Talk:Female infanticide in India/GA1

GA Review

Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch

Reviewer: Brirush (talk · contribs) 20:55, 29 March 2015 (UTC)

I am placing this article on hold. Here are my evaluations of the five GA criteria:

1. Well-written: Mostly good, although there are numerous errors or difficult sentences. For instance, the following sentences in the section State response are confusing:

• The plan was to allow families to give their child up for adoption without having to go through the adoption procedure, no names are taken.
• In the four years following the programme's inception 136 baby girls were given over, but in 2000, 1,218 cases of female infanticide were reported, the scheme was deemed a failure and abandoned but the following year was reinstated.
• Once the obligations are met the state puts aside ₨ 2000 in a state run fund, and upon reaching twenty the girl may use the money, which now should stand at ₨ 10,000, to either marry, or go into higher education. (Reviewer's note: Why should it now stand at ₨ 10,000?)

2. Verifiable: The sources seem to be good; however, there are frequently entire paragraphs with many different topics with one reference at the end. Does this reference apply to the whole paragraph?

• Example: In 1857, John Cave-Brown documented for the first time the practice of female infanticide among the Jats in the Punjab region. Data from the census during the colonial period and from 2001 propose that the Jat have practiced female infanticide for 150 years. In the Gujarat region, the first cited examples of discrepancies in the sex ratio among Lewa Patidars and Kanbis dates from 1847.[11][12]

Do those two references describe everything in the previous paragraph? Does one describe one sentence, and one another? It is unclear, and this is true throughout the history section.

3. Broad in its coverage: This is the biggest issue. There needs to be much more on the effect this has had on society. Many of your sources describe the economic and societal impact of female infanticide. Men travelling long distances or paying to get spouses, etc. This is really important for the article.

4. Neutral: This article is surprisingly neutral. At first, it seemed to be very one-sided, and I expected to find dissenting opinions; however, researching the issue, it seems that essentially everyone agrees with the viewpoint in the article. A great issue to write an article on.

5. Stable: This article is stable.

6. Images: The article could use more images, but it isn't necessary. Is there any press image of a classroom full of boys with a few girls in it? Or of an Indian man travelling out of the country to find a bride? Etc.

SummaryFor these reasons, I am putting the article on hold. The coverage is the largest issue; I feel strongly that this article should include more about the effects on society. Compare the article female genital mutilation and its section on health effects or the effects section of domestic violence. This may require a great deal of effort.

Brirush (talk) 20:55, 29 March 2015 (UTC)

On it, and thank you for taking the review. Darkness Shines (talk) 10:22, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

Sorry, have been away most of the week and am about to be away for a few more days, I probably will not get to this till next week sometime. On the refs, both are there for a particular paragraph, not separate sentences. But I will double check. Darkness Shines (talk) 07:00, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

@Brirush: I have concerns about this article's neutrality. Infanticide is widely defined by scholars as, "the crime of killing a child within a year of birth" 1, 2; or as homicide of a newborn. The article conflates "infanticide" with overall all-ages gender sex ratios in India and with female foeticide in India. To mix these three important but different issues, without defining infanticide and without clarifying discussion, is a weakness of this article. An adult female or male, and even a newborn, may die from diseases, natural causes or accidents (for example, read 3a and 3b - vast majority of neonatal and infant deaths in India and outside India are not infanticides). All these and other causes affect a nation's child sex ratio and overall sex ratio. This article is loaded with overall sex ratio and overall gender population data. The article implies that the overall sex ratio and foeticide is same as or indicative of infant homicide in 0-1 age group (infanticide). This is not true, worldwide or in India, see 1, 2, 3a, 4. All this needs to be addressed in this article.

Even where overall sex ratio is discussed, the article fails to present the recent dissenting data and scholarly views. For example, Alain Klarsfeld (2014) at p. 105 in ISBN 978-0-857-93931-9 states the 2011 census overall sex ratio of 940 which is higher than 2001 census (and 2001 ratio was higher than 1991 ratio). Similarly see, Ghosh (2012) at p. 414 in ISBN 978-8-120-34649-9, etc.

The history section too is one sided. Dissenting peer reviewed scholarly views from sources such as 5, 6, Jackson's book on Infanticide (ISBN 978-0-754-60318-4), India-related discussion Johansson's infanticide chapter in ISBN 978-0-202-36221-2, etc should be summarized.

The article lacks a summary of secondary sources that have studied the psychological health and social issue perspectives in cases of infanticide, such as India-related studies on postpartum syndrome and female infanticide, see 7, 8, 9, etc.

In places, the current article cites sources that never use the word infanticide, or infant. For example, Madeleine Bunting's 2011 article (reference [3] in the article).

I am willing to help and cooperatively improve this article. The current article, although has some well researched content, suffers from serious neutrality issues. SamanthaBooth (talk) 20:03, 13 April 2015 (UTC)

@SamanthaBooth: Thank you for this information! I did not know about the more recent dissenting views, and had difficulty finding them on my own when I looked earlier.

I agree that psychological and social and effects should have a large section in this article, and that this is one of its largest deficiencies.

