Excerpt from Half the Sky by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
“Amartya Sen, the ebullient Nobel Prize–winning economist, has developed a gauge of gender inequality that is a striking reminder of the stakes involved.
"More than 100 million women are missing," Sen wrote in a classic essay in 1990 in The New York Review of Books, spurring a new field of research. Sen noted that in normal circumstances women live longer than men, and so there are more females than males in much of the world. Even poor regions like most of Latin America and much of Africa have more females than males. Yet in places where girls have a deeply unequal status, they vanish. China has 107 males for every 100 females in its overall population (and an even greater disproportion among newborns), India has 108, and Pakistan has 111. This has nothing to do with biology, and indeed the state of Kerala in the southwest of India, which has championed female education and equality, has the same excess of females that exists in the United States. The implication of the sex ratios, Professor Sen found, is that about 107 million females are missing from the globe today. Follow-up studies have calculated the number slightly differently, deriving alternative figures for "missing women"of between 60 million and 101 million.
Every year, at least another 2 million girls worldwide disappear because of gender discrimination. In the wealthy countries of the West, discrimination is usually a matter of unequal pay or underfunded sports teams or unwanted touching from a boss. In contrast, in much of the world discrimination is lethal.
In India, for example, mothers are less likely to take their daughters to be vaccinated than their sons—that alone accounts for one fifth of India's missing females—while studies have found that, on average, girls are brought to the hospital only when they are sicker than boys taken to the hospital. All told, girls in India from one to five years of age are 50 percent more likely to die than boys the same age. The best estimate is that a little Indian girl dies from discrimination every four minutes.”
New Light in association with Leena Kejriwal, a photographer and an installation artist, are working together on a public art project called M.I.S.S.I.N.G., which is addressing this issue-how millions of girls are disappearing each year.
https://www.wishberry.in/campaign/missing/
This art and awareness campaign is focused specifically on the issue of sex trafficking and the multiple girls who are lost to this trade. The figures for sex trafficking are alarming. And the average age of girls disappearing into sexual exploitation is between 9 and 12 years in India. The issue is already tipping India’s gender statistics and will be endangering future generations-sooner then imagined.
The work consists of larger than life fiberglass structures set against prominent skylines. The silhouettes of young girls are in direct contrast with the landscape and represent doorways to black holes into which millions of girls disappear each year.
In addition to the fiberglass project, you’ll see black silhouettes of girls all over the Kalighat red light district. New Light has created these silhouettes all over the area, trying to raise awareness about this issue.
I pass them every time I visit New Light’s creche cum shelter since they’re concentrated around Kalighat road, which is at the center of the red light district. It is a haunting reminder of the world we live in. Of how devalued girls are.
For this reason, it is even more crucial to have an organization like New Light.