insideMAN

Nine out of ten victims of police-related deaths are male. Who cares?

by 8 Comments

Why does nobody care that it’s mostly men and boys who die during or after contact with the police, asks insideMAN news editor, Glen Poole?

How do we make sexism against men and boys visible? 

One of the challenges we face is that men are the invisible gender—and the problem with invisibility is you can’t see it. Even when you know that the sexism, discrimination and inequality that affects the male of the species exists, it can be fiercely difficult to uncover and present it to others in a way that they can see the sexism with their own eyes.

Being an advocate for men and boys takes constant vigilance and a willingness to chase passing shadows in pursuit of actual evidence that we live in a world that is sexist towards men as well as women.

I caught sight of one such shadow last night. It was cast briefly from my radio by a BBC newsreader who casually announced that more “people” died in police custody in the past year, before moving on to the next news item.

I instinctively knew I’d been exposed to a typical example of everyday sexism against men and boys, but I had to go digging for it. It’s the word “people” that’s the giveaway.

Generally, there are two reasons the media refer to “people” when telling us stories:

  1. Because the “people” they are referring to are a fairly even mix of men and women
  2. Because the majority of the “people” they are talking about are men

In contrast, you will very rarely (if ever) hear of a group of women referred to as “people”.  You can guarantee, for example, that if the majority of “people” who died in police custody were women, the story would no longer be about “people”, it would become a gendered story about women or “women and girls”.

And yet when the majority of people in a story are men, their gender becomes invisible, they aren’t identified as men, they are disguised as “people”. There’s an exception to this rule. If the “people” in question have perpetrated some heinous crime, then they are no longer “people”, they are male actors in a gendered story, and the fact they are “men” is pushed to the fore.

This is the binary, sexist nature of gendered news stories. If the story fits into the accepted gendered narrative of women good, men bad; men are perpetrators, women are victims; women HAVE problems and men ARE problems, then the gender is identified loud and clear.

If, however, it’s a story about a problem that most affects men, then their gender is made invisible. This is pure, unadulterated sexism against men and it is rife in the media, in the public sector and in our general discourse about gender.

So what are the facts of the matter?

This is what the sexist (against men) media didn’t tell us today about the latest annual report from the UK’s Independent Police Complaints Commission. These are the facts I had to go digging for because they weren’t revealed in any of the news reports:

  • 142 people died during or following police contact in 2014/2015:
  • 123 of these people were men and boys (that’s 87%)
  • 17 died while in police custody and 13 of those people were male (82%)
  • 14 died in road accidents involving the police and 13 of those were male (93%)
  • 41 died during or after contact with the police and 34 (83%) were male
  • 69 people killed themselves following police custody and 61 (88%) were male
  • 1 person was shot by the police and he was male (100%)

The Home Secretary, Theresa May, acknowledged that police custody is “a place where all too often vulnerable people, often those with mental health problems, are taken because there is no other place to go.”

There’s that word again—“people”. If nine out of 10 “people” who died during or following police custody were women, we wouldn’t be talking about “vulnerable people”, we’d be talking about “vulnerable women”.

But no politician or newsreader or public servant in his or her right mind would refer to these vulnerable people who die in tragic circumstances as “vulnerable men”.

Firstly, the “what about teh womenz” brigade would be incensed that female victims have been overlooked, and would argue that female victims have it harder than male victims, because death during and after contact with the police is a patriarchal construct designed to meet the needs of men, not women (or some such dogma). You can’t challenge the monopoly that feminism has on gendered issues by pointing at the many inequalities that impact men and boys and expect to get away with it.

Secondly, the “silent”, socially-conservative majority would never approve of labeling big, strong men as “vulnerable”, lest the whole fabric of society came tumbling down around our ears!

And so to spare the upset of liberal “progressives” and “small ‘c’ conservatives”, we must keep men’s gender invisible when shit stuff happens to us.

And our inability to see the gendered nature of this shit stuff that mostly happens to men—like suicide, rough sleeping, murder, workplace death, imprisonment and death following contact with the police—is ultimately what stops us from tackling these issues.

We are all—men and women—collectively more tolerant of the harm that happens to men and boys. We have a “gender empathy gap”.

