14 DAY TRIAL // Over the past twenty years, the deaths of 1.8 million female infants and children in India are related to domestic violence against their mothers, a new study carried out by Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) researchers concluded.
“Being born a girl into a family in India in which your mother is abused makes it significantly less likely that you will survive early childhood,” said lead author Jay Silverman, associate professor of society, human development, and health at HSPH.
“Shockingly, this violence does not pose a threat to your life if you are lucky enough to be born a boy.”
A plausible explanation for this phenomenon is the lower investment in girl children in domains like nutrition, immunization and care for major causes of infant and child death (like diarrhea and respiratory infections).
The neglect for young girls is usually more pronounced in families in which the women have a very low status – women who are physically abused by their husbands.
The researchers examined over 158,000 births, between 1985 and 2005, and found that the more violent the husbands were towards their wives, the higher the risk of death was among female children.
The mothers' status had no influence whatsoever on the survival of male children, whether in the first or in the first five years of life.
So, based on their results, the researchers insist that violence against women should be considered a critical priority, and programs and policies for child survival improvement should be put into place, especially the ones that aim at increasing the survival of girls.
Silverman said that “family violence against women in India must be vigorously challenged, given that even a very small reduction in this abuse may lead to the saving of tens of thousands of lives of girl infants and children.
Today, 2.1 million children die in India every year, and the nation is nowhere near of meeting the United Nations Millennium Development Goal of a two-thirds reduction in child mortality from 1990 levels by 2015.
The authors explain that is the violence against mothers doesn't change, and the associated gender-based mistreatment of female infants and children continues, this could be a major barrier preventing India from reaching this goal.
The article describing the study appeared online January 4, 2011 in the journal Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, and will appear in the January print edition.