China Says It Will Allow Couples to Have 3 Children, Up From 2
The move is the Communist Party’s latest attempt to reverse declining birthrates and avert a population crisis, but experts say it is woefully inadequate.
China said on Monday that it would allow all married couples to have three children, ending a two-child policy that has failed to raise the country’s declining birthrates and avert a demographic crisis.
The announcement by the ruling Communist Party represents an acknowledgment that its limits on reproduction, the world’s toughest, have jeopardized the country’s future. The labor pool is shrinking and the population is graying, threatening the industrial strategy that China has used for decades to emerge from poverty to become an economic powerhouse.
But it is far from clear that relaxing the policy further will pay off. People in China have responded coolly to the party’s earlier move, in 2016, to allow couples to have two children. To them, such measures do little to assuage their anxiety over the rising cost of education and of supporting aging parents, made worse by the lack of day care and the pervasive culture of long work hours.
In a nod to those concerns, the party also indicated on Monday that it would improve maternity leave and workplace protections, pledging to make it easier for couples to have more children. But those protections are all but absent for single mothers in China, who despite the push for more children still lack access to benefits.
Births in China have fallen for four consecutive years, including in 2020, when the number of babies born dropped to the lowest since the Mao era. The country’s total fertility rate — an estimate of the number of children born over a woman’s lifetime — now stands at 1.3, well below the replacement rate of 2.1, raising the possibility of a shrinking population over time.
The announcement on Monday still splits the difference between individual reproductive rights and government limits over women’s bodies. Prominent voices within China have called on the party to scrap its restrictions on births altogether. But Beijing, under Xi Jinping, the party leader who has pushed for greater control in the daily lives of the country’s 1.4 billion people, has resisted.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/31/worl ... 778d3e6de3
SOCIAL TRENDS
Have Three Children? No Way, Many Chinese Say.
Intense workplace competition, inadequate child care and widespread job discrimination against pregnant women have made childbearing an unappealing prospect for many.
After China said it would allow couples to have three children, the state news media trumpeted the move as a major change that would help stimulate growth. But across much of the country, the announcement was met with indignation.
Women worried that the move would only exacerbate discrimination from employers reluctant to pay maternity leave. Young people fumed that they were already hard-pressed to find jobs and take care of themselves, let alone a child (or three). Working-class parents said the financial burden of more children would be unbearable.
“I definitely will not have another child,” said Hu Daifang, a former migrant worker in Sichuan Province. Mr. Hu, 35, said he was already struggling, especially after his mother fell ill and could no longer help care for his two children. “It feels like we are just surviving, not living.”
For many ordinary Chinese, the news about the policy change on Monday was only a reminder of a problem they’d long recognized: the drastic inadequacy of China’s social safety net and legal protections that would enable them to have more children.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/01/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Intense workplace competition, inadequate child care and widespread job discrimination against pregnant women have made childbearing an unappealing prospect for many.
After China said it would allow couples to have three children, the state news media trumpeted the move as a major change that would help stimulate growth. But across much of the country, the announcement was met with indignation.
Women worried that the move would only exacerbate discrimination from employers reluctant to pay maternity leave. Young people fumed that they were already hard-pressed to find jobs and take care of themselves, let alone a child (or three). Working-class parents said the financial burden of more children would be unbearable.
“I definitely will not have another child,” said Hu Daifang, a former migrant worker in Sichuan Province. Mr. Hu, 35, said he was already struggling, especially after his mother fell ill and could no longer help care for his two children. “It feels like we are just surviving, not living.”
For many ordinary Chinese, the news about the policy change on Monday was only a reminder of a problem they’d long recognized: the drastic inadequacy of China’s social safety net and legal protections that would enable them to have more children.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/01/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Why Is It OK to Be Mean to the Ugly?
A manager sits behind a table and decides he’s going to fire a woman because he doesn’t like her skin. If he fires her because her skin is brown, we call that racism and there is legal recourse. If he fires her because her skin is female, we call that sexism and there is legal recourse. If he fires her because her skin is pockmarked and he finds her unattractive, well, we don’t talk about that much and, in most places in America, there is no legal recourse.
This is puzzling. We live in a society that abhors discrimination on the basis of many traits. And yet one of the major forms of discrimination is lookism, prejudice against the unattractive. And this gets almost no attention and sparks little outrage. Why?
Lookism starts, like every form of bigotry, with prejudice and stereotypes.
Studies show that most people consider an “attractive” face to have clean, symmetrical features. We find it easier to recognize and categorize these prototypical faces than we do irregular and “unattractive” ones. So we find it easier — from a brain processing perspective — to look at attractive people.
Attractive people thus start off with a slight physical advantage. But then people project all sorts of widely unrelated stereotypes onto them. In survey after survey, beautiful people are described as trustworthy, competent, friendly, likable and intelligent, while ugly people get the opposite labels. This is a version of the halo effect.
Not all the time, but often, the attractive get the first-class treatment. Research suggests they are more likely to be offered job interviews, more likely to be hired when interviewed and more likely to be promoted than less attractive individuals. They are more likely to receive loans and more likely to receive lower interest rates on those loans.
The discriminatory effects of lookism are pervasive. Attractive economists are more likely to study at high-ranked graduate programs and their papers are cited more often than papers from their less attractive peers. One study found that when unattractive criminals committed a moderate misdemeanor, their fines were about four times as large as those of attractive criminals.
Daniel Hamermesh, a leading scholar in this field, observed that an American worker who is among the bottom one-seventh in looks earns about 10 to 15 percent less a year than one in the top third. An unattractive person misses out on nearly a quarter-million dollars in earnings over a lifetime.
The overall effect of these biases is vast. One 2004 study found that more people report being discriminated against because of their looks than because of their ethnicity.
In a study published in the current issue of the American Journal of Sociology, Ellis P. Monk Jr., Michael H. Esposito and Hedwig Lee report that the earnings gap between people perceived as attractive and unattractive rivals or exceeds the earnings gap between white and Black adults. They find the attractiveness curve is especially punishing for Black women. Those who meet the socially dominant criteria for beauty see an earnings boost; those who don’t earn on average just 63 cents to the dollar of those who do.
Why are we so blasé about this kind of discrimination? Maybe people think lookism is baked into human nature and there’s not much they can do about it. Maybe it’s because there’s no National Association of Ugly People lobbying for change. The economist Tyler Cowen notices that it’s often the educated coastal class that most strictly enforces norms about thinness and dress. Maybe we don’t like policing the bigotry we’re most guilty of?
My general answer is that it’s very hard to buck the core values of your culture, even when you know it’s the right thing to do.
Over the past few decades, social media, the meritocracy and celebrity culture have fused to form a modern culture that is almost pagan in its values. That is, it places tremendous emphasis on competitive display, personal achievement and the idea that physical beauty is an external sign of moral beauty and overall worth.
Pagan culture holds up a certain ideal hero — those who are genetically endowed in the realms of athleticism, intelligence and beauty. This culture looks at obesity as a moral weakness and a sign that you’re in a lower social class.
Our pagan culture places great emphasis on the sports arena, the university and the social media screen, where beauty, strength and I.Q. can be most impressively displayed.
This ethos underlies many athletic shoe and gym ads, which hold up heroes in whom physical endowments and moral goodness are one. It’s the paganism of the C.E.O. who likes to be flanked by a team of hot staffers. (“I must be a winner because I’m surrounded by the beautiful.”) It’s the fashion magazine in which articles about social justice are interspersed with photo spreads of the impossibly beautiful. (“We believe in social equality, as long as you’re gorgeous.”) It’s the lookist one-upmanship of TikTok.
A society that celebrates beauty this obsessively is going to be a social context in which the less beautiful will be slighted. The only solution is to shift the norms and practices. One positive example comes, oddly, from Victoria’s Secret, which replaced its “Angels” with seven women of more diverse body types. When Victoria’s Secret is on the cutting edge of the fight against lookism, the rest of us have some catching up to do.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/24/opin ... 778d3e6de3
A manager sits behind a table and decides he’s going to fire a woman because he doesn’t like her skin. If he fires her because her skin is brown, we call that racism and there is legal recourse. If he fires her because her skin is female, we call that sexism and there is legal recourse. If he fires her because her skin is pockmarked and he finds her unattractive, well, we don’t talk about that much and, in most places in America, there is no legal recourse.
This is puzzling. We live in a society that abhors discrimination on the basis of many traits. And yet one of the major forms of discrimination is lookism, prejudice against the unattractive. And this gets almost no attention and sparks little outrage. Why?
Lookism starts, like every form of bigotry, with prejudice and stereotypes.
Studies show that most people consider an “attractive” face to have clean, symmetrical features. We find it easier to recognize and categorize these prototypical faces than we do irregular and “unattractive” ones. So we find it easier — from a brain processing perspective — to look at attractive people.
Attractive people thus start off with a slight physical advantage. But then people project all sorts of widely unrelated stereotypes onto them. In survey after survey, beautiful people are described as trustworthy, competent, friendly, likable and intelligent, while ugly people get the opposite labels. This is a version of the halo effect.
Not all the time, but often, the attractive get the first-class treatment. Research suggests they are more likely to be offered job interviews, more likely to be hired when interviewed and more likely to be promoted than less attractive individuals. They are more likely to receive loans and more likely to receive lower interest rates on those loans.
The discriminatory effects of lookism are pervasive. Attractive economists are more likely to study at high-ranked graduate programs and their papers are cited more often than papers from their less attractive peers. One study found that when unattractive criminals committed a moderate misdemeanor, their fines were about four times as large as those of attractive criminals.
Daniel Hamermesh, a leading scholar in this field, observed that an American worker who is among the bottom one-seventh in looks earns about 10 to 15 percent less a year than one in the top third. An unattractive person misses out on nearly a quarter-million dollars in earnings over a lifetime.
The overall effect of these biases is vast. One 2004 study found that more people report being discriminated against because of their looks than because of their ethnicity.
