For sure, in your community, you have seen flyers distributed on trees, street lamp posts, at shops, cafés, etc., with the face of a girl or woman and a text in capital letters saying: MISSING or DISAPPEARED.
Where is she? Have you seen her? What do you know about her? These are the main questions many families ask daily about their missing one.
Ann, Ayodele, Maria, Caroline, Liu, Shanel, Sara, Fahima, Amal, Chinedu, Cosette, Claudia, Wiola, Natasza, Akiko, Elvira, etc.?
These names represent our grandmothers, wives, daughters, cousins, aunts, sisters, friends, neighbours, and co-workers who are missing today.
The term “missing women” was first used by a scholar, Amartya Sen, who brought to attention that it’s a result of sex-selective abortion, unequal treatment, and infanticide of girls. His essay, published in The New York Review of Books in 1990, revealed the sex ratio, which measures the number of males born in society against the number of women. This demonstrated that roughly 100 million women are missing worldwide.
“These numbers tell us, quietly, a terrible story of inequality and neglect leading to the excessive mortality of women,” said researcher Amartya in his essay.
The topic of missing women is vast. Worldwide, women are missing because of sex-selection abortions, female infanticide, lack of pregnancy and childbirth education, poor health care, low quality of nutrition, and the growth of gender violence toward women ( sex trade, feminicide, etc).
The State of the World Population 2020 report reveals that 142 million women are missing globally. India has the highest rate with 46 million.
In many countries, the loss of a beloved one is an open wound. In Latin American countries like Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Peru, Brazil, and Uruguay. Millions of people are missing between 1976 and 1986, at the hands of the military dictatorships.
During my first visit to Buenos Aires, Argentina, I remember it was heartbreaking to see the Mothers of May Square (Madres de la Plaza de Mayo), who were protesting with their white headscarves, which symbolise the diapers embroidered with the names and dates of their children’s birth. These children were missing during the military dictatorship.
Today, this cruel reality continues in many countries where activists, human rights defenders, journalists and others are going missing or forced to disappear daily; many of them are women.
The Women from Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico (Las Mujeres de Juarez), who have been missing and murdered by hundreds, are a clear example of missing women.
Iconography of Mexico
Colombia is another country where women are disappearing daily. According to the newspaper Noticias Medellin, in an article from last June, from January to April 2020, a total of 1,563 people have disappeared, of which 583 are women, 335 are under 18 years old, and 248 are over 18 years old. This was stated in a preliminary report from the National Forensic Medicine.
We don’t want the list of missing women’s names to increase, we don’t want to continue walking in our neighbourhood and seeing flyers of missing women, and to continue hearing about the same topic every day.
What can we do?
-Stand together in this fight.
-Support friends and family who have been through this painful experience.
-If you have any information about a missing woman, call and give it, remember it can be useful.
-Don’t forget the names of those beloved women who are missing.
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