Girls suffer from rural preference for boys
Source: Xinhua |
March 7, 2013, Thursday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
LI Azuo wakes up at 5am every day to do her chores before she treks 2 kilometers to school.
The nine-year-old fixes breakfast for her brothers, cleans the house and feeds the pigs before making her way to a village school in a remote area of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.
Her limbs are covered in bruises from countless falls on the craggy, slippery trail leading to her family's pig sty perched on a mountain near her home.
She feeds the pigs, as well as some chickens and ducks, so her family can have meat on the dinner table when her parents return from working in another part of the autonomous region.
A typical meal for her consists of plain rice or noodles with a small portion of vegetables. A free school lunch program, which was initiated by Chinese media and later expanded and financed by the government, ensures she can have an egg and noodles with minced meat.
Li's winter wardrobe is a jacket, jeans and a sweater that a neighbor gave her.
At night, when temperatures approach freezing during the winter and there's no heat, she stays fully dressed. Her makeshift bed fashioned from a few pieces of scrap wood has no cushion or extra sheet, and she says she often wakes up at night and feels a chill in her bones.
Her parents work in a faraway county and bring home only 2,000 yuan (US$322) a year, according to Li's uncle.
Their income is low, even by local standards.
Even with all of her housework, Li ranks third among the 30 second-graders at the village school she attends. But many rural parents in China, including Li's, do not believe their daughters deserve the same treatment as their sons.
"It's useless to send girls to high school. They are married off all the same, no matter how many years they spend at school," Li's uncle said.
While everyone's living conditions are poor, girls have it the worst.
Young brides are not rare in the countryside, partly because girls who have reached puberty are often at risk of sexual assault.
The lack of care and protection is a crucial problem for rural girls who get left behind when their parents move away for work, said Sun Xiaoying, a researcher with Guangxi's regional academy of social sciences.
"Parents should abandon their traditional preferences for boys and care more for girls," Sun said. "The government should build more boarding schools for rural left-behind children, and teachers should be more attentive to girls' health and development."
The nine-year-old fixes breakfast for her brothers, cleans the house and feeds the pigs before making her way to a village school in a remote area of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.
Her limbs are covered in bruises from countless falls on the craggy, slippery trail leading to her family's pig sty perched on a mountain near her home.
She feeds the pigs, as well as some chickens and ducks, so her family can have meat on the dinner table when her parents return from working in another part of the autonomous region.
A typical meal for her consists of plain rice or noodles with a small portion of vegetables. A free school lunch program, which was initiated by Chinese media and later expanded and financed by the government, ensures she can have an egg and noodles with minced meat.
Li's winter wardrobe is a jacket, jeans and a sweater that a neighbor gave her.
At night, when temperatures approach freezing during the winter and there's no heat, she stays fully dressed. Her makeshift bed fashioned from a few pieces of scrap wood has no cushion or extra sheet, and she says she often wakes up at night and feels a chill in her bones.
Her parents work in a faraway county and bring home only 2,000 yuan (US$322) a year, according to Li's uncle.
Their income is low, even by local standards.
Even with all of her housework, Li ranks third among the 30 second-graders at the village school she attends. But many rural parents in China, including Li's, do not believe their daughters deserve the same treatment as their sons.
"It's useless to send girls to high school. They are married off all the same, no matter how many years they spend at school," Li's uncle said.
While everyone's living conditions are poor, girls have it the worst.
Young brides are not rare in the countryside, partly because girls who have reached puberty are often at risk of sexual assault.
The lack of care and protection is a crucial problem for rural girls who get left behind when their parents move away for work, said Sun Xiaoying, a researcher with Guangxi's regional academy of social sciences.
"Parents should abandon their traditional preferences for boys and care more for girls," Sun said. "The government should build more boarding schools for rural left-behind children, and teachers should be more attentive to girls' health and development."
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