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Gaza: why does it concern us more when women and children die?

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When 80% of people killed in the Gaza airstrikes are male, why is no-one talking about gender asks Glen Poole?

A total of 172 men, children and women were killed in Gaza over a seven-day period by Israeli airstrikes last week and the death toll continues to rise. It’s a shocking figure and the scenes of death and destruction that have been broadcast around the world will be a concern to anyone with an empathetic heart.

But the question for those concerned about the wellbeing of men and boys to ask is this –why do we care more when women die? More than we care about the children and more than we care about the men? Women account for just one in eight of the deaths (each one of them tragic), but they are in the minority when compared to the men and the children.

According to the German press agency DPA:

  • 119 of those killed are men (69% of the death toll)
  • 31 are children (18%)
  • 22 are women (13%)

Women and children first 

When you look at the number of men, children and women killed in Gaza it is clear that women are the smallest group. And yet the media make women the number one victim group in its reports from Gaza. Here’s Russia Today, for example, with an article headlined “30 percent of Israeli airstrikes victims in Gaza are women and children“:

“Of the 172 Palestinians killed around 30 percent are women and children. The dead include 29 women, of whom seven are under the age of 18. They also include 24 men under 18. About half are small boys aged 10 or under, the youngest an 18-month-old baby.”

Can you see who’s missing after first women, second girls and third boys (referred to here as men under 18)… that’s right it’s adult men. Here comes their mention:

“It is not immediately possible to independently verify how many of the 119 men killed are civilians.”

Presumably this is mentioned because the death of a civilian is somehow more tragic than the death of a male soldier? We live in an era where nation states still rely on men to put their lives at risk in order to protect national security and yet those men’s lives are deemed to have a different value to the lives of the female and male civilians who are killed in conflict.

Men’s injuries ignored by media 

Meanwhile, The Independent newspaper played a similar trick with reports that 1361 Palestinians were injured in the strikes, 53% of whom were men; 29% children and 18% women. The newspaper chose not to mention the 700 plus men who were injured,  focussing instead on the fact that “out of wounded Palestinians, almost 390 were children and 250 were women”.

The Independent, at least, put children first, but was blind to the fact that the majority of  those injured are men — more than women and children combined — with men three times more likely to suffer injury than women.

If all this wasn’t bad enough, Baroness Tonge, an independent Liberal Democrat in the House of Lords, managed to overlook the fact that seven out of 10 victims were men and 80% were male as she declared in parliament that nearly half of those killed were women and children — a statement which stretched the definition of “nearly half” beyond statistical credibility.

These figures are not extraordinary. The World Health Organisation estimates that there are around half a million violent deaths in the world every year and more than eight out of 10 victims are men and boys. The horrific killings in Gaza are consistent with this trend, with 80% of the victims being male an 20% being girls.

The invisibility of the disposable male

When it comes to gender equality, both the the socially conservative and the progressive liberal mindset works on the principle of women and children first. According to this logic, if the only people killed were male then we would have less cause to be concerned, because the male of the species is a disposable resource not worthy of note as a victim of gendered violence.

This has certainly been the case in other conflicts. There was no mention of the gender of the victims when the BBC and others reported that extensive photographic evidence revealed 11,000 “detainees” had been tortured and executed by Syrian forces.

According to one blogger: “The vast majority of the images were of young men most likely between the ages of twenty and forty. There were no children. Within the images seen, there was only one female body.”

There was no outcry about the gender of the victims when ISIS slaughtered 190 male prisoners in Northern Iraq, or when the Iraqi forces murdered 250 sunni men and boys in suspected revenge attacks. 

When the kidnapping of 200 Nigerian girls by Boko Haram caused international outcry earlier this year, the few lone voices that pointed out that Boko Haram had been slaughtering boys for months were drowned out by a noisy global conscience that deems the mass kidnapping of girls to be more worthy of concern than the mass killing of boys.

And when the Syrian government was attacking the city of Homs, the United Nations was successful in negotiating the release of women and children, but the men were left behind. This is the same UN that has an international strategy to End Violence Against Women and Girls by doesn’t deem men and boys—who account for more than 80% of victims of violent death—worthy of such strategic concern.

When it comes to violent death it seems, we all, men and women, remain collectively more tolerant of the harm that happens to men and boys—and that includes the men and boys who are the majority of people currently dying and being injured in the Israeli strikes on Gaza.

—Photograph: flickr/msdonalee

Written by Glen Poole author of the book Equality For Men

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  • http://thepowerofrelationship.com Mark Davenport

    I guess that, because according to politically correct consensus, men are the perpetrators of violence so they can’t also be the victims of it, now can they?
    It’s an old old role that men play here. One that once made some kind of survival sense. If the men were killed, the women would nonetheless all get pregnant even with a tiny number of males who survived (or from the conquering tribe) and population could recover. Men were disposable as far as survival of the group was concerned.
    Maybe we still have some deep values that have persisted fro that ancient past.

  • CitymanMichael

    We have to accept that for millennia, men have been disposable, not just in war but also in work – and actually disposable in life – especially if they did not conform to society’s needs for provider/protectors.

    However, in 2014 in the west, these public attitudes and opinions about men’s role in life are outdated.

    Another problem which I have with this situation is that in the past, men were highly respected in society. I believe that society’s respect for men has weakened.

