also afraid that the resort to turning to trafficked women and girls as brides or as sex slaves actually would retard the self-correcting mechanism.  And so waiting for the big market to act without addressing the social norms, I think would be a mistake.

Monica Das Gupta:  Civil society interventions, in the case of South Korea, they became very important after the end of the authoritarian regimes.  During that period, people have been trying, but it was a pretty effective enforcement, a very conservative social policy.  But in the process of the whole, sort of, democratic movement, the women’s movement also managed to get some look in.  But even then, I mean, we’re talking about late ’80s, it was until 2006 or something that the Korean Supreme Court finally quashed the last vestiges of that infernal Family Law.

Nicholas Eberstadt:  Monica, for example, do you give any stock to the argument that the “Love Your Daughter Movement” or other sorts of spontaneous arrangements and organizations that seem to spring up in the ’90s and in the beginning part of this decade, would you speculate that those had any sort of tangible impact upon this change or these handmaidens of a change that were already in process?

Monica Das Gupta:  To tell you the truth, I don’t know too much about the Love Your Daughter Movement.  What was the Love Your Daughter Movement?

Nicholas Eberstadt:  In South Korea over the past decade, I would roughly in the past --

Monica Das Gupta:  Oh, that?

Nicholas Eberstadt:  Yes.

Laura Lederer:  “Value Your Daughter”.

Nicholas Eberstadt:  Value Your Daughter.

Monica Das Gupta:  Right.  Value Your Daughters makes a huge difference, I mean, just to hear people say it.  But also, if you can put across the notion that this has been tried both in -- in fact, in all three countries, to some extent, to say that girls are equally responsible for their parents as boys.  Of course, the problem is that you can’t legislate that any child is responsible.  But just the fact that you’re trying to get these ideas across and these things are being spoken of, I think they make a huge difference.  And you were saying over lunch about this Japanese study which documented that.

Nicholas Eberstadt:  Yes.  A research by a doctoral student up at Harvard was talking about the extent to which civil society pressures in Japan in the 19th century may have mitigated and then helped to eliminate female infanticide and excess mortality on the part of women.  Fabian Drixler, a doctoral student up at Harvard, has been working on that question.

I think we’ve got quite a bit of background, a rich background for general discussion.  Who would like to pose a question or make an observation?  We’re a small enough group.  I don’t know that we need a microphone.  Just talk up.  Don’t be shy.  Just please identify yourself and ask your question.  Let us know who you wish to pose a question to or comment.

Male Voice:  [audio glitch] in the sex ratio in one of the states.

Monica Das Gupta:  Oh, in one of the states?  [Cross-talking]  Yes.  Yes, actually, now that you say it, I have looked at it.  I have a memory like a sieve.  And yes, there has been a turnaround in a couple of those states.  Oh, now that you mention it, I’m writing a paper on the subject.  It’s been, yes, ten months since I last got a chance to work on it.  In a couple of states, there has been a turnaround.  But in some of them, it’s --

Male Voice:  [inaudible]

Monica Das Gupta:  No, not yet.  Not yet.

Male Voice:  [inaudible] I heard it was Gujarat or something.  But it did look like Gujarat was that [inaudible] sex ratio [inaudible]

Monica Das Gupta:  Gujarat, not as high as Punjab and Haryana but it’s up there.  The two western states, Rajasthan and Gujarat sort of are next in line.

[Break in audio 00:59:32-1:00:03]

Monica Das Gupta:  Well, I mean, within specific settings, there seems to be some religious factor.  I mean, studies in South Korea have suggested that places with more intense, what they call Confucian religion, have higher sex ratios.  What they call Confucian is, I mean, it’s a very wobbly definition.  Studies in India show that across Punjab and Haryana, I mean, they were all part of a large state called Punjab, half of which is now in Pakistan and the other half in India has been split into Punjab and Haryana.  That province, in the British colonial times, had the highest sex ratio since the beginning of documentation. 

So it’s the same pattern of, sort of, the same historical patterns across the country, which continues today.  What they showed, the early censuses, is that all the religious groups, there are a lot of Muslims, Hindus, and some Sikhs.  The Sikhs are a smaller group.  They all had very adverse sex ratios.  But the Muslims had the least, followed by the Hindus, and the Sikhs had the most.  So yes, I mean, there is some element of religious -- there is a religious overlay but it’s a mere overlay over what there is in the sort of overall culture of the people.