In a study published in the current issue of the American Journal of Sociology, Ellis P. Monk Jr., Michael H. Esposito and Hedwig Lee report that the earnings gap between people perceived as attractive and unattractive rivals or exceeds the earnings gap between white and Black adults. They find the attractiveness curve is especially punishing for Black women. Those who meet the socially dominant criteria for beauty see an earnings boost; those who don’t earn on average just 63 cents to the dollar of those who do.
Why are we so blasé about this kind of discrimination? Maybe people think lookism is baked into human nature and there’s not much they can do about it. Maybe it’s because there’s no National Association of Ugly People lobbying for change. The economist Tyler Cowen notices that it’s often the educated coastal class that most strictly enforces norms about thinness and dress. Maybe we don’t like policing the bigotry we’re most guilty of?
My general answer is that it’s very hard to buck the core values of your culture, even when you know it’s the right thing to do.
Over the past few decades, social media, the meritocracy and celebrity culture have fused to form a modern culture that is almost pagan in its values. That is, it places tremendous emphasis on competitive display, personal achievement and the idea that physical beauty is an external sign of moral beauty and overall worth.
Pagan culture holds up a certain ideal hero — those who are genetically endowed in the realms of athleticism, intelligence and beauty. This culture looks at obesity as a moral weakness and a sign that you’re in a lower social class.
Our pagan culture places great emphasis on the sports arena, the university and the social media screen, where beauty, strength and I.Q. can be most impressively displayed.
This ethos underlies many athletic shoe and gym ads, which hold up heroes in whom physical endowments and moral goodness are one. It’s the paganism of the C.E.O. who likes to be flanked by a team of hot staffers. (“I must be a winner because I’m surrounded by the beautiful.”) It’s the fashion magazine in which articles about social justice are interspersed with photo spreads of the impossibly beautiful. (“We believe in social equality, as long as you’re gorgeous.”) It’s the lookist one-upmanship of TikTok.
A society that celebrates beauty this obsessively is going to be a social context in which the less beautiful will be slighted. The only solution is to shift the norms and practices. One positive example comes, oddly, from Victoria’s Secret, which replaced its “Angels” with seven women of more diverse body types. When Victoria’s Secret is on the cutting edge of the fight against lookism, the rest of us have some catching up to do.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/24/opin ... 778d3e6de3
These Chinese Millennials Are ‘Chilling,’ and Beijing Isn’t Happy
Young people in China have set off a nascent counterculture movement that involves lying down and doing as little as possible.
Five years ago, Luo Huazhong discovered that he enjoyed doing nothing. He quit his job as a factory worker in China, biked 1,300 miles from Sichuan Province to Tibet and decided he could get by on odd jobs and $60 a month from his savings. He called his new lifestyle “lying flat.”
“I have been chilling,” Mr. Luo, 31, wrote in a blog post in April, describing his way of life. “I don’t feel like there’s anything wrong.”
He titled his post “Lying Flat Is Justice,” attaching a photo of himself lying on his bed in a dark room with the curtains drawn. Before long, the post was being celebrated by Chinese millennials as an anti-consumerist manifesto. “Lying flat” went viral and has since become a broader statement about Chinese society.
A generation ago, the route to success in China was to work hard, get married and have children. The country’s authoritarianism was seen as a fair trade-off as millions were lifted out of poverty. But with employees working longer hours and housing prices rising faster than incomes, many young Chinese fear they will be the first generation not to do better than their parents.
They are now defying the country’s long-held prosperity narrative by refusing to participate in it.
Mr. Luo’s blog post was removed by censors, who saw it as an affront to Beijing’s economic ambitions. Mentions of “lying flat” — tangping, as it’s known in Mandarin — are heavily restricted on the Chinese internet. An official counternarrative has also emerged, encouraging young people to work hard for the sake of the country’s future.
“After working for so long, I just felt numb, like a machine,” Mr. Luo said in an interview. “And so I resigned.”
To lie flat means to forgo marriage, not have children, stay unemployed and eschew material wants such as a house or a car. It is the opposite of what China’s leaders have asked of their people. But that didn’t bother Leon Ding.
Mr. Ding, 22, has been lying flat for almost three months and thinks of the act as “silent resistance.” He dropped out of a university in his final year in March because he didn’t like the computer science major his parents had chosen for him.
After leaving school, Mr. Ding used his savings to rent a room in Shenzhen. He tried to find a regular office job but realized that most positions required him to work long hours. “I want a stable job that allows me to have my own time to relax, but where can I find it?” he said.
Mr. Ding thinks young people should work hard for what they love, but not “996” — 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week — as many employers in China expect. Frustrated with the job search, he decided that “lying flat” was the way to go.
“To be honest, it feels really comfortable,” he said. “I don’t want to be too hard on myself.”
To make ends meet, Mr. Ding gets paid to play video games and has minimized his spending by doing things like cutting out his favorite bubble tea. Asked about his long-term plans, he said: “Come back and ask me in six months. I only plan for six months.”
While plenty of Chinese millennials continue to adhere to the country’s traditional work ethic, “lying flat” reflects both a nascent counterculture movement and a backlash against China’s hypercompetitive work environment.
Xiang Biao, a professor of social anthropology at Oxford University who focuses on Chinese society, called tangping culture a turning point for China. “Young people feel a kind of pressure that they cannot explain and they feel that promises were broken,” he said. “People realize that material betterment is no longer the single most important source of meaning in life.”
The ruling Communist Party, wary of any form of social instability, has targeted the “lying flat” idea as a threat to stability in China. Censors have deleted a tangping group with more than 9,000 members on Douban, a popular internet forum. The authorities also barred posts on another tangping forum with more than 200,000 members.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/03/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Young people in China have set off a nascent counterculture movement that involves lying down and doing as little as possible.
Five years ago, Luo Huazhong discovered that he enjoyed doing nothing. He quit his job as a factory worker in China, biked 1,300 miles from Sichuan Province to Tibet and decided he could get by on odd jobs and $60 a month from his savings. He called his new lifestyle “lying flat.”
“I have been chilling,” Mr. Luo, 31, wrote in a blog post in April, describing his way of life. “I don’t feel like there’s anything wrong.”
He titled his post “Lying Flat Is Justice,” attaching a photo of himself lying on his bed in a dark room with the curtains drawn. Before long, the post was being celebrated by Chinese millennials as an anti-consumerist manifesto. “Lying flat” went viral and has since become a broader statement about Chinese society.
A generation ago, the route to success in China was to work hard, get married and have children. The country’s authoritarianism was seen as a fair trade-off as millions were lifted out of poverty. But with employees working longer hours and housing prices rising faster than incomes, many young Chinese fear they will be the first generation not to do better than their parents.
They are now defying the country’s long-held prosperity narrative by refusing to participate in it.
Mr. Luo’s blog post was removed by censors, who saw it as an affront to Beijing’s economic ambitions. Mentions of “lying flat” — tangping, as it’s known in Mandarin — are heavily restricted on the Chinese internet. An official counternarrative has also emerged, encouraging young people to work hard for the sake of the country’s future.
“After working for so long, I just felt numb, like a machine,” Mr. Luo said in an interview. “And so I resigned.”
To lie flat means to forgo marriage, not have children, stay unemployed and eschew material wants such as a house or a car. It is the opposite of what China’s leaders have asked of their people. But that didn’t bother Leon Ding.
Mr. Ding, 22, has been lying flat for almost three months and thinks of the act as “silent resistance.” He dropped out of a university in his final year in March because he didn’t like the computer science major his parents had chosen for him.
After leaving school, Mr. Ding used his savings to rent a room in Shenzhen. He tried to find a regular office job but realized that most positions required him to work long hours. “I want a stable job that allows me to have my own time to relax, but where can I find it?” he said.
Mr. Ding thinks young people should work hard for what they love, but not “996” — 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week — as many employers in China expect. Frustrated with the job search, he decided that “lying flat” was the way to go.
“To be honest, it feels really comfortable,” he said. “I don’t want to be too hard on myself.”
To make ends meet, Mr. Ding gets paid to play video games and has minimized his spending by doing things like cutting out his favorite bubble tea. Asked about his long-term plans, he said: “Come back and ask me in six months. I only plan for six months.”
While plenty of Chinese millennials continue to adhere to the country’s traditional work ethic, “lying flat” reflects both a nascent counterculture movement and a backlash against China’s hypercompetitive work environment.
Xiang Biao, a professor of social anthropology at Oxford University who focuses on Chinese society, called tangping culture a turning point for China. “Young people feel a kind of pressure that they cannot explain and they feel that promises were broken,” he said. “People realize that material betterment is no longer the single most important source of meaning in life.”
The ruling Communist Party, wary of any form of social instability, has targeted the “lying flat” idea as a threat to stability in China. Censors have deleted a tangping group with more than 9,000 members on Douban, a popular internet forum. The authorities also barred posts on another tangping forum with more than 200,000 members.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/03/worl ... 778d3e6de3
She’s One of China’s Biggest Stars. She’s Also Transgender.
Jin Xing, the first person in China to openly undergo transition surgery, is a household name. But she says she’s no standard-bearer for the L.G.B.T.Q. community.
Jin Xing, a 53-year-old television host often called China’s Oprah Winfrey, holds strong views about what it means to be a woman. She has hounded female guests to hurry up and get married, and she has pressed others to give birth. When it comes to men, she has recommended that women act helpless to get their way.
That might not be so unusual in China, where traditional gender norms are still deeply embedded, especially among older people. Except Ms. Jin is no typical Chinese star.
As China’s first — and even today, only — major transgender celebrity, Ms. Jin is in many ways regarded as a progressive icon. She underwent transition surgery in 1995, the first person in the country to do so openly. She went on to host one of China’s most popular talk shows, even as stigmas against L.G.B.T.Q. people remained — and still remain — widespread.
China’s best-known personalities appeared on her program, “The Jin Xing Show.” Brad Pitt once bumbled through some Mandarin with her to promote a film.
“All my close friends teased me: ‘China would never let you host a talk show,’” Ms. Jin said, recalling when she first shared that goal with them. “‘How could they let you, with your transgender identity, be on television?’”