The traditional view of “women and children” first and the feminist focus on “women and girls” first combine to cast a perfect shadow that make the vulnerabilities of men and boys invisible. It’s how we unconsciously conspire to repeatedly tell all men and boys to “man up” without ever actually having to say the words.

It’s why, when men and boys account for 8 out 10 violent deaths worldwide, we have global campaigns to end violence against women and girls, but no campaigns to end violence against men and boys.

It’s why, when around 95% of the UK prison population is male, we have gendered initiatives to reduce the impact of prison on women, but no gendered initiatives to reduce the impact of prison on men.

It’s why, when ten men every month in the UK are dying during or after contact with the police, we don’t name it as a gendered issue.

Let’s be absolutely clear, if ten women a month in the UK were dying during or after contact with the police, we would name it as a gendered issue.

And there’s the sexism against men. It’s born out of our collective tolerance of the harm that happens against men and boys. It’s born out of the different value men and women place on men’s lives and women’s lives.

We believe women and girls are precious and sensitive and vulnerable and need protecting and men and boys are disposable, strong and don’t need protecting.

So what if vulnerable males are dying during or after contact with the police? They’re just “people”, statistics, they’re not women and girls. They’re only men and boys. Who cares?

I do. I care. It matters to me that our society takes the death of our sons, brothers, fathers, uncles, nephews, grandfathers and male friends less seriously because of our collective sexism against men. I care. Do you?

—Photo Credit: flickr/ms.akr

Article by Glen Poole author of the book Equality For Men

If you liked this article and want to read more, follow us on Twitter @insideMANmag and Facebook.

 

What urinals tell us about a man’s right to bodily integrity

by 2 Comments

Men are curious about what other blokes have, but are conscious not to be caught out. My brother told me about a heterosexual friend who – while, standing at a urinal – tried to turn his head stealthily to the left to get a sneaky peek at his neighbour. But he ended up accidentally splashing another man standing next to him.

However, men and their behaviours are increasingly drawing the ire of the public, not amusement. Only recently, a German court had to step in to uphold the right of men to urinate while standing, regardless of their poor aiming techniques. Men are also annoying the public in other ways, like taking up too much space with their “classic legs splayed” position on public transport.

I acknowledge the annoyance that some of you might have with men. But what I do find interesting in all the irritation directed at the male sex is the shrinking space available for men to just be themselves. Ironically, “all-powerful” men have become objectified, and we are little interested in hearing about how they feel about all this. Intriguingly, the metaphors around urinals are instructive here.

All the world’s a stage…

An influential sociologist, Erving Goffman, believed that what we could deduce from the way that public toilets were stylised is that women were supposed to have lovelier surroundings for the elimination of their waste products and nice places to interact with other women away from the gaze of men and attend to their appearances (1).

Public toilet facilities for men, on the other hand, were frequently paired down, often to just a urinal. A kind of assembly line for the production of urine if you like. Goffman believed that while the gents and ladies were thought of as just the natural order of things, they were actually crucial in producing some of the differences we see in men and women.

Inspired by the famous on-street urinals of Paris beginning in the mid-19th Century, the “vespasiennes” or “pissoirs”, many street urinals in London now don’t have any privacy at all. All the world’s a stage when men stand and urinate, literally. Society long ago decided that men do not have the same rights to privacy as women. This can create trauma for awkward male adolescents, for instance, forced to shower with other boys in shared showers.

Fighting over cyberspace

Unease around men and their urine as a kind of “filth”, and the need to protect women from unruly men has a lingering history (2). But our subconscious anxieties burst into the public consciousness with Duchamp’s invention of conceptual art, via the Fountain in 1917. The Fountain was basically a sideways urinal, as some people pointed out at the time. But brilliantly, the Fountain scandalised a whole generation, bringing to the surface our fears around men, urine and their sexuality.

Urinals literally became a battleground, with heteronormativity being one crusade (i.e. the idea heterosexual practices should be promoted as natural). Before Grindr, when homosexuality was criminalised, men took to urinals as a semi-private space to find other partners. Urinals – and their ambiguity – provided an excellent way for men “in the know” to meet other men. The outcomes of authorities pushing homosexual men to the fringes of society were annoying to those same authorities, who subsequently passed criminal laws targeting such loitering men (3).