[Break in audio 1:01:43-1:03:04]

Ambassador Mark Lagon:  Well, I don’t know precisely what the evidence is about the linkage between the two, but I think it’s important that the Western countries not exacerbate a problem by being a model in the wrong direction.  So policies that have been put in place by the United States and some other Western countries to train troops not to take advantage of women and commercial sexual exploitation, as a magnet for human trafficking, is important.  And also, there is an interesting phenomenon in Asia of an assumption that sex tourists all have a Western face and there is no admission that, in fact, below that most visible level of Western sex tourists, there are, in fact, customers for commercial sex, as a magnet for human trafficking, who are from Asia or even in the country in question.

But I think social norms, in large part, have to do with the domestic population and this is a matter of not exacerbating things by outsiders, whether troops or tourists reinforcing a pattern of treating women only as playthings for consumption.

[Break in audio 1:04:33-1:05:02]

Laura Lederer:  I’m not sure what you’re referring to.  I know that there are some new studies that are concerned about large populations of men and the violence, just generalized violence that may occur in a society and the social instability and national security issues, that sort of thing.  But they’re not a part of the work that I’m doing and I don’t know whether you can add anything to that.

Ambassador Mark Lagon:  I don’t know how to answer that, although I have to think, as China is an emerging power in the world.  One has to think about the sex imbalance.  It’s often an interesting question to ask in Washington what someone has as their book on their bedside table.  I’m going back to readings that I read in college, the play by Aristophanes, Lysistrata, which is about women who decide to take over their society and hold out on having sex with their husbands so that they would make peace.  And one wonders whether a society that has an acute male to female imbalance is more war-like.  But I’m sure that in terms of crime and some other pathologies, there are people who are better equipped than me to identity them.

Nicholas Eberstadt:  Say a word about this.  I suppose the most widely read treatise on this question in the last few years would have been Valerie Hudson and Andrea den Boer’s book Bare Branches, which draws the association between an excess of males and a deficit of security.  I mean, I think it was the way that they framed the problem.  And they outlined a plausible case, I should say, in that book, at least in my reading, although I wouldn’t say that it is necessarily determinative. 

You can think of counterexamples in the past where a society has coped with a lack of brides for large proportions of the population without devolving into kind of Hobbesian nightmares.  And the most obvious example would be in Western European states in the early Industrial Era and the late Middle Ages, early Industrial Era when the advent of a situation in which ten, 15, or 20 percent of young men would never end up getting married and never end up having children. 

Western societies invented the social construction of honorable bachelorhood at that time and it obviously wasn’t always honorable, but it worked tolerably well as a mechanism for coping with tension because it meant that people could have a narrative for their own lives in which they didn’t have to be a loser or a leper or an outcast if they weren’t married and didn’t become a parent.  So I mean, it may not all be worrisome.  There may be different sorts of social responses as well.

Ambassador Mark Lagon:  I think it’s interesting, just to add a point, that there is a certain nimbleness that sometimes surprises us in a society dealing with social norms.  I mean, the case of South Korea is striking.  Despite a government tilted towards conservatism, there seems to be a move in social norms.  Here, the point that Claude [indiscernible] raised about training troops not to take advantage of women in prostitution demonstrates something kind of close to home.  I mean, it wasn’t long ago that the idea was pretty prevalent in Western societies that amongst soldiers, boys will be boys.  They need their recreation and it’s just going to happen that they’re going to turn to women and commercial sex.  And we’ve moved quite a long way to training our soldiers that that’s not the case.  There is a possibility, to be more nimble, to change social norms.

Nicholas Eberstadt:  A couple of questions and comments over here.  Yes, ma’am?

Female Voice:  Yes, my name is [inaudible] and I’m from [indiscernible] Massachusetts.  I have three questions here.  I’d like to ask you all to address that.  The first question is given the excess of males in these countries you described, India and China, could you describe the manifestation of the problem?  How does this excess manifest itself in the countries you were describing?  What kinds of social problems?

And the second question is about whether the governments, such as China or India, have they internalized the problems and come to the realization that policies are needed to address those manifestations?  So it wasn’t clear to me that those governments, [inaudible] India and China believe this is a problem in your discussion, so I’d like to hear more about your take, your observation.

Nicholas Eberstadt:  However you all want to --

Laura Lederer:  Well, I’ll start, and then please jump in.  I think we have to talk about them each and other countries too because it’s not just India and China.  We are using them as, sort of, the biggest of the problems.  But all of the South Asian countries, Nepal and Bangladesh and Pakistan have these similar imbalances and some of the Southeast Asian countries, also.  I do think that both India and China are aware of the imbalances and are, as I said in my comments, have made some, especially India, they have education campaigns, they have law and law enforcement campaigns, and they’ve got some new incentives. 