But even as Ms. Jin’s remarkable biography has elevated her to an almost mythic level, it has also, for some, made her one of the most perplexing figures in Chinese pop culture.
Though often lauded as a trailblazer for the L.G.B.T.Q. community, she rejects the role of standard-bearer and criticizes activists whom she perceives as seeking special treatment. “Respect is earned by yourself, not something you ask society to give you,” she said.
She also has attracted fierce criticism for her views on womanhood. In a 2013 memoir, Ms. Jin wrote that a “smart woman” should make her partner feel that she was a “little girl who needs him.” On “The Jin Xing Show,” she told the actress Michelle Ye that only after giving birth would she feel complete.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/16/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Jin Xing, the first person in China to openly undergo transition surgery, is a household name. But she says she’s no standard-bearer for the L.G.B.T.Q. community.
Jin Xing, a 53-year-old television host often called China’s Oprah Winfrey, holds strong views about what it means to be a woman. She has hounded female guests to hurry up and get married, and she has pressed others to give birth. When it comes to men, she has recommended that women act helpless to get their way.
That might not be so unusual in China, where traditional gender norms are still deeply embedded, especially among older people. Except Ms. Jin is no typical Chinese star.
As China’s first — and even today, only — major transgender celebrity, Ms. Jin is in many ways regarded as a progressive icon. She underwent transition surgery in 1995, the first person in the country to do so openly. She went on to host one of China’s most popular talk shows, even as stigmas against L.G.B.T.Q. people remained — and still remain — widespread.
China’s best-known personalities appeared on her program, “The Jin Xing Show.” Brad Pitt once bumbled through some Mandarin with her to promote a film.
“All my close friends teased me: ‘China would never let you host a talk show,’” Ms. Jin said, recalling when she first shared that goal with them. “‘How could they let you, with your transgender identity, be on television?’”
But even as Ms. Jin’s remarkable biography has elevated her to an almost mythic level, it has also, for some, made her one of the most perplexing figures in Chinese pop culture.
Though often lauded as a trailblazer for the L.G.B.T.Q. community, she rejects the role of standard-bearer and criticizes activists whom she perceives as seeking special treatment. “Respect is earned by yourself, not something you ask society to give you,” she said.
She also has attracted fierce criticism for her views on womanhood. In a 2013 memoir, Ms. Jin wrote that a “smart woman” should make her partner feel that she was a “little girl who needs him.” On “The Jin Xing Show,” she told the actress Michelle Ye that only after giving birth would she feel complete.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/16/worl ... 778d3e6de3
What’s Ripping American Families Apart?
At least 27 percent of Americans are estranged from a member of their own family, and research suggests about 40 percent of Americans have experienced estrangement at some point.
The most common form of estrangement is between adult children and one or both parents — a cut usually initiated by the child. A study published in 2010 found that parents in the U.S. are about twice as likely to be in a contentious relationship with their adult children as parents in Israel, Germany, England and Spain.
The Cornell sociologist Karl Pillemer, author of “Fault Lines: Fractured Families and How to Mend Them,” writes that the children in these cases often cite harsh parenting, parental favoritism, divorce and poor and increasingly hostile communication often culminating in a volcanic event. As one woman told Salon: “I have someone out to get me, and it’s my mother. My part of being a good mom has been getting my son away from mine.”
The parents in these cases are often completely bewildered by the accusations. They often remember a totally different childhood home and accuse their children of rewriting what happened. As one cutoff couple told the psychologist Joshua Coleman: “Emotional abuse? We gave our child everything. We read every parenting book under the sun, took her on wonderful vacations, went to all of her sporting events.”
Part of the misunderstanding derives from the truth that we all construct our own realities, but part of the problem, as Nick Haslam of the University of Melbourne has suggested, is there seems to be a generational shift in what constitutes abuse. Practices that seemed like normal parenting to one generation are conceptualized as abusive, overbearing and traumatizing to another.
There’s a lot of real emotional abuse out there, but as Coleman put it in an essay in The Atlantic, “My recent research — and my clinical work over the past four decades — has shown me that you can be a conscientious parent and your kid may still want nothing to do with you when they’re older.”
Either way, there’s a lot of agony for all concerned. The children feel they have to live with the legacy of an abusive childhood. The parents feel rejected by the person they love most in the world, their own child, and they are powerless to do anything about it. There’s anger, grief and depression on all sides — painful holidays and birthdays — plus, the next generation often grows up without knowing their grandparents.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/29/opin ... 778d3e6de3
At least 27 percent of Americans are estranged from a member of their own family, and research suggests about 40 percent of Americans have experienced estrangement at some point.
The most common form of estrangement is between adult children and one or both parents — a cut usually initiated by the child. A study published in 2010 found that parents in the U.S. are about twice as likely to be in a contentious relationship with their adult children as parents in Israel, Germany, England and Spain.
The Cornell sociologist Karl Pillemer, author of “Fault Lines: Fractured Families and How to Mend Them,” writes that the children in these cases often cite harsh parenting, parental favoritism, divorce and poor and increasingly hostile communication often culminating in a volcanic event. As one woman told Salon: “I have someone out to get me, and it’s my mother. My part of being a good mom has been getting my son away from mine.”
The parents in these cases are often completely bewildered by the accusations. They often remember a totally different childhood home and accuse their children of rewriting what happened. As one cutoff couple told the psychologist Joshua Coleman: “Emotional abuse? We gave our child everything. We read every parenting book under the sun, took her on wonderful vacations, went to all of her sporting events.”
Part of the misunderstanding derives from the truth that we all construct our own realities, but part of the problem, as Nick Haslam of the University of Melbourne has suggested, is there seems to be a generational shift in what constitutes abuse. Practices that seemed like normal parenting to one generation are conceptualized as abusive, overbearing and traumatizing to another.
There’s a lot of real emotional abuse out there, but as Coleman put it in an essay in The Atlantic, “My recent research — and my clinical work over the past four decades — has shown me that you can be a conscientious parent and your kid may still want nothing to do with you when they’re older.”
Either way, there’s a lot of agony for all concerned. The children feel they have to live with the legacy of an abusive childhood. The parents feel rejected by the person they love most in the world, their own child, and they are powerless to do anything about it. There’s anger, grief and depression on all sides — painful holidays and birthdays — plus, the next generation often grows up without knowing their grandparents.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/29/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Re: SOCIAL TRENDS
Why Maids Keep Dying in Saudi Arabia
Feith Shimila Murunga says her boss groped, beat and raped her.
Mary Wanjiru Nyambura says she was thrown from a balcony.
Winfridah Kwamboka never even made it back home.
East African leaders and Saudi royals are among those profiting off a lucrative, deadly trade in domestic workers.
By Abdi Latif Dahir and Justin ScheckPhotographs by Kiana Hayeri
Abdi Latif Dahir, Justin Scheck and Kiana Hayeri spent months visiting cities and remote villages in Kenya and Uganda.
March 16, 2025
On any given day in Kenya, dozens, if not hundreds of women buzz around the Nairobi international airport’s departures area. They huddle for selfies in matching T-shirts, discussing how they’ll spend the money from their new jobs in Saudi Arabia.
Lured by company recruiters and encouraged by Kenya’s government, the women have reason for optimism. Spend two years in Saudi Arabia as a housekeeper or nanny, the pitch goes, and you can earn enough to build a house, educate your children and save for the future.
While the departure terminal hums with anticipation, the arrivals area is where hope meets grim reality. Hollow-cheeked women return, often ground down by unpaid wages, beatings, starvation and sexual assault. Some are broke. Others are in coffins.
At least 274 Kenyan workers, mostly women, have died in Saudi Arabia in the past five years — an extraordinary figure for a young work force doing jobs that, in most countries, are considered extremely safe. At least 55 Kenyan workers died last year, twice as many as the previous year.
Autopsy reports are vague and contradictory. They describe women with evidence of trauma, including burns and electric shocks, all labeled natural deaths. One woman’s cause of death was simply “brain dead.” An untold number of Ugandans have died, too, but their government releases no data.
There are people who are supposed to protect these women — government officials like Fabian Kyule Muli, vice chairman of the labor committee in Kenya’s National Assembly. The powerful committee could demand thorough investigations into worker deaths, pressure the government to negotiate better protections from Saudi Arabia or pass laws limiting migration until reforms are enacted.
But Mr. Muli, like other East African officials, also owns a staffing company that sends women to Saudi Arabia. One of them, Margaret Mutheu Mueni, said that her Saudi boss had seized her passport, declared that he had “bought” her and frequently withheld food. When she called the staffing agency for help, she said, a company representative told her, “You can swim across the Red Sea and get yourself back to Kenya.”
Dorcas Syombua Munyao was sent to Saudi Arabia by a company owned by a Kenyan government official, Fabian Kyule Muli.
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Margaret Mutheu Mueni was another recruited by Mr. Muli’s company. She said her Saudi boss claimed that he had “bought” her.
In Kenya, Uganda and Saudi Arabia, a New York Times investigation found, powerful people have incentives to keep the flow of workers moving, despite widespread abuse. Members of the Saudi royal family are major investors in agencies that place domestic workers. Politicians and their relatives in Uganda and Kenya own staffing agencies, too.
The line between their public and private roles sometimes blurs.
Mr. Muli’s labor committee, for example, has become a prominent voice encouraging workers to go overseas. The committee has at times rejected evidence of abuse.
Last month, four Ugandan women in maids’ uniforms sent a video plea to an aid group, saying that they had been detained for six months in Saudi Arabia.
“We are exhausted from being held against our will,” one woman said on the video. The company that sent her abroad is owned by Sedrack Nzaire, an official with Uganda’s governing party who is identified in Ugandan media as the brother of the president, Yoweri Museveni.
Nearly every staffing agency refused to answer questions or ignored repeated requests for comment. That includes Mr. Muli, Mr. Nzaire and their companies.
