Psychology Essays

Prejudice and how it works : The Persecution of Women and its Depiction in Historical Art

The biggest crimes against humanity have occurred because of prejudice and territorial dispute . If we account for the fact that prejudice has often been an important causative factor behind territorial wars , its effect on the history of humankind is nothing short of devastating and the need for its ' control and cessation imperative

Prejudice of course has many causes but its ' research in recent years has been stimulated by two issues . The first has been anti-Semitism and

its expression first in Nazi Germany and later in the reaction of the Islamic nations to the state of Israel . The other has been racism , a serious social issue in the United States and an increasingly global phenomenon . In twentieth-century society , racism and anti-Semitism have come to epitomize the destructive power of prejudice in human affairs , as well as its tragic irrationality (Duckit , J ,

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Research on prejudice against women has been less specific , possibly because the problem has been alleviated in western society . This is patently unfair and indicative of a lack of concern for a worldwide problem . Enormous crimes have been committed against women and large-scale persecution is continuing today . Recent research however has tended to concentrate on the problems of race , that too mostly in the black-white context and on the Western and Islamic perception of Semitism . In fact , the rampant prejudice against woman in most parts of the world and their continuous mutilation and genocide deserves research that is more detailed as well as intervention that is far more aggressive

A horrifying , yet lesser-known example of prejudice is the murderous anti woman stance of Indian society . Lancet magazine (India loses 10 m female births ,

1 ) reports a recent finding by a team of Canadian and Indian researchers that approximately 500 ,000 female infants are killed in India every year . These exterminations are carried out mostly through pre-birth sex determination followed by selective abortion . They further conclude that as abortions became easier through the widespread availability of ultrasound equipment around twenty years ago , it is quite likely that ten million female foeticides could have happened in India in the last two decades . The official census figures of 2001 (Male-Female Ratio in Country alarming , P1 ) which show a sharp drop in the female : male ratios tend to corroborate this finding . Possibly the enormity of these conclusions will be better comprehended by comparing the findings of the Lancet report with the UK every year a fertility ,

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A figure of ten million female deaths is nearly seventy percent more than the being that the killed in India were all unborn female infants . They were also not killed by a rampaging megalomaniac and his crazed accomplices in a short burst of insane frenzy . Their parents murdered them systematically with the help of conniving midwives and abetting doctors simply because they were the wrong sex

Prejudice against women is pervasive . It exists in all patriarchal societies and...