One that is interesting is that they are, now in Punjab, just this year offering 100,000 rupees, which is approximately $2000, for every family that brings a girl child to term to birth and beyond.  And so they are beginning to set up programs and to try different things and to watch and weigh and do away with the programs that aren’t working.  They’re trying to strengthen some of their laws.  And I think, in the case of China, they are weighing the pros and cons of moving in right now.  They have had success with their one-child policy, I think, and it has helped them in a lot of ways.  And so I think demographers are looking at the negative consequences of this but also weighing them against what they feel are the benefits.

And where we come in is to say that from our perspective, and we have, probably, in the United States I think the best global perspective on the problem of trafficking of persons because we have been monitoring now for the last -- almost ten years and we’ve been assessing and rating every country in terms of their problem and also their progress.  We can say, “This is a red flag and we predict that there are going to be serious new kinds of trafficking and because of our prevention, prosecution, and protection approach to this, we’d like countries to move in and design programs that would prevent what we see as a growing, possible problem.”

Monica Das Gupta:  They also have -- they are experimenting with cash incentives for raising girls.  What else did you mention?  [Cross-talking]

Laura Lederer:  There is law and law enforcement and then there are incentives and disincentives.

Monica Das Gupta:  The works.  Virtually identical approaches.

Female Voice:  The question is really how serious are they?  Are they really thinking of serious problems that they themselves are facing in terms of government or the social agencies such that they really engage themselves in the aspect of addressing the issue seriously?  Because from your point of view is the trafficking issue that put us, putting some resources on the table.  But for the Chinese government and Indian government, what impact the government or the society such that they are willing to put dough on the table?  That’s the question.

Monica Das Gupta:  I mean, you would have to believe that governments aren’t interested in public policy for the welfare of its citizens?  I mean, are you suggesting that they have to be personally threatened?

Female Voice:  -- hear what your observation is.

Monica Das Gupta:  I don’t think that either the Chinese or the Indian government feels personally threatened by the fact of the skewed sex ratios.

Female Voice:  [inaudible]

Monica Das Gupta:  But I think both, well, I mean, why would they be?  But both countries have been trying very actively to change it.  That’s a very Hobbesian view that you have of why governments have certain kinds of public policy and they don’t -- I think these countries are interested in the well-being of their citizens and more broadly, in issues of equity and not just how it affects them personally.

How it affects them personally, I mean, in India, as you saw, the sex ratios on aggregate are not very skewed.  These are two states with not very large populations and they’re able to import wives from neighboring states.  So the thing sort of dissipates itself fairly quickly in the marriage market.  China has more of an issue because a very large part of the country, a large part of the population has very skewed sex ratios, so it doesn’t dissipate so quickly.

But as you can see from the maps of where the single men are, the way they’re dissipating it is that they’re leaving the single men up in the sort of poor remote areas of the country where presumably, what’s going to happen over time is they’re basically going to be voiceless and they’re going to just die out.  These are not people who are going to be in a position to create a lot of trouble for their own government or for other governments.  They really are stuck out in the boondocks.  Their women move to marry elsewhere.  It’s not a happy situation to be in, but it’s a situation where you think that this country is going to be more belligerent towards others because of its sex ratio.  I think that’s pretty much mitigated by the geographical location of the people who actually don’t marry.

Ambassador Mark Lagon:  This is an interesting question.  I just want to add something.  I agree with the assessment that both governments see this as a problem and I see sort of a moderate effort to address the problem, not sufficiently intense, for instance, in the law enforcement on this 1994 law in India that outlaws you checking what the sex of your child is going to be through tests.  But I would say we have to be plain that there are ways in which China has a disadvantage relative to India.

First of all, I mean, I think the example of South Korea indicates that it’s helpful to have spontaneous civil society movement to discuss a social problem in addition to a concerted policy from the government.  So the room for a maneuver for civil society in China is somewhat more diminished because there isn’t comfort with NGO’s which aren’t government-organized.

Even though it is a good thing that the one-child policy seems to be being loosened, that there is more choice being considered by the Chinese government, even a mitigated one-child policy creates an added pressure because if there were only so many children you can have, it really adds to the dynamic of a possibility for sex selection and in favor of a male and the phenomenon of infanticide.