Kenya and Uganda are deep in a yearslong economic slump, and remittances from foreign workers are a significant source of income. Even after other countries negotiated deals with Saudi Arabia that guaranteed worker protections, East African countries missed opportunities to do the same, records show.
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A group of women standing outside, listening to a man in a blue shirt.
Outside a domestic-work training center in Kampala, Uganda, last year. Remittances from foreign workers are a significant source of income in the country.
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Women in brightly colored head scarves work at desks in a makeshift classroom.
Studying at the training center in Kampala. Classes can include Arabic lessons as well as practical skills, like how to operate washing machines.
Kenya’s Commission on Administrative Justice declared in 2022 that worker-protection efforts had been hindered by “interference by politicians who use proxies to operate the agencies.”
Undeterred, Kenya’s president, William Ruto, says he wants to send up to half a million workers to Saudi Arabia in the coming years. One of his top advisers, Moses Kuria, has owned a staffing agency. Mr. Kuria’s brother, a county-level politician, still does.
A spokesman for Mr. Ruto, Hussein Mohamed, said that labor migration benefited the economy. He said the government was taking steps to protect workers, including weeding out unlicensed recruiting firms that are more likely to have shoddy practices. He said that Mr. Kuria, the presidential adviser, had no conflict of interest because he does not work on labor issues.
In Uganda, recruiting-firm owners include a recently retired senior police official and Maj. Gen. Leopold Kyanda, a former military attaché to the United States.
Recruiting companies work closely with Saudi agencies that are similarly well connected. Descendants of King Faisal have been among the largest shareholders in two of the biggest agencies. A director of a Saudi government human rights board serves as vice chairman of a major staffing agency. So does a former interior minister, an Investment Ministry official and several government advisers.
Together, these agencies paint a rosy picture of work in Saudi Arabia. But when things go wrong, families say, the workers are often left to fend for themselves.
A Kenyan housekeeper, Eunice Achieng, called home in a panic in 2022, saying that her boss had threatened to kill her and throw her in a water tank. “She was screaming, ‘Please come save me!’” her mother recalled. Ms. Achieng soon turned up dead in a rooftop water tank, her mother said. Saudi health officials said her body was too decomposed to determine how she died. The Saudi police labeled it a “natural death.”
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A woman standing in the aisle of an airplane.
Eunice Achieng on the day she left for Saudi Arabia. She was found dead in a rooftop water tank.
One young mother jumped from a third-story roof to escape an abusive employer, breaking her back. Another said that her boss had raped her and then sent her home pregnant and broke.
In Uganda, Isiko Moses Waiswa said that when he learned his wife had died in Saudi Arabia, her employer there gave him a choice: her body or her $2,800 in wages.
“I told him that whether you send me the money or you don’t send me the money, me, I want the body of my wife,” Mr. Waiswa said.
A Saudi autopsy found that his wife, Aisha Meeme, was emaciated. She had extensive bruising, three broken ribs and what appeared to be severe electrocution burns on her ear, hand and feet. The Saudi authorities declared that she had died of natural causes.
Roughly half a million Kenyan and Ugandan workers are in Saudi Arabia today, the Saudi government says. Most of them are women who cook, clean or care for children. Journalists and rights groups, who have long publicized worker abuse in the kingdom, have often blamed its persistence on archaic Saudi labor laws.
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A middle-aged man and two children in a classroom with a chalkboard.
Isiko Moses Waiswa with his son and daughter in Kampala. When Mr. Waiswa learned that his wife, Aisha Meeme, had died in Saudi Arabia, her employer there gave him a choice: her body or her $2,800 in wages.
The Times interviewed more than 90 workers and family members of those who died, and uncovered another reason that things do not change. Using employment contracts, medical files and autopsies, reporters linked deaths and injuries to staffing agencies and the people who run them. What became clear was that powerful people profit off the system as it exists.
The interviews and documents reveal a system that treats women like household goods — bought, sold and discarded. Some company websites have an “add to cart” button next to photos of workers. One advertises “Kenyan maids for sale.”
A spokesman for the human resources ministry in Saudi Arabia said it had taken steps to protect workers. “Any form of exploitation or abuse of domestic workers is entirely unacceptable, and allegations of such behavior are thoroughly investigated,” the spokesman, Mike Goldstein, wrote in an email.
He said the government had raised fines for abuse and made it easier for workers to quit. He said domestic laborers were capped at 10-hour workdays and were guaranteed one day off per week. He said the government now requires employers to pay their maids through an online system and will one day track people who repeatedly violate labor laws.
“Workers have multiple ways to report abuse, unpaid wages or contract violations, including hotlines, digital platforms and direct complaint mechanisms,” he said.
But Milton Turyasiima, an assistant commissioner with the Ugandan Ministry of Gender, Labor and Social Development, said that abuse remained rampant.
“We get complaints on a daily basis,” he said.
Selling a Dream
Recruiters fan out across East Africa, from impoverished hilltop villages to the cinder block neighborhoods of Nairobi and Kampala, the Ugandan capital.
They search for people desperate, and ambitious, enough to leave their families for low-paying jobs in a country where they do not know the native language. People like Faridah Nassanga, a slim woman with a warm but detached air.
“We are really poor,” Ms. Nassanga said, sitting outside her one-room concrete home in Kampala. Meals are cooked on a propane burner in the alley beside a trickling sewage gutter. She shares a triple-decker bunk bed with her mother and children.
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A woman in a red shirt and pink pants sits on a chair with a child in her lap.
Faridah Nassanga and her toddler in Kampala. “We are really poor,” Ms. Nassanga said of her family.
Ms. Nassanga said a friend introduced her in 2019 to an agent from Marphie International Recruitment Agency, whose co-owner, Henry Tukahirwa, recently retired as one of Uganda’s highest-ranking police officers. Ms. Nassanga agreed to move to Saudi Arabia for a job paying about $200 a month.
She found her housekeeping job as pleasant as recruiters had promised. She had her own room. The woman she worked for sometimes even helped with chores.
Then one day, she said, her boss’s husband walked into her room and raped her. Afterward, she said, he kicked and slapped her. He threw her underwear at her as she retreated to the kitchen, Ms. Nassanga said.
When she became pregnant, Ms. Nassanga’s boss accused her of sleeping with the husband. The Saudi family put her on a plane back to Uganda, said Abdallah Kayonde, who runs a legal-aid group that is trying to get compensation for her.
Ms. Nassanga knows her employer’s name but not her phone number. The only records she has are from the recruiting agency.
Ruth Karungi, who owns the agency with her husband, the retired police official, said that when Ms. Nassanga showed up at the office with an infant, the company contacted the Saudi partner agency, which did not respond.
The company then notified the Saudi Embassy. “We trusted that they would address the case through the proper diplomatic channels,” Ms. Karungi said by email.
She said she did not know if anyone had followed up.
Now, Ms. Nassanga is back sharing a one-room home with her mother, her two older children and her toddler — a boy with a notably different complexion and hair from his siblings.
‘An Important Destination Country’
Saudi Arabia has a wage hierarchy for foreign workers, with East Africans near the bottom at about $200 to $250 a month.
Over the years, some countries have fought for better wages and protections for their workers. The Philippines, for example, negotiated a deal with Saudi Arabia in 2012 that raised wages.
That sent staffing agencies looking for cheaper labor elsewhere.
Few Ugandan workers arrived in the kingdom in 2017, Ugandan government data show. Five years later, the number was 85,928.
African governments stood to benefit from remittances. Mr. Muli’s committee called on Kenya in 2019 to “embark on a rigorous campaign to market Saudi Arabia as an important destination country for foreign employment.”
“The current notion that foreign workers in Saudi Arabia go through suffering” needed “to be corrected,” the committee added.
Mwanakombo Ngao was hospitalized in a mental institution after returning home. She has no recollection of what happened in Saudi Arabia.
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Esther Kerubo Moranga said her Saudi boss abused her. Now, she says, her uncle beats her for returning home without money.
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Josephine Uchi says she worked a demanding housekeeping job while also caring for a Saudi family of 12. She was allowed four hours of sleep a night.
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The African countries provide a “new and lower-cost services market,” one of Saudi Arabia’s largest staffing agencies, Maharah Human Resources Company, wrote in 2019.
Some of King Faisal’s descendants, through a holding company, have been important shareholders in both Maharah and in another major staffing agency, Saudi Manpower Solutions Company, or Smasco.
Al Mawarid, yet another big staffing company, also has deep government ties. Its chairman, Ahmad al-Rakban, was executive director of administration for the Saudi National Guard. The chief executive, Riyadh al-Romaizan, is chairman of a government-backed industry council. Tariq al-Awaji, a former top official at the Interior Ministry, is a company director. Another board member, until recently, was an official in the Investment Ministry.
In recent years, Al Mawarid has paid about $4 million to acquire workers from Macro Manpower, the firm owned by Mr. Nzaire, the brother of Uganda’s president, corporate filings show.
(East African recruiting agencies make money from per-worker fees from Saudi companies. Those companies, in turn, get fees from people who hire maids.)
Al Mawarid’s chief executive, Mr. al-Romaizan, declined to answer questions.
Attacked With Bleach
Mary Nsiimenta, a single mother with big, mournful eyes, cleaned house for a family with five children in Najran, in southern Saudi Arabia. She said the children, ages 9 to 18, hit her with a stick and put bleach in her eyes.
(Several women told The Times that they were assaulted with bleach or forced to soak their hands in it as punishment.)
According to Ms. Nsiimenta, her employer was stingy with her salary. After she repeatedly asked to be paid, she said, the family locked her on a third-story rooftop.
As time dragged on, she felt sure she would die there, she recalled.
“The sun was too much,” she said. “Hot. No food. I lost control.”
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Mary Nsiimenta, in a pink-and-purple dress and head covering, looks out of a barred window.
Mary Nsiimenta says she was locked on a rooftop under the hot sun for asking to be paid.
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Ms. Nsiimenta's back with a long scar along the spine, seen through an opening in her dress.
The scar on Ms. Nsiimenta’s back from spinal surgery after she jumped from the roof.
