A representative of an international aid agency working in Swaziland has called for some Swazi children to be sterilised to stop them having children of their own.
Linda Kanya, of Skillshare International, a UK-based agency, says, ‘women and girls of unsound mind’ are ‘greatly at risk of being taken advantage of sexually’.
Kanya goes on to say, ‘The guardians of this population should have the option of sterilizing their child.’
Kanya leaves the vile suggestion there and goes on to list a whole number of what Skillshare calls ‘Reproductive Rights’ that need to be addressed in Swaziland.
I stand to be corrected here, but I thought the idea of forced sterilisation of people of ‘unsound mind’ went out with Nazi Germany.
The suggestion, which was published in the Times Sunday (11 May 2008), is as crass as it is appalling.
Kanya was writing in a column in the newspaper that each week previews what can be seen that week on a television programme Skillshare does for Swazi TV.
When Kanya wrote this she was clearly the spokesperson for Skillshare.
For those who don’t know Skillshare, it is a UK-government funded organisation that sends ‘professional’ people as volunteers to countries in Africa and Asia.
It claims to have a vision of a world without ‘injustice and inequality’. It also claims to ‘promote and protect the rights of disadvantaged communities’ and not to discriminate against the disabled.
Quite how forced sterilisation of people Skillshare considers are of ‘unsound mind’ fits in with its supposed fight against injustice and support for the disabled is beyond me.
Would Skillshare tell us whether forced sterilisation is its official policy in Swaziland?
If it is, then we also need to know what plan Skillshare has to fulfil this policy in the kingdom.
Also, can Skillshare tell us whether this policy is supported by its paymasters, the UK Government?
This is indeed appalling. In the United States I believe that sterilization laws persisted after World War II in a number of states. And of course eugenics, of which this is a species, had many self-identified progressive proponents before Nazism put it in bad odor, including Gunnar and Alva Myrdal, Margaret Sanger, and the first president of the small liberal arts college in the U.S. where I was an undergraduate (for some fairly random examples). It is bizarre and disturbing to see this recrudescence. In the U.S. there were strong racial and ethnic elements to the actual practice of sterilization -- I wonder if Skillshare advocates the same policies in the U.K.
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