By Diana Sai Farias
Special to The Voice

“When I was in my early twenties living in India, I remember female infanticide being in the news,” said Nyantara Pais Caputi, who now lives in the East Bay. “Then I started paying attention to it when I was looking into adopting a second child from India.” Caputi and her husband were told they would have at least a two- to three-year wait for a baby girl.

After investigating the reasons for the delay, she found that “in North India the ratio of males to females had a big gap because girls were being killed, either before birth or immediately afterward.”

In the state of Karnataka, the Indian government is trying to counteract this rejection of girl births by offering money or a bicycle to families willing to accept a female child, she said.

“Some states, depending on the ruling government party, are even putting girls through school with supplies, uniforms, and transportation,” she said, to encourage families to keep their daughters.

Despite these efforts, the number of deaths of baby girls continues to increase and the ratio of girls to boys is expected to get worse in the 2011 census. The state of Haryana holds the lowest ratio at 800 females to 1000 males.

Appalled that so little public attention is focused on this practice and concerned that Indian families aren’t aware of adoption as a viable option, Caputi decided to use her skills of producing and directing short films to address what is also universally referred to as “boy preference or son preference.”

She contacted social activists working for the empowerment of women in her home town of Bangalore, known today as India’s Silicon Valley. They helped her make contact with women whose daughters have been victims of this crime.

“I was shocked,” she said. “It should be headlines and it’s not. The newspapers and media hardly ever cover this. It’s almost like because they’re girls, it doesn’t matter.”

She realized that the mothers are the first victims because pressures of society and poverty often drive them to kill their infant daughters. “I really feel sorry for these women who do this because in their hearts they must not want to do it,” said Caputi, who with her husband Gino is a member of St. Agnes Parish in Concord.

Caputi said that during an interview with one of the women, “I noticed that she had tears in her eyes when she was talking about it, even though it happened years ago.”

In traditional Indian society, inheritances of property and businesses can only be received by boys. Only boys can light their father’s Hindu burial fire and boys are expected to support their parents as they grow old. Thus, in-laws often harass and taunt their daughter-in-laws until they give birth to a boy.

Another societal pressure, Caputi said, is the Indian government’s national family planning campaign, a response to the World Bank’s demands to require third world countries to control their populations in order to receive loans and grants-in-aid.

‘We two and Our two’
Titled “Hum do Hamare do” (“We two and Our two”), this campaign slogan was implemented throughout India on highway billboards and public vehicles along with a picture of a smiling family consisting of a mother, father and two children.

It has embedded a prevailing attitude into the Indian mind, Caputi said, “that I would have to have a son if I can only have two children.”

The national government has also imposed a policy in some states that people with more than two children cannot hold a government job.

But the most significant motivator, according to an ActionAid report, “Disappearing Daughters,” is the dowry. Declared illegal in 1961, the dowry system is still practiced as a social norm in most Indian castes, classes, religions, and states. It requires that a groom’s family receives money and other valuables from a bride’s family.

The groom’s family often demands high ticket items even after marriage. In extreme cases where a bride’s family cannot provide what is demanded, the bride is burned or hanged by the husband, the mother-in-law or another member of his family.

ActionAid says that poor families trying to avoid exorbitant dowry costs resort to murder of their female newborns through strangulation, suffocation, starvation, snapping of the neck, poison (fertilizer, rice husks or sap) or allowance of umbilical cord infection. Infants are killed by the mother, mother-in-law, family member, close friend, or some combination of these.

Often the mothers “have had so much abuse, suffering and violence in their lives that they don’t want their daughters to go through the same thing,” Caputi said. “Very often these murders are not reported to the police. Even if neighbors or other family members know about it, it’s kept all very hush-hush and a lot of Indians don’t even know about it.”

For those who have access to and can afford ultrasound technology, an abortion is the preferred method of avoiding a daughter and dowry costs. Sex selective abortions were made illegal in 1994, but Caputi discovered that the numbers are increasing. One recent survey showed that nearly 100 percent of abortions recorded in the city of Mumbai (Bombay) were done on female fetuses.

Caputi said, “Ultrasound clinics are being checked by undercover officers, so some of the doctors have started using codes. For example, they will write on the page a plus sign if it’s a boy and a minus sign if it’s a girl.”

But at this point, most doctors know the law is generally not enforced and therefore they can continue what has become a very lucrative business, according to Caputi.

She said that one NGO leader working against female infanticide told her, “The government has set up committees of doctors to investigate clinics with reported incidences of ultrasound crime. Though there have been reports that even include pictures, it is very hard for doctors to turn in their fellow doctors. The police very rarely fine or imprison them.”

According to a recent UNICEF study, “Violence Against Children in South Asia,” in India alone between 3 and 5 million female fetuses are aborted every year.

Though India and China have the largest number of offenders, a February 2008 Fact Sheet published by the U.N. Department of Information, reported that “Female infanticide, prenatal sex selection and systematic neglect of girls are widespread in South and East Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East.” It is known to be practiced in Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan, South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan.

Caputi wants her documentary, which she’s entitled, “Petals in the Dust: India’s Missing Girls,” to be an agent for change. “The solution I see is to really reach out to kids when they are in school, when they are in about 9th grade. That’s one audience that we will be targeting.”

Sponsored by Children’s Works, Inc., a San Francisco non-profit organization, the film will be the first full-length documentary on this topic made in the U.S. Caputi plans to get the film dubbed in Hindi and shown in Indian schools.

She also wants the documentary to help create support for women who have lost their daughters to infanticide and feticide. “They are hurting so much and feel so alone,” she said, noting that there is little or no counseling available to help women with their grief.

Adoption as a solution
Additionally, she plans to use the film to highlight adoption as a solution because “the women rejecting their girl children don’t know that there are people who would want to adopt their girls and that these girls could have a happy life. They only think that adoption would be another lifetime of suffering.”

Nyantara Caputi and her husband, who is the film’s associate producer and director of photography, estimate it will take two to three years to acquire the funding needed to complete their documentary. In the meantime, they have created a website (www.petalsinthedust.com) to serve as an educational resource with links for those who want to help the cause, as well as a Facebook page.

The website includes a trailer which had its first screening in September at the Drexel H. Foundation Children’s Film Festival in Vale, Oregon. The Drexel founder told the Caputis that after watching the trailer, she and others “were very moved and people had tears in their eyes.”

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