She jumped, landing hard.
“I crawled out like a snake” to the street, she said. Passers-by brought her to a hospital where, medical records show, doctors repaired her spine. She reported the abuse to doctors and the police, she said, but they told her to return to work.
Ms. Nsiimenta refused, and the Saudi placement agency returned her to Uganda in 2023. In chronic pain and incontinent, she cannot work. Friends and relatives are raising her children. “My life is destroyed,” she said.
Trading Abuse for a Type of Prison
Saudi law says that, when a worker needs to go home, an employer, recruiter or the Saudi government is obligated to pay.
“Under no circumstances does a worker bear any financial responsibility for repatriation,” wrote Mr. Goldstein, the Saudi ministry spokesman.
But workers and worker-rights advocates say that laborers are often forced to pay. Those without money can be detained.
Because visas are tied to employment, workers who leave their jobs can lose their legal status. To help address that, the Saudi government paid a company, Sakan, to provide housing and legal assistance to foreign workers in trouble.
Hannah Njeri Miriam ended up at a Sakan center in 2022, about a year after she left Kenya’s Rift Valley for Saudi Arabia.
Ms. Miriam’s employer fired her after a dispute. Jobless and homeless, Sakan was the only place to go. Once there, according to her family, the staff said she could leave only if she paid about $300 for her travel.
She called home, saying she was being mistreated and underfed. Nobody could afford to help. The Kenyan agency that had sent her abroad had gone out of business.
Finally, her family got a call from another woman at the center. She said Ms. Miriam had tried to escape through an air-conditioning opening but had slipped and fallen two stories. A forensic report said that Ms. Miriam had died of head wounds. The Saudi police later said that she died of “congestive cardiac and respiratory failure.” Sakan’s chairman declined to comment.
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A man, his face partially obscured by shadows, sits in his home, beneath a poster of Jesus.
Jackson Tutuma feared that work in Saudi Arabia was too dangerous. But his wife, Hannah Njeri Miriam, set off anyway. “I begged her,” Mr. Tutuma, said. “I was heartbroken.”
Mr. Goldstein, the Saudi ministry spokesman, declined to comment on individual deaths but said that every case was thoroughly investigated. He did not comment on the inconsistencies between autopsies and police reports and would not say how many people had been arrested or prosecuted in labor cases.
Mr. Goldstein said the government stopped funding Sakan in 2023. Now, he said, it pays the recruiting agency Smasco to run worker-assistance centers.
Three Kenyan women spoke to The Times from inside a Smasco center. The women, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, said that they could not go home unless they paid about $400. The company did not respond to requests for comment.
Returning Home
As migration to Saudi Arabia surged, reports of deaths and injuries spread across East Africa. Bodies began arriving. Each story brought new outrage.
People should not have been surprised. The leaders of Kenya and Uganda had ample warning of abuse, yet they signed agreements with Saudi Arabia that lacked protections that other leaders demanded.
The Philippines deal in 2012, for example, guaranteed a $400 monthly minimum wage, access to bank accounts and a promise that workers’ passports would not be confiscated.
Kenya initially demanded similar wages, according to a government report, but when Saudi Arabia balked, Kenya agreed to a deal in 2015 with no minimum wage at all.
The treaty contained little beyond a promise to establish a committee to monitor labor issues. The commission was never formed, a government report said.
Mr. Mohamed, the Kenyan president’s spokesman, said that the government later negotiated $225 monthly wages. He said Kenyan workers were simply not as highly regarded in Saudi Arabia. “Philippines is able to dictate the price,” he said.
When Uganda cut its agreement with the Saudi government, they made no mention of a minimum wage. The issue of worker mistreatment was well discussed at the time. The Saudi ambassador to Uganda even wrote a column in a Ugandan newspaper assailing critics who “offend and abuse the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia” by publicizing abuse.
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A man and a woman hug in front of a large black mortuary van.
Friends and family at the Nairobi airport in October with a hearse carrying the body of Lucy Nyambura Kimani.Credit...The New York Times
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A casket, labeled in Arabic, sits in the back of a hearse.
A label in Arabic on the coffin of Ms. Kimani, who died while working in Saudi Arabia.Credit...The New York Times
In 2021, a Kenyan Senate committee found “deteriorating conditions” in Saudi Arabia and an “increase in distress calls by those alleging torture and mistreatment.” The committee recommended suspending worker transfers.
When Mr. Ruto was elected president in 2022, though, the campaign to send workers abroad intensified. His government reached a new Saudi labor agreement the following year without a wage increase or substantive new protections.
“It’s a cycle of abuse that no one is addressing,” said Stephanie Marigu, a Kenyan lawyer who represents workers.
Now, a few times a month, rural Kenyans head to Nairobi to collect a coffin from the airport.
Hundreds of people gathered in September at a village school in southwestern Kenya. They paid respects to Millicent Moraa Obwocha, who had left her husband and young son behind months earlier.
Her employer sexually harassed and assaulted her, her husband, Obuya Simon Areba, said. Things got so bad last summer, he said, that she asked her Saudi recruiter to rescue her.
A few days later, her husband got the call that she was dead. She was 24. The Kenyan government attributed her death to “nerve issues.”
Her employer, Abdullah Omar Abdul al-Rahman Hailan, said that Mr. Areba’s account was “misleading and incorrect” and called a Times reporter “a clown.”
At the funeral, Ms. Obwocha’s body lay in an open coffin in a white dress and veil.
Beside her was a six-foot-tall photograph. In it, she smiles with her fingers held up in a V. She is standing outside the airport, brimming with optimism.
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The browned remains of dead flowers stand, wilted on a patch of dirt.
The grave of Millicent Moraa Obwocha in Kisii, southwestern Kenya. Her employer in Saudi Arabia sexually harassed and assaulted her, her husband said. She died age 24.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/16/worl ... e9677ea768
Feith Shimila Murunga says her boss groped, beat and raped her.
Mary Wanjiru Nyambura says she was thrown from a balcony.
Winfridah Kwamboka never even made it back home.
East African leaders and Saudi royals are among those profiting off a lucrative, deadly trade in domestic workers.
By Abdi Latif Dahir and Justin ScheckPhotographs by Kiana Hayeri
Abdi Latif Dahir, Justin Scheck and Kiana Hayeri spent months visiting cities and remote villages in Kenya and Uganda.
March 16, 2025
On any given day in Kenya, dozens, if not hundreds of women buzz around the Nairobi international airport’s departures area. They huddle for selfies in matching T-shirts, discussing how they’ll spend the money from their new jobs in Saudi Arabia.
Lured by company recruiters and encouraged by Kenya’s government, the women have reason for optimism. Spend two years in Saudi Arabia as a housekeeper or nanny, the pitch goes, and you can earn enough to build a house, educate your children and save for the future.
While the departure terminal hums with anticipation, the arrivals area is where hope meets grim reality. Hollow-cheeked women return, often ground down by unpaid wages, beatings, starvation and sexual assault. Some are broke. Others are in coffins.
At least 274 Kenyan workers, mostly women, have died in Saudi Arabia in the past five years — an extraordinary figure for a young work force doing jobs that, in most countries, are considered extremely safe. At least 55 Kenyan workers died last year, twice as many as the previous year.
Autopsy reports are vague and contradictory. They describe women with evidence of trauma, including burns and electric shocks, all labeled natural deaths. One woman’s cause of death was simply “brain dead.” An untold number of Ugandans have died, too, but their government releases no data.
There are people who are supposed to protect these women — government officials like Fabian Kyule Muli, vice chairman of the labor committee in Kenya’s National Assembly. The powerful committee could demand thorough investigations into worker deaths, pressure the government to negotiate better protections from Saudi Arabia or pass laws limiting migration until reforms are enacted.
But Mr. Muli, like other East African officials, also owns a staffing company that sends women to Saudi Arabia. One of them, Margaret Mutheu Mueni, said that her Saudi boss had seized her passport, declared that he had “bought” her and frequently withheld food. When she called the staffing agency for help, she said, a company representative told her, “You can swim across the Red Sea and get yourself back to Kenya.”
Dorcas Syombua Munyao was sent to Saudi Arabia by a company owned by a Kenyan government official, Fabian Kyule Muli.
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Margaret Mutheu Mueni was another recruited by Mr. Muli’s company. She said her Saudi boss claimed that he had “bought” her.
In Kenya, Uganda and Saudi Arabia, a New York Times investigation found, powerful people have incentives to keep the flow of workers moving, despite widespread abuse. Members of the Saudi royal family are major investors in agencies that place domestic workers. Politicians and their relatives in Uganda and Kenya own staffing agencies, too.
The line between their public and private roles sometimes blurs.
Mr. Muli’s labor committee, for example, has become a prominent voice encouraging workers to go overseas. The committee has at times rejected evidence of abuse.
Last month, four Ugandan women in maids’ uniforms sent a video plea to an aid group, saying that they had been detained for six months in Saudi Arabia.
“We are exhausted from being held against our will,” one woman said on the video. The company that sent her abroad is owned by Sedrack Nzaire, an official with Uganda’s governing party who is identified in Ugandan media as the brother of the president, Yoweri Museveni.
Nearly every staffing agency refused to answer questions or ignored repeated requests for comment. That includes Mr. Muli, Mr. Nzaire and their companies.
Kenya and Uganda are deep in a yearslong economic slump, and remittances from foreign workers are a significant source of income. Even after other countries negotiated deals with Saudi Arabia that guaranteed worker protections, East African countries missed opportunities to do the same, records show.
Image
A group of women standing outside, listening to a man in a blue shirt.
Outside a domestic-work training center in Kampala, Uganda, last year. Remittances from foreign workers are a significant source of income in the country.
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Women in brightly colored head scarves work at desks in a makeshift classroom.
Studying at the training center in Kampala. Classes can include Arabic lessons as well as practical skills, like how to operate washing machines.
Kenya’s Commission on Administrative Justice declared in 2022 that worker-protection efforts had been hindered by “interference by politicians who use proxies to operate the agencies.”
