Deputy Assistant Secretary Paula Dobriansky of the State Department’s Bureau of Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs severely criticized the dowry deaths in India and the failure of the government to bring the culprits to book because of “corruption among the police and medical officers.”
She was appearing at a human rights committee hearing chaired by Congressman Gus Yatraon.
She cited statistics that between 1986 and 1988 registered cases of dowry deaths nearly doubled from 1319 to 2152 despite the strengthening of the Indian Dowry Prohibition Act. The actual total, she said, might be substantially higher. By law, every unnatural death of a woman which occurred in the first seven years of marriage must be investigated. “However, the enforcement of this law is seriously lacking. For example there are reports which indicated that about 95 percent of registered cases end in acquittal, as corrupt police and medical officers tamper with crucial evidence. Statistics of the Police Research Bureau show a rate of 3 percent convictions in crimes against women in the past ten years.
A government study on traditional abuses in India, she said, showed that violence against women, including molestation, rape, kidnapping and wife murder, had followed an upward trend in the past decade, Dowry deaths usually by burning of young married women resulted from inability to meet their husbands families’ property demands. Insufficient dowry was often as an excuse for societally condoned violence against married women, made possible by the failure of the police to implement existing law.
Republican Congressman Christopher H. Smith condemned abortion of female fetuses in India if gender tests showed that the baby in womb is a girl. Referring to “abuse of women prevalent in South Asia,” he said that in India, “78,000 female unborn children were aborted between 1978 and 1982 precisely because they were girls. These operations followed sex determination tests. It is not by chance that in one clinic in Bombay of the 8,000 abortions performed, 7999 were of baby girls.”
He also severely condemned female circumcision and mutilation of female genitals in Africa and the Middle East (This is done to prevent women from enjoying sex on the theory that they will remain “pure.” In these cultures, women are to be used by men as sex objects
Ms. Dobriansky said that the U.S. government believed that the evolution of human rights in all countries “is the business of free people everywhere.” That was the justification for the U.S. Government publicizing repressive Government policies and promoting democracy. Last year, for the first time, in collecting data for the annual human rights report, “we specifically instructed our Embassies to report any evidence of significant and systemic physical abuse of women, Governmental attitudes towards such abuse and the extent of government effort, if any, to curtail abuses.” Much of the information was published in the report. One of the U.S. government’s priorities, she said, was to provide Congress, the American public and the international community as much information as possible about government policies the encouraged or condoned a pattern of physical abuse of women, including dowry deaths, genital mutilation, spouse abuse and more subtle forms of discrimination such as abridgement of property rights, denial of full legal capacity and various forms of involuntary servitude.
Ms. Dobriansky added: “We intend to continue to focus on these types of abuses and will instruct our posts abroad accordingly.”
Article extracted from this publication >> August 31, 1990
