By Dave Andrusko
The bodies of hundreds of newborn girls have been found dumped in garbage piles in Pakistan over the last year amid a cultural preference for boys, it has emerged (file photo, Daily Mail)
The sickening headline only begins to describe the horror that is taking place in Pakistan: “Karachi becoming a killing field for newborn girls.”
Writing this week for The News, Fakhar Durrani reports that the Edhi foundation and Chhipa Welfare organisation “have found 345 new born babies dumped in garbage in Karachi” between January 2017 to April 2018.
“And 99 percent of them were girls.”
Karachi is the capital of the Pakistani province of Sindh and is the most populous city in Pakistan
Anwar Kazmi, a senior manager in Edhi Foundation Karachi, told The News, “We have been dealing with such cases for years and there are a few such incidents which shook our souls as much. It left us wondering whether our society is heading back to primitive age.”
Kazmi disagrees with the police that the root cause of this infanticide is poverty and illiteracy, Durrani reported. According to Kazmi
in [the] majority of cases infanticide is occurring due to out-of- wedlock births. Normally, people kill girls if they are born out of wedlock as this is considered a stigma.
However if the baby is a boy the family try to protect him.
“We have seen so many horrible incidents. One such incident which still I remember despite passage of more than a decade is the stoning of a new born baby who was found outside mosque.”
The numbers and the scale of the barbarism are just incredible.
As many as 72 dead girls have been [found] buried in the first four months of this year by Edhi Foundation alone in the metropolitan city. The given data is just tip of the iceberg as Edhi foundation maintains the data of those cities where it provides services.
Chhipa Welfare Foundation, another NGO, came across 93 cases in Karachi where newborn girls were killed; around 70 babies in 2017 and 23 in this year.
Durrani says the trend of female infanticide is rising, building on the well-known cultural preference for boys.
According to a study carried out by Oxford Institute of Population Ageing, University of Oxford, over the past two decades, son preference has become more strongly associated with the practice of continuing to bear children until couples have achieved their desired number of sons and daughters in Pakistan.
The study suggests that many families in Pakistan are increasingly making reproductive decisions based on the number of sons they have.
Indeed, Durrani begins his story with an account of a dead body dumped in garbage in Karachi anonymously reported in February. “They found a dead body of a new born. It was a four-day girl whose throat was slit with a sharp knife,” Durrani writes. “While girls were buried in pre-Islamic period as unwanted creature, cruel souls in Karachi are a step ahead: they kill and throw them at garbage.”
And then this chilling forewarning: “This nameless girl is not the only victim of barbarity. “
In Pakistan, both child abandonment and infanticide are criminal offenses and punishable crimes. However, “Normally, nobody reports such cases in police station and during last one year the Karachi Police registered only one case of infanticide,” a police official from the Additional Inspector General office told The News. “The police can properly investigate the causes of such cases whether they are illegitimate children or there are any other reasons only if the people register complaints.”