The fate of so many little girls

Yesterday a friend of mine told me about this horrific documentary she had seen.  There is a region in India where women are so undervalued that female babies are drowned at birth by pouring sand down their throats.  Can you imagine the mentality of men who could inflict such a horrible death on something so small and innocent?  A knife to the heart would be quicker and kinder.  The same people burn their wives alive so they can marry another poor woman and get the dowry that her parents have to pay so that their daughter will be accepted by such a monster.

In yesterday's paper I read of the fate of a fourteen year old girl in Pakistan who died after receiving one hundred lashes with a cane after she was raped by a forty year old relative.  Before being handed over to the clerics who imposed the punishment, she had been beaten by the rapist's family.

I have read of women in Afghanistan who are killed if they leave the home without being escorted by a male relative.  If they have no male relative then it is not inconceivable that they could die from lack of food.

Women in Africa are raped and raped repeatedly. The mother of one such rapist excused her son by saying that the woman had been raped before so why should if matter.  Baby girls are raped in some of these countries.

In so many societies women are considered to be the dregs of society- lower than dogs - born without a soul - by their men.  Why? Why do these excuses for human beings fear women so much? For it must be fear that motivates them to keep an entire sex degraded and down trodden. Well I have no idea why these things happen.  I'm just glad I live in a country and in a culture where such behaviour would be punished and abhorred.  I know that rape and murder occurs in Australia and DOCS can testify to the number of people who ill treat children, but the perpetrators are individuals.  There is no official sanction, no official acceptance, no official belief that such behaviour is acceptable.  I just hope that no one is idiotic enough to allow any aspects of foreign law into our country which might make these things acceptable..

As for those cultures that only want sons, I wish, wholeheartedly, that they get their hearts desire and only have sons; and when those sons grow up and have no women to marry, that their neighbours refuse to allow them to marry their daughters.  Not only will the world's population figures benefit from this, but within a generation or two the misogynist cultures will cease to exist -  and that has to be a good thing.