Seen but not heard: Women in Burmese media

The 112-web page report, “Give Us a Baby and We’ll Let You Go,” reveals that vulnerable young women from Burma’s conflict-ridden northern Kachin and Shan states are being tricked into pressured marriages in China the place the sooner “one-youngster coverage” and preference for sons has created an enormous gender hole. The report calls on donor governments and U.N. companies to apply strain on the government of Myanmar to declare a unilateral nationwide ceasefire to end the violence in Kachin and northern Shan states. It additionally calls for humanitarian assist to internally displaced individuals and cross-border refugees so as to scale back their vulnerability to being exploited and trafficked.

Bride value, in particular, creates an economic incentive for organized marriage, particularly with youthful females who are thought of more fascinating by men who need children. BANGKOK — A nationwide ceasefire to end violence in northeastern Myanmar wouldn’t only bring long-sought peace to a region devastated by struggle, it would also help address the alarming variety of women and girls bought to men over the border in China, new research finds. Evidence of gender bias within the news undermines the widespread discourse that women and men are regarded and treated equally in Burmese society. Local historian Chie Ikeya argues that this was a colonial-era assessment made by British officials who noted that Burmese women did not seem like as oppressed as their Chinese and Indian neighbours, as a result of absence of practices like purdah and foot-binding. This misguided perspective was adopted and perpetuated by submit-colonial students and the Burmese political elite, and is still propagated at present although gender gaps are well documented.

“A woman can deliver an entire nation to collapse,” goes another. (The country’s leaders, it must be noted, have used each sayings against Suu Kyi over the past twenty years.) In follow, despite constitutional assurances to the contrary, women earn far lower than men for the same jobs – especially in the agriculture sector, the place the overwhelming majority of people are employed. Maternity go away is rarely a given. Women have to get larger scores than men on high school examinations so as to acquire admission to university.

There is little protection for the folks from Kachin state, she added, many of whom don’t have identification cards and stay in IDP camps near the border with China. KWAT’s work to rescue trafficked women from China is sophisticated by the country’s lack of laws for cover and prevention, another space the report urges the Chinese authorities to deal with.

Burmese Women Not Allowed to Marry Foreigners, The Irrawaddy, 25 May 2010.

However, a lot of what appears to be a retiring perspective amongst Burmese women in their social life is actually explained by the distinction of Burmese manners from Western manners. In the West the custom of chivalry (in nonetheless diluted a form) dictates most of the surface attitudes to women.

My foreign associates have typically told me that they are shocked to see an ordinary Burmese woman sitting at her stall in a bazaar, dressed within the traditional htamein and jacket, her hair arranged on prime of her head within the traditional method, typically smoking a cigar—and dealing with her commerce with all of the exhausting-headed enterprise acumen of a person. Or, in an agricultural family, the spouse could also be serving to with the planting, the reaping, the winnowing. If her husband is a cartman, a Burmese woman might carry out her share of the labor. You can see her in business homes, signing contracts and making decisions for the firm, or discover her in any of the professions or in parliament. It all appears quite completely different from the acquainted picture of the down-trodden, backward Asian woman.

Burmese women in Thai ‘human zoo’, 30 January 2008. Thae Thae.

It’s a population estimate that may “certainly enhance” if the results had been extrapolated to larger areas of Kachin state, Shan state, and Yunnan province, the report states. Thousands of Burmese women and girls have been trafficked and compelled to marry Chinese men and bear their children amid the continuing battle, according to a research by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Kachin Women’s Association Thailand.

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In some ways, one might argue that the patriarchal political system merely reflects the biases of traditional Burmese society. “If the hen crows, there gained burmese women’t be a rosy daybreak,” says one outdated proverb.

Even though women make up barely more than half of Burma’s population of fifty one million, she says, this has been outweighed by the fact that generals have ruled the nation for more than half a century. There are few incentives for trafficked women or their relatives to seek official help. Families looking for police aid to trace lacking daughters, sisters and wives had been turned away in Myanmar, or were asked for money, HRW found.

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More than 100 women got here to the workplace of the Rangoon City Corporation (of which we had been allowed to be members) and we marched with banners and placards to the Legislative Council, followed via the streets by a big crowd of spectators. Our more recent historical past has done little to diminish our historical rights. During the days of the Burmese kings, women have been frequently appointed to excessive workplace and became leaders of a village, chieftainess, and even ruled as queen.

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In my own analysis work within the village system of Burma I have even found vestiges of a matriarchal system which will need to have flourished here at one time. The inheritance of sure oil wells, for example, belonged solely to women; in some cases the inheritance to the headmanship of a village was via the female line. To this present day we now have no family surnames in Burma and a woman retains her personal title after marriage. These horrific accounts were revealed in a Thursday report published by Human Rights Watch, which found Burmese safety forces had “committed widespread rape” towards Rohingya women and girls as a part of a brutal ethnic cleaning that has pressured greater than 600,000 Rohingyas to flee their properties.

Combined with a lack of opportunity for protected migration, an absence of social protection measures, and challenges in acquiring documentation, border communities are left with few options. The report’s findings present that organized marriage serves as a coping strategy for families in the Kachin and northern Shan states, many of whom reside in poverty or monetary insecurity, explained report co-author Casey Branchini.

“Myanmar and Chinese authorities are trying away while unscrupulous traffickers are promoting Kachin women and girls into captivity and unspeakable abuse,” stated Heather Barr, women’s rights co-director at Human Rights Watch. Many of the Kachin women are trafficked out of Myanmar by their family members, pals or individuals they belief; in a single case a woman was betrayed by somebody from her bible examine class. They are often promised jobs throughout the border in China, and discover only after they cross over that they’ve been offered into sexual slavery.