And then finally, there are those who are victimized, who come from other countries, North Koreans, Burmese, studies we have seen of Kachin girls who come from Burma, half of the ones trafficked into China have been sold as wives.  A policy of migration in China that tends to treat people who are fleeing neighboring repressive regimes as economic migrants rather than people to be protected and those who might be threatened with being deported if they are regular migrants, that kind of migration policy does not contribute to victims being treated as victims.  So all of these are disadvantages for China and that’s a charitable way of putting it and it has to do with governance in that regime.

Nicholas Eberstadt:  I have just one more arithmetic aspect to this.  China’s perspective marriage squeeze is substantially greater than India’s on a nationwide scale as opposed to a regional scale.  Number one, because of the gender imbalance, the sex ratio at birth imbalances, and the sex ratio imbalances that we have seen emerging among the youth population from the nationwide scale, these are much greater in China than in India. 

Number two is the fertility level question.  China, for almost two decades, has been a sub-replacement fertility society, which means that one can anticipate that subsequent birth cohorts are going to be smaller than existing birth cohorts.  In a society with a wide population base, one can imagine a notional matchup of brides and grooms, even if there is an imbalance, because each new birth cohort will be larger.  But if your demographic pyramid is like this, you have, prospectively, a real game of musical chairs going on.  And the success of any prospective groom in such a society adds to the disadvantage of the rise in cohorts, as an arithmetic proposition.

[Break in audio 01:20:53-01:20:58]

 Nicholas Eberstadt:  Let me ask if we can gather both of your questions and then we have three questions.  Why don’t we see if we can gather all three questions, get a response, and then we’ll wrap it up?  One, two, three.

[Break in audio 01:21:14-01:22:35]

Nicholas Eberstadt:  Maybe I can ask Monica, Mark, and Laura in that order to respond as they see fit to those questions and also to add any observations they may have been wishing to make, just kind of wrap up.  Monica, why don’t you take the lead, if you would?

Monica Das Gupta:  I don’t know if I inadvertently gave the impression that civil society movements for having parents value sons no more than daughters was very strong.  Although broadly, civil society movements for gender equality were very strong in South Korea, they existed, and they chipped away at things, there’s no question about it.  But as movements go, they are much stronger.  It’s much more vocal in India.  And yes, in China, they don’t like NGO’s but they have their NGO, the Women’s Federation, which is powerful and has its representatives in every village and they go around making sure that husbands don’t beat their wives and they don’t do this and they don’t do that, and of course, also making sure that people meet their birth quotas and don’t go over.

But what I’m trying to say is that civil society is very different in China and India.  They’re very different models but they’re both very powerful in their own ways and offhand, I would say much more powerful than they were in South Korea.  That’s why the very rapid turnaround in South Korea implies that we will see a turnaround.  I mean, you reminded me that you can begin to see the turnaround already in a couple of Indian states.  You will see it.  It’s coming.  It’s a decade or maybe a decade and a half.  And it would be very surprising if that doesn’t happen.

On inheritance laws, it’s very, very hard.  I mean, Mao tried, back in the early ’50s.  It was one of the few things on which the Communists had to back off because there was such outrage at the idea.  They didn’t have inheritance because they had already communalized the land.  But the sense in which they had inheritance is that the men got to have a share of the -- a right to continue living in the commune after marriage and the women would have that right in whichever commune they married into and they would give up their right in their home village.  Mao tried to change that, that if women got divorced, they could come back and claim their preexisting rights.  There was such rebellion, on such a scale, that they had to back off.  It’s not easy.  And more recently in India, they tried to enforce.  They’ve had equal inheritance for decades but they tried to enforce this in Haryana, which is one of those states.  Huge opposition.  It’s not easy to tackle, head-on, these kinds of issues because you’re talking about property.

Ambassador Mark Lagon:  A couple of thoughts connecting two of your questions.  I don’t know what the statistics are about the mitigation of the problem through micro-financing, but it clearly is something that helps empower women at a disadvantage to human trafficking.  However, I think actually the other question of the inheritance laws is crucial.  We found around the world that something that makes women vulnerable to being human trafficking victims is in fact this pattern of not being valued in the sense that they can inherit that puts them at risk of having to turn to other opportunities.  So micro-financing is fine but I think the most urgent thing is to allow there to be actual legal equality for women to acquire property.

Since you asked for closing thoughts, I thought I might use something as a vignette about how seized or not seized the Chinese and Indian governments are with this problem.  My old job, which I had until about a year and a half ago, was in a bureau at the State Department dealing with UN and I was heavily involved in our engagement in the UN’s Commission on the Status of Women. 

