Stop Gendercide Project: China's Stolen Children brings viewers face-to-face with a crisis brought on by the controversial one-child policy, implemented in 1979

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

China's Stolen Children brings viewers face-to-face with a crisis brought on by the controversial one-child policy, implemented in 1979

It is this manifestation of the draconian population control program that prompted some daring filmmakers to travel incognito to China for the purpose of documenting the horror.

Check out HBO's film called "China's Stolen Children." Narrated by Ben Kingsley, it shows the nightmare of "the world's largest experiment in social engineering" through the eyes of several families caught in the middle of it.

It focuses on the plight of children sold out of fear of government punishment or stolen because of the nation's unnatural shortage of offspring.

Because of the Chinese government's obsession with being accepted as a member of the community of civilized nations, Beijing is portrayed as more interested in covering up the epidemic of child theft than in addressing the problem.

"Legal abortions are commonplace for Chinese families in the one-child era," explain the documentary makers. "Moreover, with ultrasound machines allowing parents to determine gender at 4-5 months, many first-time pregnancies are aborted if the fetus is female. This selective (and illegal) practice is the result of China's traditional preference for sons; here and in other Asian cultures, brides migrate to husbands' families, leaving their own parents to fend for themselves in old age. Because of this, parents covet male babies. In the one-child era, as many as 40 million baby girls have been selectively aborted – creating a gender gap that has left millions of men with little hope of finding wives. And while the black market for male children remains robust, there is a growing demand for girls as well."

"China's Stolen Children" is the 2008 BAFTA Award winner for best current affairs program. It is the directorial debut of Australian-born Jezza Neumann, who also shot and helped edit the film. It was produced by Kate Blewett and Brian Woods, who have co-directed and produced a number of projects over the years, including the Emmy® and Peabody Award-winning "The Dying Rooms" for Cinemax, which deals with the neglect of abandoned babies in Chinese orphanages.

I recommend viewing it. VIEW UK & International Documentary Films
"China's Stolen Children" TRAILER BELOW UNDER BLOGS "GENDERCIDE FILMS, ETC." SECTION.

FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THE FILM GO TO: http://www.truevisiontv.com/china/index.htm

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WHAT IS GENDERCIDE?

What is Female infanticide or gendercide?
The killing of baby girls due to the preference for male babies and the low value associated with the birth of females.

Where does this take place?
Female infanticide is a concern in third world countries today. The highest numbers of gendercide take place in the rural areas of China as well as India, the two most populous countries in the world.

How many die from female infanticide?
There are no statistics because of the unreliability and ambiguity of much of the data. Some say that over the course of time it the numbers are probably higher than those killed by mass genocide.

The term "Gendercide" was first used by Mary Anne Warren in her 1985 book, Gendercide: The Implications of Sex Selection. Warren drew "an analogy between the concept of genocide" and what she called "gendercide." Citing the Oxford English Dictionary definition of genocide as "the deliberate extermination of a race of people," Warren wrote:
By analogy, gendercide would be the deliberate extermination of persons of a particular sex (or gender). Other terms, such as "gynocide" and "femicide," have been used to refer to the wrongful killing of girls and women. But "gendercide" is a sex-neutral term, in that the victims may be either male or female. There is a need for such a sex-neutral term, since sexually discriminatory killing is just as wrong when the victims happen to be male. The term also calls attention to the fact that gender roles have often had lethal consequences, and that these are in important respects analogous to the lethal consequences of racial, religious, and class prejudice.