Undeterred, Kenya’s president, William Ruto, says he wants to send up to half a million workers to Saudi Arabia in the coming years. One of his top advisers, Moses Kuria, has owned a staffing agency. Mr. Kuria’s brother, a county-level politician, still does.
A spokesman for Mr. Ruto, Hussein Mohamed, said that labor migration benefited the economy. He said the government was taking steps to protect workers, including weeding out unlicensed recruiting firms that are more likely to have shoddy practices. He said that Mr. Kuria, the presidential adviser, had no conflict of interest because he does not work on labor issues.
In Uganda, recruiting-firm owners include a recently retired senior police official and Maj. Gen. Leopold Kyanda, a former military attaché to the United States.
Recruiting companies work closely with Saudi agencies that are similarly well connected. Descendants of King Faisal have been among the largest shareholders in two of the biggest agencies. A director of a Saudi government human rights board serves as vice chairman of a major staffing agency. So does a former interior minister, an Investment Ministry official and several government advisers.
Together, these agencies paint a rosy picture of work in Saudi Arabia. But when things go wrong, families say, the workers are often left to fend for themselves.
A Kenyan housekeeper, Eunice Achieng, called home in a panic in 2022, saying that her boss had threatened to kill her and throw her in a water tank. “She was screaming, ‘Please come save me!’” her mother recalled. Ms. Achieng soon turned up dead in a rooftop water tank, her mother said. Saudi health officials said her body was too decomposed to determine how she died. The Saudi police labeled it a “natural death.”
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A woman standing in the aisle of an airplane.
Eunice Achieng on the day she left for Saudi Arabia. She was found dead in a rooftop water tank.
One young mother jumped from a third-story roof to escape an abusive employer, breaking her back. Another said that her boss had raped her and then sent her home pregnant and broke.
In Uganda, Isiko Moses Waiswa said that when he learned his wife had died in Saudi Arabia, her employer there gave him a choice: her body or her $2,800 in wages.
“I told him that whether you send me the money or you don’t send me the money, me, I want the body of my wife,” Mr. Waiswa said.
A Saudi autopsy found that his wife, Aisha Meeme, was emaciated. She had extensive bruising, three broken ribs and what appeared to be severe electrocution burns on her ear, hand and feet. The Saudi authorities declared that she had died of natural causes.
Roughly half a million Kenyan and Ugandan workers are in Saudi Arabia today, the Saudi government says. Most of them are women who cook, clean or care for children. Journalists and rights groups, who have long publicized worker abuse in the kingdom, have often blamed its persistence on archaic Saudi labor laws.
Image
A middle-aged man and two children in a classroom with a chalkboard.
Isiko Moses Waiswa with his son and daughter in Kampala. When Mr. Waiswa learned that his wife, Aisha Meeme, had died in Saudi Arabia, her employer there gave him a choice: her body or her $2,800 in wages.
The Times interviewed more than 90 workers and family members of those who died, and uncovered another reason that things do not change. Using employment contracts, medical files and autopsies, reporters linked deaths and injuries to staffing agencies and the people who run them. What became clear was that powerful people profit off the system as it exists.
The interviews and documents reveal a system that treats women like household goods — bought, sold and discarded. Some company websites have an “add to cart” button next to photos of workers. One advertises “Kenyan maids for sale.”
A spokesman for the human resources ministry in Saudi Arabia said it had taken steps to protect workers. “Any form of exploitation or abuse of domestic workers is entirely unacceptable, and allegations of such behavior are thoroughly investigated,” the spokesman, Mike Goldstein, wrote in an email.
He said the government had raised fines for abuse and made it easier for workers to quit. He said domestic laborers were capped at 10-hour workdays and were guaranteed one day off per week. He said the government now requires employers to pay their maids through an online system and will one day track people who repeatedly violate labor laws.
“Workers have multiple ways to report abuse, unpaid wages or contract violations, including hotlines, digital platforms and direct complaint mechanisms,” he said.
But Milton Turyasiima, an assistant commissioner with the Ugandan Ministry of Gender, Labor and Social Development, said that abuse remained rampant.
“We get complaints on a daily basis,” he said.
Selling a Dream
Recruiters fan out across East Africa, from impoverished hilltop villages to the cinder block neighborhoods of Nairobi and Kampala, the Ugandan capital.
They search for people desperate, and ambitious, enough to leave their families for low-paying jobs in a country where they do not know the native language. People like Faridah Nassanga, a slim woman with a warm but detached air.
“We are really poor,” Ms. Nassanga said, sitting outside her one-room concrete home in Kampala. Meals are cooked on a propane burner in the alley beside a trickling sewage gutter. She shares a triple-decker bunk bed with her mother and children.
Image
A woman in a red shirt and pink pants sits on a chair with a child in her lap.
Faridah Nassanga and her toddler in Kampala. “We are really poor,” Ms. Nassanga said of her family.
Ms. Nassanga said a friend introduced her in 2019 to an agent from Marphie International Recruitment Agency, whose co-owner, Henry Tukahirwa, recently retired as one of Uganda’s highest-ranking police officers. Ms. Nassanga agreed to move to Saudi Arabia for a job paying about $200 a month.
She found her housekeeping job as pleasant as recruiters had promised. She had her own room. The woman she worked for sometimes even helped with chores.
Then one day, she said, her boss’s husband walked into her room and raped her. Afterward, she said, he kicked and slapped her. He threw her underwear at her as she retreated to the kitchen, Ms. Nassanga said.
When she became pregnant, Ms. Nassanga’s boss accused her of sleeping with the husband. The Saudi family put her on a plane back to Uganda, said Abdallah Kayonde, who runs a legal-aid group that is trying to get compensation for her.
Ms. Nassanga knows her employer’s name but not her phone number. The only records she has are from the recruiting agency.
Ruth Karungi, who owns the agency with her husband, the retired police official, said that when Ms. Nassanga showed up at the office with an infant, the company contacted the Saudi partner agency, which did not respond.
The company then notified the Saudi Embassy. “We trusted that they would address the case through the proper diplomatic channels,” Ms. Karungi said by email.
She said she did not know if anyone had followed up.
Now, Ms. Nassanga is back sharing a one-room home with her mother, her two older children and her toddler — a boy with a notably different complexion and hair from his siblings.
‘An Important Destination Country’
Saudi Arabia has a wage hierarchy for foreign workers, with East Africans near the bottom at about $200 to $250 a month.
Over the years, some countries have fought for better wages and protections for their workers. The Philippines, for example, negotiated a deal with Saudi Arabia in 2012 that raised wages.
That sent staffing agencies looking for cheaper labor elsewhere.
Few Ugandan workers arrived in the kingdom in 2017, Ugandan government data show. Five years later, the number was 85,928.
African governments stood to benefit from remittances. Mr. Muli’s committee called on Kenya in 2019 to “embark on a rigorous campaign to market Saudi Arabia as an important destination country for foreign employment.”
“The current notion that foreign workers in Saudi Arabia go through suffering” needed “to be corrected,” the committee added.
Mwanakombo Ngao was hospitalized in a mental institution after returning home. She has no recollection of what happened in Saudi Arabia.
Image
Esther Kerubo Moranga said her Saudi boss abused her. Now, she says, her uncle beats her for returning home without money.
Image
Josephine Uchi says she worked a demanding housekeeping job while also caring for a Saudi family of 12. She was allowed four hours of sleep a night.
Image
The African countries provide a “new and lower-cost services market,” one of Saudi Arabia’s largest staffing agencies, Maharah Human Resources Company, wrote in 2019.
Some of King Faisal’s descendants, through a holding company, have been important shareholders in both Maharah and in another major staffing agency, Saudi Manpower Solutions Company, or Smasco.
Al Mawarid, yet another big staffing company, also has deep government ties. Its chairman, Ahmad al-Rakban, was executive director of administration for the Saudi National Guard. The chief executive, Riyadh al-Romaizan, is chairman of a government-backed industry council. Tariq al-Awaji, a former top official at the Interior Ministry, is a company director. Another board member, until recently, was an official in the Investment Ministry.
In recent years, Al Mawarid has paid about $4 million to acquire workers from Macro Manpower, the firm owned by Mr. Nzaire, the brother of Uganda’s president, corporate filings show.
(East African recruiting agencies make money from per-worker fees from Saudi companies. Those companies, in turn, get fees from people who hire maids.)
Al Mawarid’s chief executive, Mr. al-Romaizan, declined to answer questions.
Attacked With Bleach
Mary Nsiimenta, a single mother with big, mournful eyes, cleaned house for a family with five children in Najran, in southern Saudi Arabia. She said the children, ages 9 to 18, hit her with a stick and put bleach in her eyes.
(Several women told The Times that they were assaulted with bleach or forced to soak their hands in it as punishment.)
According to Ms. Nsiimenta, her employer was stingy with her salary. After she repeatedly asked to be paid, she said, the family locked her on a third-story rooftop.
As time dragged on, she felt sure she would die there, she recalled.
“The sun was too much,” she said. “Hot. No food. I lost control.”
Image
Mary Nsiimenta, in a pink-and-purple dress and head covering, looks out of a barred window.
Mary Nsiimenta says she was locked on a rooftop under the hot sun for asking to be paid.
Image
Ms. Nsiimenta's back with a long scar along the spine, seen through an opening in her dress.
The scar on Ms. Nsiimenta’s back from spinal surgery after she jumped from the roof.
She jumped, landing hard.
“I crawled out like a snake” to the street, she said. Passers-by brought her to a hospital where, medical records show, doctors repaired her spine. She reported the abuse to doctors and the police, she said, but they told her to return to work.
Ms. Nsiimenta refused, and the Saudi placement agency returned her to Uganda in 2023. In chronic pain and incontinent, she cannot work. Friends and relatives are raising her children. “My life is destroyed,” she said.
Trading Abuse for a Type of Prison
Saudi law says that, when a worker needs to go home, an employer, recruiter or the Saudi government is obligated to pay.
“Under no circumstances does a worker bear any financial responsibility for repatriation,” wrote Mr. Goldstein, the Saudi ministry spokesman.