  • Darren Ball

    Biologically speaking, men are much more disposable than women. We are only here as a species because we have been successful at reproduction; because one man can father thousands of children, we don’t need many men. Scientists have been able to prove that throughout history a much higher proportion of women than men have passed on their genes, which suggests that women have been selective in their breeding.

    Another clue is that men are generally stronger than women – this is a sign that men have an innate protective role. We would be a very badly adapted species if we weren’t innately more protective of women. If nature had selected a characteristic in which women, not men, were most inclined to fight off an invading force or hostile animals, then our offspring would have been slaughtered in the womb whilst the much stronger men cowered in a corner.

    Some will counter that men are not more protective of women and cite male-on-female violence as proof. However, my claim is that men are innately more protective of women in their circle of concern (their own family, tribe, country, creed, etc.), but not necessarily of women of enemy civilisations.

    As for domestic violence, there are some cultures in which male-on-female domestic violence is allowed, and even encouraged, but this is not a human universal characteristic: it is only acceptable in certain cultures, so it is not innate. Even in those cultures, men protect “their” women from external assaults.

    DV is quite common in all cultures, even where it is not tolerated; this may suggest that it is rooted in some innate characteristics. However, it does not disprove the theory that men are innately protective towards women. British men are twice as likely to be violent towards a male partner than a female partner, and women in lesbian relationships are at three-time the risk of heterosexual women. Similar patterns are to be found in other western countries. This evidence suggests that in societies where DV towards women is not an acceptable part of the culture, violent men exercise more restraint around women than they do around men, and women are more violent to other women than men are.

    Men are more violent than women overall, but usually they are violent towards other men despite the greater risk to themselves.

    Our greater outrage to mortar attacks on women is visceral and innate, no matter how much we rationalise it otherwise; it’s a reaction that has served our species well. However acknowledging that society is naturally more protective of women than men does not fit our current paradigm of women being disadvantaged everywhere and maleness being a dysfunctional mutation of the human species.

    Acknowledgement of our greater concern for women would require us to bestow a virtue on men for favouring the interests of women over themselves, and of bravery and chivalry. This wouldn’t fit our paradigm either: men are not allowed to have any particular virtues.

    The reaction by many men (often myself) to our current feminist-inspired paradigm is to say “what about the men being [insert issue of choice]?” What feminists often dismissively describe as “what about the menz?” These men have a good point: you can’t hold the view that men have nothing particular to offer and society discriminates only against women, and then start calling for special treatment for women whenever some nasty shit happens (which we don’t just do in war zones, but also in the criminal justice system, domestic violence, mental health, physical health, etc.).

    Asking for equal care for men is valid and rational, but it’s only one way to square the circle. The alternative, which may sometimes be more appropriate, is to reject the paradigm altogether. Perhaps a war zone is one such instance where we allow ourselves to be more concerned for the women than the men, because men are a tougher bunch who should be protecting their women and children, as they have done since the birth of civilisation. Men are good like that.

    • TrebolBajo

      i don’t think there are any cultures where male on female domestic violence is acceptable

      • Darren Ball

        TreboBajo,

        In our own culture it was acceptable until relatively recently. A husband was allowed to hit his wife as a form of discipline. The ugly phrase that was used is “reasonable chastisement” and is still a defence today for parents hitting their children (UK Law). I don’t believe that this practice, as awful as it was, extended to allowing husbands to beat the shit out of their wives – husbands were allowed to disciplined their wives as they disciplined their children. If nothing else, it must have been grotesquely humiliating for an adult woman to be disciplined by her husband.

        Some Muslim communities interpret the Quran in much the same way. Straight of the www I got this on my first hit:

        START
        The Hanafis mentioned four situations in which a husband is permitted to discipline his wife by hitting her. These are: not adorning herself when he wants her to; not responding when he calls her to bed and she is taahirah (pure, i.e., not menstruating); not praying; and going out of the house without his permission.
        FINISH
        Elsewhere it talks about the husband’s right to rape his wife. See for yourself here: http://islamqa.info/en/10680.

        Why this is not regarded as incitement to violence and hate speech is thoroughly beyond me.

        Some communities stone women to death for committing adultery. If that wasn’t bad enough, the definition of adultery can include women who have been raped. Then of course there’s the so-called “honour killings”.

        I know I’m not doing this subject justice, but there are communities in which extreme violence towards women is common, accepted, encouraged and even considered necessary.

  • Darren Ball

    My comments above notwithstanding, the London Metro free news paper yesterday ran an article on the Gaza conflict in which they wrote that 147 children and 74 women had so far been killed. They didn’t bother to mention the number of men who’d been killed.

    At the time of the article the total number of casualties was in excess of 600, so the number of men killed must have been over 379 (83 per cent of all adult casualties).

    As a free paper, the Metro tries to appeal to as many Londoners as it possibly can. It doesn’t try to be controversial. There does appear to be something in our collective Zeitgeist that is extremely ambivalent towards men suffering physical hardship.

    • Inside MAN

      Hi Darren,

      Thanks for the heads up about that. I think it’s a total blind spot for most people — it’s just the traditional way reporting on these issues is done. From my experience in the newsroom, journalists don’t even think about it.

      We’re running your article later today — slated to go up at around midday.

      Thanks very much for submitting — great to have your contribution!

      Dan

  • Darren Ball

    It’s a pleasure.

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  • http://www.iife.net/ www.iife.net

    A fascinating discussion is worth comment. I do think that you should write more on this subject, it may
    not be a taboo subject but generally people do not talk about these subjects.
    To the next! Best wishes!!