Is the difference in violence against women between the West and the rest just one of the many wholesome factors that are bundled together in the Matthew Effect—democracy, prosperity, economic freedom, education, technology, decent government? Not entirely. Korea and Japan are affluent democracies but have more domestic violence against women, and several Latin American countries that are far less developed appear to have more equal sex ratios and lower absolute rates. This leaves some statistical wiggle room to look for the differences across societies that make women safer, holding affluence constant. Archer found that countries in which women are better represented in government and the professions, and in which they earn a larger proportion of earned income, are less likely to have women at the receiving end of spousal abuse. Also, cultures that are classified as more individualistic, where people feel they are individuals with the right to pursue their own goals, have relatively less domestic violence against women than the cultures classified as collectivist, where people feel they are part of a community whose interests take precedence over their own.
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These correlations don’t prove causation, but they are consistent with the suggestion that the decline of violence against women in the West has been pushed along by a humanist mindset that elevates the rights of individual people over the traditions of the community, and that increasingly embraces the vantage point of women.
Though elsewhere I have been chary about making predictions, I think it’s extremely likely that in the coming decades violence against women will decrease throughout the world. The pressure will come both from the top down and from the bottom up. At the top, a consensus has formed within the international community that violence against women is the most pressing human rights problem remaining in the world.
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There have been symbolic measures such as the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women (November 25) and numerous proclamations from bully pulpits such as the United Nations and its member governments. Though the measures are toothless, the history of denunciations of slavery, whaling, piracy, privateering, chemical weaponry, apartheid, and atmospheric nuclear testing shows that international shaming campaigns can make a difference over the long run.
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As the head of the UN Development Fund for Women has noted, “There are now more national plans, policies, and laws in place than ever before, and momentum is also growing in the intergovernmental arena.”
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Among the grassroots, attitudes all over the world will almost certainly ensure that women will gain greater economic and political representation in the coming years. A 2010 survey by the Pew Research Center Global Attitudes Project of twenty-two countries found that in most of them, at least 90 percent of the respondents of both sexes believe that women should have equal rights, including the United States, China, India, Japan, South Korea, Turkey, Lebanon, and countries in Europe and Latin America. Even in Egypt, Jordan, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Kenya, more than 60 percent favor equal rights; only in Nigeria does the proportion fall just short of half.
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Support for women being allowed to work outside the home is even higher. And recall the global Gallup survey that showed that even in Islamic countries a majority of women believe that women should be able to vote as they please, work at any job, and serve in government, and that in most of the countries, a majority of the men agreed.
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As this pent-up demand is released, the interests of women are bound to be given greater consideration in their countries’ policies and norms. The argument that women should not be assaulted by the men in their lives is irrefutable, and as Victor Hugo noted, “There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.”
CHILDREN’S RIGHTS AND THE DECLINE OF INFANTICIDE, SPANKING, CHILD ABUSE, AND BULLYING
What do Moses, Ishmael, Romulus and Remus, Oedipus, Cyrus the Great, Sargon, Gilgamesh, and Hou Chi (a founder of the Chou Dynasty) have in common? They were all exposed as infants—abandoned by their parents and left to the elements.
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The image of a helpless baby dying alone of cold, hunger, and predation is a potent tug on the heartstrings, so it is not surprising that a rise from infant exposure to dynastic greatness found its way into the mythologies of Jewish, Muslim, Roman, Greek, Persian, Akkadian, Sumerian, and Chinese civilizations. But the ubiquity of the exposure archetype is not just a lesson in what makes for a good story arc. It is also a lesson on how common infanticide was in human history. From time immemorial, parents have abandoned, smothered, strangled, beaten, drowned, or poisoned many of their newborns.
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A survey of cultures by the anthropologist Laila Williamson reveals that infanticide has been practiced on every continent and by every kind of society, from nonstate bands and villages (77 percent of which have an accepted custom of infanticide) to advanced civilizations.
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Until recently, between 10 and 15 percent of all babies were killed shortly after they were born, and in some societies the rate has been as high as 50 percent.
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In the words of the historian Lloyd deMause, “All families once practiced infanticide. All states trace their origin to child sacrifice. All religions began with the mutilation and murder of children.”
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Though infanticide is the most extreme form of maltreatment of children, our cultural heritage tells of many others, including the sacrifice of children to gods; the sale of children into slavery, marriage, and religious servitude; the exploitation of children to clean chimneys and crawl through tunnels in coal mines; and the subjection of children to forms of corporal punishment that verge on or cross over into torture.
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We have come a long way to arrive at an age in which one-pound preemies are rescued with heroic surgery, children are not expected to be economically productive until their fourth decade, and violence against children has been defined down to dodgeball.
How can we make sense of something that runs as contrary to the continuation of life as killing a newborn? In the concluding chapter of
Hardness of Heart/Hardness of Life
, his magisterial survey of infanticide around the world, the physician Larry Milner makes a confession:
I began this book with one purpose in mind—to understand, as stated in the Introduction: “How someone can take their own child, and strangle it to death?” When I first raised the question many years ago, I thought the issue to be suggestive of some unique pathologic alteration of Nature’s way. It did not seem rational that evolution would maintain an inherited tendency to kill one’s offspring when survival was already in such a delicate balance. Darwinian natural selection of genetic material meant that only the survival of the fittest was guaranteed; a tendency toward infanticide must certainly be a sign of unfit behavior that would not pass this reasonable standard. But the answer which has emerged from my research indicates that one of the most “natural” things a human being can do is voluntarily kill its own offspring when faced with a variety of stressful situations.