But workers and worker-rights advocates say that laborers are often forced to pay. Those without money can be detained.
Because visas are tied to employment, workers who leave their jobs can lose their legal status. To help address that, the Saudi government paid a company, Sakan, to provide housing and legal assistance to foreign workers in trouble.
Hannah Njeri Miriam ended up at a Sakan center in 2022, about a year after she left Kenya’s Rift Valley for Saudi Arabia.
Ms. Miriam’s employer fired her after a dispute. Jobless and homeless, Sakan was the only place to go. Once there, according to her family, the staff said she could leave only if she paid about $300 for her travel.
She called home, saying she was being mistreated and underfed. Nobody could afford to help. The Kenyan agency that had sent her abroad had gone out of business.
Finally, her family got a call from another woman at the center. She said Ms. Miriam had tried to escape through an air-conditioning opening but had slipped and fallen two stories. A forensic report said that Ms. Miriam had died of head wounds. The Saudi police later said that she died of “congestive cardiac and respiratory failure.” Sakan’s chairman declined to comment.
Image
A man, his face partially obscured by shadows, sits in his home, beneath a poster of Jesus.
Jackson Tutuma feared that work in Saudi Arabia was too dangerous. But his wife, Hannah Njeri Miriam, set off anyway. “I begged her,” Mr. Tutuma, said. “I was heartbroken.”
Mr. Goldstein, the Saudi ministry spokesman, declined to comment on individual deaths but said that every case was thoroughly investigated. He did not comment on the inconsistencies between autopsies and police reports and would not say how many people had been arrested or prosecuted in labor cases.
Mr. Goldstein said the government stopped funding Sakan in 2023. Now, he said, it pays the recruiting agency Smasco to run worker-assistance centers.
Three Kenyan women spoke to The Times from inside a Smasco center. The women, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, said that they could not go home unless they paid about $400. The company did not respond to requests for comment.
Returning Home
As migration to Saudi Arabia surged, reports of deaths and injuries spread across East Africa. Bodies began arriving. Each story brought new outrage.
People should not have been surprised. The leaders of Kenya and Uganda had ample warning of abuse, yet they signed agreements with Saudi Arabia that lacked protections that other leaders demanded.
The Philippines deal in 2012, for example, guaranteed a $400 monthly minimum wage, access to bank accounts and a promise that workers’ passports would not be confiscated.
Kenya initially demanded similar wages, according to a government report, but when Saudi Arabia balked, Kenya agreed to a deal in 2015 with no minimum wage at all.
The treaty contained little beyond a promise to establish a committee to monitor labor issues. The commission was never formed, a government report said.
Mr. Mohamed, the Kenyan president’s spokesman, said that the government later negotiated $225 monthly wages. He said Kenyan workers were simply not as highly regarded in Saudi Arabia. “Philippines is able to dictate the price,” he said.
When Uganda cut its agreement with the Saudi government, they made no mention of a minimum wage. The issue of worker mistreatment was well discussed at the time. The Saudi ambassador to Uganda even wrote a column in a Ugandan newspaper assailing critics who “offend and abuse the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia” by publicizing abuse.
Image
A man and a woman hug in front of a large black mortuary van.
Friends and family at the Nairobi airport in October with a hearse carrying the body of Lucy Nyambura Kimani.Credit...The New York Times
Image
A casket, labeled in Arabic, sits in the back of a hearse.
A label in Arabic on the coffin of Ms. Kimani, who died while working in Saudi Arabia.Credit...The New York Times
In 2021, a Kenyan Senate committee found “deteriorating conditions” in Saudi Arabia and an “increase in distress calls by those alleging torture and mistreatment.” The committee recommended suspending worker transfers.
When Mr. Ruto was elected president in 2022, though, the campaign to send workers abroad intensified. His government reached a new Saudi labor agreement the following year without a wage increase or substantive new protections.
“It’s a cycle of abuse that no one is addressing,” said Stephanie Marigu, a Kenyan lawyer who represents workers.
Now, a few times a month, rural Kenyans head to Nairobi to collect a coffin from the airport.
Hundreds of people gathered in September at a village school in southwestern Kenya. They paid respects to Millicent Moraa Obwocha, who had left her husband and young son behind months earlier.
Her employer sexually harassed and assaulted her, her husband, Obuya Simon Areba, said. Things got so bad last summer, he said, that she asked her Saudi recruiter to rescue her.
A few days later, her husband got the call that she was dead. She was 24. The Kenyan government attributed her death to “nerve issues.”
Her employer, Abdullah Omar Abdul al-Rahman Hailan, said that Mr. Areba’s account was “misleading and incorrect” and called a Times reporter “a clown.”
At the funeral, Ms. Obwocha’s body lay in an open coffin in a white dress and veil.
Beside her was a six-foot-tall photograph. In it, she smiles with her fingers held up in a V. She is standing outside the airport, brimming with optimism.
Image
The browned remains of dead flowers stand, wilted on a patch of dirt.
The grave of Millicent Moraa Obwocha in Kisii, southwestern Kenya. Her employer in Saudi Arabia sexually harassed and assaulted her, her husband said. She died age 24.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/16/worl ... e9677ea768
Re: SOCIAL TRENDS
Neither 5 nor 8 million – A group of scientists has done the math and the world’s population could be very different from what we thought
In November 2022, the UN announced that the global population had reached 8 billion people. While these numbers are just estimates, the real point of interest isn’t so much the exact figure, but rather the fact that we aren’t even be hitting the replacement rate since 2023. This means that, by the end of the century, humanity will peak and then start a gradual decline. But how reliable are these numbers? A new study has added some spice to the debate, suggesting that we’ve been off in our counting.
In fact, according to this study, we’ve likely overlooked several hundred million people.
Second-guessing Official Numbers
As demographer Jakub Bijak told the BBC last year, “Estimating the number of people on Earth is far from an exact science.” It’s true that the process is imprecise, but Bijak also pointed out that the one thing we can be certain about when it comes to population predictions is how uncertain they really are.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that demographers are just guessing. Demographers base their predictions on trends and data from every country going back to 1950, but… what if some of that data wasn’t counted correctly?
A new study from Aalto University in Finland, published in Nature, reveals how the data sets that demographers rely on “profoundly and systematically” underestimate the true global population. The implications are serious: we could be talking about hundreds of millions more people living on Earth.
Josias Láng-Ritter, one of the researchers behind the study, points to one specific area where this issue is most pronounced: the rural population. “For the first time, our research shows that a significant portion of the rural population may be left out of global population data,” he explains.
“Depending on the dataset, rural populations have been underreported by as much as 53% to 84%during the period we studied. These findings are striking, especially since these datasets have been relied upon in thousands of studies and played a key role in guiding decision-making, yet their accuracy has never been thoroughly checked,” says the researcher.
This presents serious consequences. As the researchers point out, no amount of data revision can fully fix the problem because it’s a structural one. Governments simply lack the resources to gather precise data from rural areas, which leads to a huge gap between the real population and what’s reported in the population maps used for demographic studies. And this, in turn, affects the decisions that are made based on that data.
Rural Population: Forgotten and Underestimated
Current estimates place 43% of the world’s 8.2 billion people in rural areas—around 3.526 billion individuals. However, considering that this figure has been undercounted by between 53% and 84%, we’re not talking about a small group of people. Understanding the true number of people is crucial for one simple reason: redistributing resources effectively.
The absence of accurate demographic data can have a major impact on political decisions. Ritter points to social decisions as an example. “In many countries, the national-level data might be lacking, so they rely on global population maps to help guide their choices: Do we need a new paved road or a hospital? How much medication should be distributed to a particular area? How many people could be at risk from natural disasters like earthquakes or floods?” he explains.
By doing the math, in the best-case scenario—assuming a 53% undercount of rural populations—we could be talking about 1.869 billion people who have been missed. In the worst-case scenario, with 84% uncounted, that number jumps to 2.962 billion. The study published in Nature uses Paraguay as an example, noting that the 2012 census might have missed a quarter of the population.
https://eladelantado.com/news/total-wor ... e_vignette
In November 2022, the UN announced that the global population had reached 8 billion people. While these numbers are just estimates, the real point of interest isn’t so much the exact figure, but rather the fact that we aren’t even be hitting the replacement rate since 2023. This means that, by the end of the century, humanity will peak and then start a gradual decline. But how reliable are these numbers? A new study has added some spice to the debate, suggesting that we’ve been off in our counting.
In fact, according to this study, we’ve likely overlooked several hundred million people.
Second-guessing Official Numbers
As demographer Jakub Bijak told the BBC last year, “Estimating the number of people on Earth is far from an exact science.” It’s true that the process is imprecise, but Bijak also pointed out that the one thing we can be certain about when it comes to population predictions is how uncertain they really are.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that demographers are just guessing. Demographers base their predictions on trends and data from every country going back to 1950, but… what if some of that data wasn’t counted correctly?
A new study from Aalto University in Finland, published in Nature, reveals how the data sets that demographers rely on “profoundly and systematically” underestimate the true global population. The implications are serious: we could be talking about hundreds of millions more people living on Earth.
Josias Láng-Ritter, one of the researchers behind the study, points to one specific area where this issue is most pronounced: the rural population. “For the first time, our research shows that a significant portion of the rural population may be left out of global population data,” he explains.
“Depending on the dataset, rural populations have been underreported by as much as 53% to 84%during the period we studied. These findings are striking, especially since these datasets have been relied upon in thousands of studies and played a key role in guiding decision-making, yet their accuracy has never been thoroughly checked,” says the researcher.
This presents serious consequences. As the researchers point out, no amount of data revision can fully fix the problem because it’s a structural one. Governments simply lack the resources to gather precise data from rural areas, which leads to a huge gap between the real population and what’s reported in the population maps used for demographic studies. And this, in turn, affects the decisions that are made based on that data.
