The mental health issues ripple through society. One study discovered that 14.7 percent of unmarried men admitted having paid for sex in 2000 - about double the rate for married men. More likely to engage in commercial and unprotected sex, these men are likely the drivers of a growing market for female trafficking. Women from the around the world - especially nearby countries, including Myanmar, Vietnam, Laos, Singapore, Mongolia and North Korea - are trafficked to China for commercial sex exploitation in growing numbers; in 2013, the U.S. State Department designated China as one of the world's worst offenders in combating human trafficking. "China has become the sex- and labor-trafficking capital of the world," said U.S. Representative Chris Smith, R-N.J., at the time.
It appears that the outraged cries from within and without have been heard. The Chinese government has spent millions of dollars in recent years to fund research into the implications of this radical skew in gender population numbers. Recently, China has also reshaped social policy. For example, it is setting up small old-age pensions; creating preferential admission to universities for families that have only girls; and making sex-selective abortions, which are illegal, even more difficult to obtain by cracking down on ultrasound procedures after 14 weeks of pregnancy, the time at which the genitals of a child can be discerned.
China's more relaxed family planning laws and re-imagined social policy will help, but a crippling gender imbalance will continue for many, many years. A true restoration of natural sex proportions may never happen. By virtue of China's large population (and the large population of India, which also skews male), gender imbalance is now a global concern. "The overall sex ratio of the world now is something like 101.4, so for the first time that we have records, there are actually more men on planet Earth than women," Hudson said.
Linkback:
https://tubagbohol.mikeligalig.com/index.php?topic=78823.0