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The solution to Milner’s puzzlement lies in the subfield of evolutionary biology called life history theory.
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The intuition that a mother should treat every offspring as infinitely precious, far from being an implication of the theory of natural selection, is incompatible with it. Selection acts to maximize an organism’s expected lifetime reproductive output, and that requires that it negotiate the tradeoff between investing in a new offspring and conserving its resources for current and future offspring. Mammals are extreme among animals in the amount of time, energy, and food they invest in their young, and humans are extreme among mammals. Pregnancy and birth are only the first chapter in a mother’s investment career, and a mammalian mother faces an expenditure of more calories in suckling the offspring to maturity than she expended in bearing it.
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Nature generally abhors the sunk-cost fallacy, and so we expect mothers to assess the offspring and the circumstances to decide whether to commit themselves to the additional investment or to conserve their energy for its born or unborn siblings.
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If a newborn is sickly, or if the situation is unpromising for its survival, they do not throw good money after bad but cut their losses and favor the healthiest in the litter or wait until times get better and they can try again.
To a biologist, human infanticide is an example of this triage.
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Until recently, women nursed their children for two to four years before returning to full fertility. Many children died, especially in the perilous first year. Most women saw no more than two or three of their children survive to adulthood, and many did not see any survive. To become a grandmother in the unforgiving environment of our evolutionary ancestors, a woman would have had to make hard choices. The triage theory predicts that a mother would let a newborn die when its prospects for survival to adulthood were poor. The forecast may be based on bad signs in the infant, such as being deformed or unresponsive, or bad signs for successful motherhood, such as being burdened with older children, beset by war or famine, or unable to count on support from relatives or the baby’s father. It should also depend on whether she is young enough to have opportunities to try again.
Martin Daly and Margo Wilson tested the triage theory by examining a sample of sixty unrelated societies from a database of ethnographies.
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Infanticide was documented in a majority of them, and in 112 cases the anthropologists recorded a reason. Eighty-seven percent of the reasons fit the triage theory: the infant was not sired by the woman’s husband, the infant was deformed or ill, or the infant had strikes against its chances of surviving to maturity, such as being a twin, having an older sibling close in age, having no father around, or being born into a family that had fallen on hard economic times.
The ubiquity and evolutionary intelligibility of infanticide suggest that for all its apparent inhumanity, it is usually not a form of wanton murder but falls into a special category of violence. Anthropologists who interview these women (or their relatives, since the event may be too painful for the woman to discuss) often recount that the mother saw the death as an unavoidable tragedy and grieved for the lost child. Napoleon Chagnon, for example, wrote of the wife of a Yanomamö headman, “Bahami was pregnant when I began my fieldwork, but she destroyed the infant when it was born—a boy in this case—explaining tearfully that she had no choice. The new baby would have competed with Ariwari, her youngest child, who was still nursing. Rather than expose Ariwari to the dangers and uncertainty of an early weaning, she chose to terminate the newborn instead.”
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Though the Yanomamö are the so-called fierce people, infanticide is not necessarily a manifestation of fierceness across the board. Some warring tribes, particularly in Africa, rarely kill their newborns, while some relatively peaceful ones kill them regularly.
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The title of Milner’s magnum opus comes from a quotation from a 19th-century founder of anthropology, Edward Tylor, who wrote, “Infanticide arises from hardness of life rather than hardness of heart.”
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The fateful tipping point between keeping and sacrificing a newborn is set both by internal emotions and by cultural norms. In a culture such as ours that reveres birth and takes every step to allow babies to thrive, we tend to think that joyful bonding between mother and newborn is close to reflexive. But in fact it requires overcoming considerable psychological obstacles. In the 1st century CE, Plutarch pointed out an uncomfortable truth:
There is nothing so imperfect, so helpless, so naked, so shapeless, so foul, as man observed at birth, to whom alone, one might almost say, Nature has given not even a clean passage to the light; but, defiled with blood and covered with filth, and resembling more one just slain than one just born, he is an object for none to touch or lift up or kiss or embrace except for someone who loves with a natural affection.
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The “natural affection” is far from automatic. Daly and Wilson, and later the anthropologist Edward Hagen, have proposed that postpartum depression and its milder version, the baby blues, are not a hormonal malfunction but the emotional implementation of the decision period for keeping a child.
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Mothers with postpartum depression often feel emotionally detached from their newborns and may harbor intrusive thoughts of harming them. Mild depression, psychologists have found, often gives people a more accurate appraisal of their life prospects than the rose-tinted view we normally enjoy. The typical rumination of a depressed new mother—how will I cope with this burden?—has been a legitimate question for mothers throughout history who faced the weighty choice between a definite tragedy now and the possibility of an even greater tragedy later. As the situation becomes manageable and the blues dissipate, many women report falling in love with their baby, coming to see it as a uniquely wonderful individual.
Hagen examined the psychiatric literature on postpartum depression to test five predictions of the theory that it is an evaluation period for investing in a newborn. As predicted, postpartum depression is more common in women who lack social support (they are single, separated, dissatisfied with their marriage, or distant from their parents), who had had a complicated delivery or an unhealthy infant, and who were unemployed or whose husbands were unemployed. He found reports of postpartum depression in a number of non-Western populations which showed the same risk factors (though he could not find enough suitable studies of traditional kin-based societies). Finally, postpartum depression is only loosely tied to measured hormonal imbalances, suggesting that it is not a malfunction but a design feature.