Author Description

The astounding part of this story is that female infanticide and girl-specific abortion are simply the outcome of every day discrimination against women and girls, running according to its internal logic. This discrimination seems to have reached a tipping point and is spinning freely towards its logical end - the extermination of girls before or at birth. What brought on this tipping point? Why has international law not recognised this result for what it is, the gender equivalent of genocide? And if it did, might we see the institutions of patriarchy held as complicit in a crime against humanity?