Rural Population: Forgotten and Underestimated
Current estimates place 43% of the world’s 8.2 billion people in rural areas—around 3.526 billion individuals. However, considering that this figure has been undercounted by between 53% and 84%, we’re not talking about a small group of people. Understanding the true number of people is crucial for one simple reason: redistributing resources effectively.
The absence of accurate demographic data can have a major impact on political decisions. Ritter points to social decisions as an example. “In many countries, the national-level data might be lacking, so they rely on global population maps to help guide their choices: Do we need a new paved road or a hospital? How much medication should be distributed to a particular area? How many people could be at risk from natural disasters like earthquakes or floods?” he explains.
By doing the math, in the best-case scenario—assuming a 53% undercount of rural populations—we could be talking about 1.869 billion people who have been missed. In the worst-case scenario, with 84% uncounted, that number jumps to 2.962 billion. The study published in Nature uses Paraguay as an example, noting that the 2012 census might have missed a quarter of the population.
https://eladelantado.com/news/total-wor ... e_vignette
Re: SOCIAL TRENDS
Japan sees record drop in population
For the fourteenth year running, Japan's population has slumped to a record low. The non-foreign population dropped by nearly 900,000 — an unprecedented fall.
Japan is seeking to reverse its shrinking birth rate but the effects are yet to be seen
Japan's citizen population dipped to 120.3 million as of October 2024, official data showed on Monday, marking a record drop of 898,000 people from the previous year.
The country's birth rate is among the lowest in the world, leading to big problems for society and business — a shrinking workforce and fewer consumers.
How do Japan's population figures stack up?
The fall — the 13th consecutive non-foreign population slide — was the largest since the government began collecting comparable data in 1950, according to the Interior Ministry.
Including foreign nationals, the population also fell by 550,000 people to 123.8 million — the 14th straight annual fall.
Only two prefectures, Tokyo and neighboring Saitama, had population increases with numbers falling in the country's remaining 45 prefectures.
Akita prefecture, in the northern part of Honshu island, showed the most marked decline.
Japan's population peaked in 2008, and since then it has steadily shrunk because of a declining birthrate.
What can Japan do to halt the slide?
In a briefing, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi said the Japanese government had been trying to offer help to young would-be parents who feel too economically constricted to have children.
Akashi: Japan's family-friendliest city
05:26
"We understand that the declining birthrate is continuing because many people who wish to raise children are not able to fulfill their wishes," Hayashi said.
The Japanese government is trying to raise wages for young people while also offering help with looking after children, he said.
"We will promote comprehensive measures to realize a society where everyone who wishes to have children can have children and raise them with peace of mind," Hayashi added.
While Japan has turned to young foreigners as a source of labor, the government has retained a strict immigration policy, only allowing in foreign workers temporarily.
In 2023, then Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said the government would channel some 3.5 trillion yen (about $25 billion or €23.5 billion) each year into child care and other measures to support parents.
Edited by: Wesley Rahn
https://www.dw.com/en/japan-sees-record ... a-72239612
For the fourteenth year running, Japan's population has slumped to a record low. The non-foreign population dropped by nearly 900,000 — an unprecedented fall.
Japan is seeking to reverse its shrinking birth rate but the effects are yet to be seen
Japan's citizen population dipped to 120.3 million as of October 2024, official data showed on Monday, marking a record drop of 898,000 people from the previous year.
The country's birth rate is among the lowest in the world, leading to big problems for society and business — a shrinking workforce and fewer consumers.
How do Japan's population figures stack up?
The fall — the 13th consecutive non-foreign population slide — was the largest since the government began collecting comparable data in 1950, according to the Interior Ministry.
Including foreign nationals, the population also fell by 550,000 people to 123.8 million — the 14th straight annual fall.
Only two prefectures, Tokyo and neighboring Saitama, had population increases with numbers falling in the country's remaining 45 prefectures.
Akita prefecture, in the northern part of Honshu island, showed the most marked decline.
Japan's population peaked in 2008, and since then it has steadily shrunk because of a declining birthrate.
What can Japan do to halt the slide?
In a briefing, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi said the Japanese government had been trying to offer help to young would-be parents who feel too economically constricted to have children.
Akashi: Japan's family-friendliest city
05:26
"We understand that the declining birthrate is continuing because many people who wish to raise children are not able to fulfill their wishes," Hayashi said.
The Japanese government is trying to raise wages for young people while also offering help with looking after children, he said.
"We will promote comprehensive measures to realize a society where everyone who wishes to have children can have children and raise them with peace of mind," Hayashi added.
While Japan has turned to young foreigners as a source of labor, the government has retained a strict immigration policy, only allowing in foreign workers temporarily.
In 2023, then Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said the government would channel some 3.5 trillion yen (about $25 billion or €23.5 billion) each year into child care and other measures to support parents.
Edited by: Wesley Rahn
https://www.dw.com/en/japan-sees-record ... a-72239612
Re: SOCIAL TRENDS
Russia’s Birth Rate Plunges to 200-Year Low
Russia’s attempts to boost its flagging birth rate — through policies promoting “traditional values,” tighter abortion restrictions and officials’ encouragement of larger families — appear to be falling short, as the number of births has fallen to its lowest level in centuries.
According to data released by the state statistics agency Rosstat, 195,400 children were born in Russia during January and February 2025 — a 3% drop compared to the same period in 2024.
The decline was even steeper in February alone, with births falling 7.6% year-over-year to 90,500 — 7,400 fewer than in the same month last year.
Some regions saw even sharper drops. Births fell by 18.7% in Arkhangelsk, 19.4% in the republic of Karelia, 18.6% in the Oryol region, 21.6% in Kostroma and 26.6% in Smolensk.
According to demographer Alexei Raksha, the first quarter of 2025 likely saw the lowest number of births since the early 1800s, with February marking the lowest monthly figure in over 200 years. Based on preliminary registry office data, he estimated that 95,000 to 96,000 children were born in March, bringing the total for the first quarter to around 293,000-294,000.
Rosstat has not yet released official numbers for March.
While deaths in January and February also declined — down 5.2% to 331,100 — the drop was not enough to offset the falling birth rate. In the first two months of 2025 alone, Russia experienced a natural population decline of nearly 119,000 people.
Nationwide, deaths outnumbered births by an average of 1.6 to 1. In some regions, the gap was even wider: in Kaluga and Ivanovo, twice as many people died as were born; in Vladimir and Belgorod, the ratio was three to one.
Russia recorded 1.222 million births in 2024, the lowest annual total since 1999. Compared to 2014, the birth rate has fallen by a third. Between 2016 and 2024, natural population decline exceeded 3 million people.
According to Rosstat’s forecast based on the 2020 census, births are expected to keep falling. The annual number could drop to just 1.14 million by 2027.
A slow recovery might begin in the late 2020s, but even by 2045, the number of births is projected to remain 25% lower than in the years before Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea — reaching around 1.426 million per year.
Even if the annual number of deaths stabilizes around 1.8 million, Russia’s population is still expected to shrink by roughly 500,000 people per year.
By 2046, the country’s population could fall to 138.8 million under Rosstat’s baseline forecast — or to just 130 million in a more pessimistic scenario, roughly equal to the size of the Russian Empire in 1897.
This sharp decrease could significantly reshape Russia’s demographics. By the early 2040s, the number of children and teenagers is projected to fall by 26%, to just 20 million. Their share of the population would drop from 18.5% today to 14.2%. Meanwhile, the proportion of elderly Russians is expected to grow from 24.5% today to nearly 27% by 2046.
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2025/04/ ... low-a88709
Russia’s attempts to boost its flagging birth rate — through policies promoting “traditional values,” tighter abortion restrictions and officials’ encouragement of larger families — appear to be falling short, as the number of births has fallen to its lowest level in centuries.
According to data released by the state statistics agency Rosstat, 195,400 children were born in Russia during January and February 2025 — a 3% drop compared to the same period in 2024.
The decline was even steeper in February alone, with births falling 7.6% year-over-year to 90,500 — 7,400 fewer than in the same month last year.
Some regions saw even sharper drops. Births fell by 18.7% in Arkhangelsk, 19.4% in the republic of Karelia, 18.6% in the Oryol region, 21.6% in Kostroma and 26.6% in Smolensk.
According to demographer Alexei Raksha, the first quarter of 2025 likely saw the lowest number of births since the early 1800s, with February marking the lowest monthly figure in over 200 years. Based on preliminary registry office data, he estimated that 95,000 to 96,000 children were born in March, bringing the total for the first quarter to around 293,000-294,000.
Rosstat has not yet released official numbers for March.
While deaths in January and February also declined — down 5.2% to 331,100 — the drop was not enough to offset the falling birth rate. In the first two months of 2025 alone, Russia experienced a natural population decline of nearly 119,000 people.
Nationwide, deaths outnumbered births by an average of 1.6 to 1. In some regions, the gap was even wider: in Kaluga and Ivanovo, twice as many people died as were born; in Vladimir and Belgorod, the ratio was three to one.
Russia recorded 1.222 million births in 2024, the lowest annual total since 1999. Compared to 2014, the birth rate has fallen by a third. Between 2016 and 2024, natural population decline exceeded 3 million people.
According to Rosstat’s forecast based on the 2020 census, births are expected to keep falling. The annual number could drop to just 1.14 million by 2027.
A slow recovery might begin in the late 2020s, but even by 2045, the number of births is projected to remain 25% lower than in the years before Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea — reaching around 1.426 million per year.
Even if the annual number of deaths stabilizes around 1.8 million, Russia’s population is still expected to shrink by roughly 500,000 people per year.
By 2046, the country’s population could fall to 138.8 million under Rosstat’s baseline forecast — or to just 130 million in a more pessimistic scenario, roughly equal to the size of the Russian Empire in 1897.
This sharp decrease could significantly reshape Russia’s demographics. By the early 2040s, the number of children and teenagers is projected to fall by 26%, to just 20 million. Their share of the population would drop from 18.5% today to 14.2%. Meanwhile, the proportion of elderly Russians is expected to grow from 24.5% today to nearly 27% by 2046.
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2025/04/ ... low-a88709