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Female infanticide in India has a history spanning centuries. Poverty, the dowry system, births to unmarried women, deformed infants, famine, lack of support services and maternal illnesses such as postpartum depression are among the causes that have been proposed to explain the phenomenon of female infanticide in India. Infanticide is nowadays a criminal offence in India but it is an under-reported crime; reliable objective data is unavailable. There were around 100 male and female infanticides reported in the country in 2010, giving an official rate of less than one per million people. == Definition == Section 315 of the Indian Penal Code defines infanticide as the killing of an infant in the 0–1 age group. The Code differentiates between this and numerous other crimes against children, including foeticide and murder. Some scholarly publications on infanticide use the legal definition. Others, such as the collaboration of Renu Dube, Reena Dube and Rashmi Bhatnagar, who describe themselves as "postcolonial feminists", adopt a broader scope for ''infanticide'', applying it from foeticide through to femicide at an unspecified age. Barbara Miller, an anthropologist, has "for convenience" used the term to refer to all non-accidental deaths of children up to the age of around 15–16, which is culturally considered to be the age when childhood ends in rural India. She notes that the act of infanticide can be "outright", such as a physical beating, or take a "passive" form through actions such as neglect and starvation. Neonaticide, being the killing of a child within 24 hours of birth, is sometimes considered as a separate study. Studies of systematic infanticide based on gender have tended to concentrate on female children – ''female infanticide'' – but there are instances where male children are targeted, one historic example of which was in Japan. Eleanor Scott, an archaeologist who has specialised in the study of infant deaths and their cultural associations, notes that the tendency to concentrate on the female examples is misplaced and driven by the desire of 19th-century cultural anthropologists to explain the evolution of lineages and systems of marriage. Scott also notes that the Netsilik Inuit "are in fact the only society for which there is any real qualitative data about the existence of the practice of female infanticide." 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Female infanticide in India」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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