The United States tried to work with other governments to promote a resolution to discuss the phenomenon of sex selection, abortion in the world.  We approached the governments of China and India and said we know that there’s kind of an association with this problem in your countries, but what if we multi-lateralized it?  What if we have a resolution that’s not finger pointing; that identifies good things that you’re doing; that suggests this is a global problem rather than being the resolution on sex selection and abortion in India and China?  And there was no willingness to multi-lateralize this and talk about it as a global problem, even when it wasn’t a finger pointing exercise. 

I have a bias.  You have a much deeper sense of some of the sexual effects on the ground in these three countries that we’ve talked about, but I do think that civil society pressure to try and deal with a social problem, a tremendous form of gender imbalance, is a helpful factor because there will be some unwillingness by governments to face problems, as I saw in that UN episode.  And thanks Nick, for opening this.

Laura Lederer:  Okay, well, I think we’re going to go from the macro to the micro here instead of vice-versa.  I think Monica, what you were saying is that, really, that increasing economic and social development, generally speaking, is the larger factor that, in South Korea, was helpful in addressing or just naturally playing a role in reducing this imbalance and the preference for sons over daughters.  In other words, a rising tide will float all boats and impact and change the social norms.  And it happened in South Korea and you sort of think it will happen naturally, it’s coming in India and in China.  And I don’t know whether that’s true or not, but I think that building on what Ambassador Lagon has just said, we need to and want to encourage countries, and not just China and India, but we want to partner with countries to find the kinds of programs that work both at a national level and also at a local level to address this growing, it’s a growing, right now, problem.  It’s not a problem that is receding.

And so I thought I would just mention a couple of the recommendations that I am making to Ambassador Lagon, things that we want to look for in terms of partnerships with governments, with international organizations and intergovernmental organizations, and also with NGO’s.  The Value Your Girl Child, that was a program in Korea and is, as Monica said, in existence in certain states in India.  It could be expanded to a national level.  It could be a national level program in China and in India.  They would need to embrace it, but I think it would be important.  And there are lots of ways to go about that.

One suggestion, when I was in India, was a suggested television series, which I think is in development right now.  What would India be like without women?  To ask people, “Wait a second, if these trends continue, what is our life going to be like or without many women in India?”  To target certain sectors that are the sectors that are the sort of first responders or that would encounter this, like health providers, a sensitization campaign to enlist health professionals in the importance of valuing girl children and in policing themselves vis-à-vis the use of sonograms and amniocentesis and other sex determination technologies, and that has not been done and it needs to be done. 

And we’re in the process of doing something similar in the United States.  We are about to have a conference at the Department of Health and Human Services that brings together medical practitioners, health providers, and others in the public health field to raise their awareness about human trafficking and identifying human trafficking victims. 

So this is something that all countries can participate in and need to.  And there can be dedicated campaigns on the sex selection -- law enforcement trainings, trainings to help local police, prosecutors, judges, hospital authorities, religious leaders, community leaders, and others that are in positions of authority to have a background in the law and in how to investigate and how to arrest and how to charge and how to prosecute and how to convict in these cases.  Because you don’t need hundreds and hundreds of cases.  You need one or two high profile cases where if somebody goes to jail for doing something wrong and that sends a message to everyone.

And then I do think it will be important for us to think about the ways to engage on the dowry issue.  I’m told by some that that is so impossible to deal with, but dowry used to be a token gift meant to start a couple out, just like we do with our wedding gifts, with some financial security.  And today, it’s become a way for the groom’s family to accumulate wealth.  It’s morphed from a token gift to a required condition of marriage.  There are demands for specific huge amounts.  People go into debt in order to get their daughters married off.  And as one feminist noted, and this will be my concluding remark, although it’s wordy, “In a patrilineal kinship system where marriages are arranged on principles of dowry and hypergamy where women and girl children are the objects of exchange along with other forms of wealth, excess female mortality is an inevitable outcome.  Because clearly, for poor families trying to cope with paying dowries for several daughters, there’s a frightening burden and this leads to the attempts to limit the birth of daughters, then you have the sex ratio imbalances and you have the increased trafficking.”  So thank you.

Nicholas Eberstadt:  Dr. Das Gupta, Dr. Lederer, Ambassador Lagon, I think you’ve given us a panoramic overview of this problem.  I’m afraid this isn’t going to be the last time we’re going to have to address this problem.  I think this is really an excellent and rich session on this.  Will you all, ladies and gents, please join me in thanking our panelists for excellent, excellent discussion this afternoon.  Thank you, all very much.

[Applause]

[End of transcript]