#missing women

[tani-b-art]

Black and Missing

[ourrace-sexraceandculture]

Public Service Announcement!!!

Human Trafficking is the fastest growing criminal industry in the entire world, second only to the drug trade. Protect our women and girls with all your might!

[ex-foster]

From foster care to missing or murdered: Canada's other tragic pipeline - Macleans.ca

How the foster-care system—which disproportionately affects Indigenous children—shows that Canada hasn't learned from past policies

[blackgirlsreverything]

Black women go missing in Memphis literally every single day. We are the largest demographic in this city and our missing bodies/lives do not get reported with the same energy as Eliza Fletcher.

I do sincerely hope she is found. However, when are we ever going to receive fair news reporting?

[giannic]

[lifewithaview]

Charlene McKenna in Ripper Street (2012) What Use Our Work?

S1E8

When a murdered woman is found at his lodgings Jackson is accused of being Jack the Ripper and arrested. Meanwhile ex-prostitute Rose answers a personal ad in the newspaper and meets a seemingly charming young man,Victor Silver. However he and his family are white slavers who drug and abduct Rose along with other young girls.Silver was once a suspect in the Ripper case but went missing in the pleasure boat accident in which the Reids' daughter also disappeared and Reid fears Silver may have killed her. The police set a trap,using a friend of Rose to pose as a want ad correspondent and Silver takes the bait. Reid then over-rules his superiors to release Jackson to help him and Drake smash the slavers ring and save Rose and the other victims.

*The episode title "What Use Our Work" is spoken by Edmund Reid (Matthew Macfadyen). "What use our work, Bennet, if we cannot care for those we love?"

[amastelle]

[coochiequeens]

China did this to themselves

Millions of missing women: China grapples with legacy of one-child policy as population ages

By 2050, analysts predict one in four people in China will be retired and the working population will have shrunk by 10%, with huge economic

Ming Ming, a boisterous six-year-old, longs to have a playmate, but his mother is adamant that she will not have another child.

“No way! One is quite enough,” Li Hong gasps. “Childcare, after-school activities, tutoring … you want them to have a good education but it costs money. We’re just ordinary working folks, not the super rich. The cost of bringing up two kids would kill us!” says the 43-year-old supermarket cashier from the southern province of Guangdong.

Li herself was born just before the one-child policy began in 1980. As an only child, she says the cost of bringing up her son on top of caring for her elderly parents and those of her husband were her main concerns.

The Covid pandemic has not helped. It began when her son was starting kindergarten, but the regular class suspensions meant she could not work full-time. Looking after a toddler all day in a small flat left her constantly exhausted. “I simply don’t have the energy for two,” she said.

Women are ‘invisible’

For three-and-a-half decades, the one-child policy that was meant to control the population exacted a huge social and human cost on Chinese society. Forced abortions, sterilisations, the use of intrauterine contraceptive devices as well as hefty financial penalties left physical and emotional scars on millions of women and traumatised families.

Thirty-five years after the one-child policy’s implementation, China is left with one of the lowest birthrates in the world.

Fearing the adverse social effects of an ageing population and a looming shortage of working-age people, the Chinese government has tried to boost the birthrate by partially lifting the one-child policy in 2013 and allowing couples to have two children if one of the spouses was an only child. In late 2015, the authorities announced all married couples could legally have two children.

But these measures failed to trigger a baby boom: In 2016, China reported 18.46 million births – just 1.4 million higher than the average number of births in the previous five years. The figure was well below the increase in births that the government had projected, which was between 2.3 and 4.3 million a year. Annual births continued to drop thereafter: from 17.23 million in 2017 to 15.23 million in 2018, 14.65 million in 2019, 12 million in 2020, then to 10.62 million in 2021. The authorities further eased the birth limit in 2021, raising it to three children per couple.

“The declining birthrates seem to be irreversible, but the government does not have a gameplan,” Dr Ye Liu, a senior lecturer in international development at King’s College London says. “It’s all about the power of men over women and utilisation of women’s bodies as economic means. In short, men make policies for women. In the recent party congress, there were many promises made but none for women. Women are ‘invisible’.”

Chinese scholars campaigned to scrap the one-child policy for more than a decade, on the grounds that the country’s total fertility rate was worryingly behind the replacement rate. In the 1970s, the total fertility rate (births per woman) fell from 5.8 in 1970 to 2.75 in 1979. In the 1980s, the rate hovered above the replacement level of 2.1 that would allow the population to replace itself, but since the 1990s, it has declined to below the replacement level. The 2010 and 2020 censuses yielded total fertility rates of 1.18 and 1.30 respectively. This further fell to an alarming 1.15 in 2021, according to figures from the National Bureau of Statistics.

More sticks than carrots

Key factors behind the low fertility rate include the rising costs of bringing up children amid rapid economic development in the past three decades, as well as the lack of social welfare provisions for families such as free or low-cost childcare, academic studies have found.

Fewer young Chinese people are getting married, and those who do are having children at a much older age, or not at all. When asked why, they routinely cite the rising cost of living, stagnating professional mobility, and the pressure of traditional gender roles on women.

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