Because this article went 5 months without being reviewed, I plan on giving one month for all interested parties to bring this article to GA status.Brirush (talk) 17:00, 14 April 2015 (UTC)

Note that a challenge has been raised about the appropriateness of the 19th-century illustration of "infanticide in the Ganges", see Talk:Female infanticide in India#Image disputed. Unfortunately DS is aggressively edit-warring the image back in again, even though it's been shown to illustrate something different from the topic of this article. I'd strongly recommend against passing this as GA as long as this behaviour continues. Fut.Perf. ☼ 08:47, 17 April 2015 (UTC)

@Future Perfect at Sunrise: If there is still an edit war by then, I'll definitely fail it for lack of stability. Thanks for helping with this.Brirush (talk) 14:05, 17 April 2015 (UTC)

Just a few more issues:

• Just tagged one sentence as "failed verification" [1], explanation here.
• Poor writing:
  • "And that the male desire to retain their luxurious lifestyle was the primary reason for the killing of female children" (elliptical sentence with "and")
  • "The plan was to allow families to give their child up for adoption without having to go through the adoption procedure, no names are taken." (asyndetic connection and tense mismatch)
  • "As of 2005 it is estimated that 22 million women are missing in India, which had been estimated at 3 million while under colonial rule." (wrongly connected relative clause)
  • "The scheme which was piloted in Tamil Nadu, saw cradles placed outside state run health facilities." (comma error"
  • "The chief minister of Tamil Nadu at the time, added another incentive" (comma error)
  • "but in 2000, 1,218 cases of female infanticide were reported, the scheme was deemed a failure and abandoned but the following year was reinstated" (poorly structured enumeration)
  • "Bumiller says in the chapter on female infanticide titled, No More Little Girls that the prevailing reason..." (misplaced comma)
  • "the majority of female infanticides in India during the colonial period occurred for the most part in the North West" (redundant "majority"/"for the most part")
  • "Data from the census during the colonial period and from 2001 propose ..." (data don't "propose" things, although they may suggest things)
  • "In 1857, … In 1789, during British colonial rule in India…" (poorly ordered sequence of paragraphs)
  • "Although the state has taken steps[a] to abolish the dowry system, the practice persists,…" (statement misplaced in "colonial" section; should go into section on present-day status)
  • "In India, since 1974 amniocentesis has been used to determine the gender of a child before birth, and should the child be female then an abortion can be carried out.[18] According to women's rights activist Donna Fernandes, some practices are so deeply embedded within Indian culture it is "almost impossible to do away with them", and she has said that India is undergoing a type of "female genocide".[19]" (jumbled, disconnected structuring)
  • "that in 2012 female children aged between 1 and 5 were 75 percent more likely to die as opposed to boys" (syntactically inconsistent wording of comparison, should be "more... than")
  • "In the Indian state of Tamil Nadu during British rule, the practice of female infanticide in Tamil Nadu among the Kallars and the Todas was reported." (statement misplaced in post-colonial section, should be in "colonial")
  • "Cultural anthropologist Barbara D. Miller, working in Northern India, noted that over a five-day period, only male children were being brought in for treatment..." (sentence misplaced in "international reactions" section
  • Statistics in the "post-colonial" section and the lead section need to be merged with each other and the different figures in both sections need to be ordered related to each other properly.

Fut.Perf. ☼ 12:20, 19 April 2015 (UTC)

Further: On the whole, in the versions last edited by DS [2], there is an evident general problem of poor structuring. Both the "colonial" and the "post-colonial" sections contain material that ought to be in the other (examples pointed out above), and the decision which details are mentioned in the lead and which ones in the body appears haphazard. The newer versions as edited by User:SamanthaBooth are not that much better [3]. This text now appears rather argumentative and suffers from lead fixation, with the lead blown up beyond proportion with data and editorial argument evidently geared towards relativizing and exonorating the practice. No matter which of these versions one might choose to work from, there'd still be a lot of work to do to get it up to scratch. Fut.Perf. ☼ 06:37, 24 April 2015 (UTC)

I share @Future Perfect at Sunrise's concern. The lead is disproportionate. It discusses gender population difference, then implies millions of female are missing. It is unclear in the lead whether this difference is only because of infanticide or whether it is partially contributing. If it is the latter, then to what extent? Egypt, Iran, Iraq, UAE, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and many countries have worse higher total males per total 100 females, yet scholarly sources do not link this gender difference in the Middle East, Central Asia, North Africa and Caribbean nations to female infanticide. Even in India and China's case, after days of digging, I have not found a single scholarly source that asserts that the numeric difference between total males and total females, was or is largely because of millions of infants being killed by their parents every year in China or India. This aspect of the article remains incomplete. This "gender difference and infanticide" discussion is not a neutrality issue, but an insertion of a tangential gender numeric difference issue, where the casual link to infanticide, or its relevance and irrelevance thereof, is neither discussed nor amplified.

I have removed the NPOV tag that I had added, but I believe the article needs lot more work to be a GA. SamanthaBooth (talk) 17:56, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

After one month, I am failing this nomination for a variety of reasons. One reason is, obviously, stability. My primary concern with coverage was the lack of a section about impact on society; this is an important omission. For this and several other reasons, I am failing the GA nomination.Brirush (talk) 11:44, 30 April 2015 (UTC)