Today, the Internet and social media are the main combat zones. For instance, there is the Youtube clip that did the rounds last year, shaming men for harassing a beautiful young woman walking around New York – 100 incidents in 10 hours – as the producers of the clip claimed. But less publicised was the level of harassment that an athletic young man received for doing the New York walk around – 30 incidents of harassment claimed in three hours – including from many women.

‘Man Blanking?’

So men are the disposable repositories of our (somewhat sexualized) anxieties. It is okay to objectify men so that we can discuss “the problem”. For instance, we rightly care about female genital mutilation, but rubbish those concerned about the genital mutilation of infant boys. Thus a recent editorial in the Evening Standard effectively denied any space for male suffering by advocating for “boys to get behind the campaign to end female genital mutilation“. To say that infant boys should not have parts of their genitals removed is weirdly unpopular.

Jane Powell, the director of the CALM charity, pointed out that we would never be able to ignore women in breast cancer prevention the way we ignore men in suicide prevention (78% of suicides are among men): “There has just been a conference talking about suicide prevention entirely focused on talking about young people, vulnerable people and perinatal care. But not men… Can you imagine a Breast Cancer campaign targeted at 1) people who are overweight, 2) younger people with a history of breast cancer in the family, 3) people who smoke… [But not women]?”

We want to encourage men to tell us how they feel on the one hand. However, we live in a world where men’s feelings about key issues of interest to them are mocked or go unheard. The trouble is, we don’t yet have a word for this mixed message we give to men, this cold-shoulder treatment. Could it be to engage in “man blanking”?

Picture: JeepersMedia

By Damien Ridge

Damien is Professor of Health Studies at the University of Westminster. He has published over 50 academic papers in leading journals, and a book on how people actually set about recovering from depression (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2009). Damien has broad research interests in health, leading research into the patient experience, mental health, HIV, chronic pain, health services, masculinity and men’s wellbeing.

This article first appeared in the Huffington Post

If you liked this article you’ll love our upcoming #insideMANbook — to find out more, add your email to the sign-up form on the right and follow us on Twitter @insideMANmag and Facebook 

—
(1) Goffman, E., The arrangement between the sexes. Theory and Society, 1977. 4(3): p. 301-331.
(2) Cooper, A., et al., Rooms of Their Own: Public toilets and gendered citizens in a New Zealand city, 1860‐1940. Gender, Place & Culture, 2000. 7(4): p. 417-433.
(3) Johnson, P., Ordinary folk and Cottaging: Law, Morality, and Public Sex. Journal of Law and Society, 2007. 34(4): p. 520-43.

97% employees who die at work are men (2009-2014 figures)

by 2 Comments

Two men a week die in workplace deaths in the UK according to official figures for the five year period from 2009-2014.

The leading cause of casualties was falls from height, which was most prevalent in the construction industry. These accounted for three out of every ten deaths amongst workers in the UK between in the past year. In total, 510 of the 528 people who died at work were male, accounting for nearly 97% of fatalities according to figures from the HSE

his is the table of numbers we used when working out the averages: (the table is called RIDAGEGEN on the HSE statistics site if you want to see the entire thing. This is just a section we took from it).

Bryan Richards of health and safety consultancy Arinite said:

Greater risk

“Although there has been an on-going debate for more equality in  women doing `men’s’ work, it does not work out in practice. Although `top percentile’ women are fitter and more physically capable than many men, it s about averages here and the average woman cannot do the physically demanding work that an average man can do, and these tend to be the  jobs where there us a greater risk of fatal injury e.g. construction, utility industries etc.”

“As for major and minor injuries, all people are vulnerable to falling when moving around a workplace. The actual risk of falling will vary depending on whether there are trip and fall hazards permanently or temporarily in the workplace. It would be difficult to eliminate this most common cause of injury at work, but injuries can be avoided/reduced by controlling the common factors that may cause trips and falls.

“These include: the working environment (office, factory etc), the type of floor surface (slippery, non-slip), contamination (spillages), obstacles (trailing cables, boxes etc.), footwear (non-slip, high heels etc.),  people! (mobility disability, distracted when walking etc).”

Protective measures 

“The hazard of falling needs to be managed proportionate to the risk. From using a step ladder correctly  to using a tower crane or working on a high rise building. Protective measures include training and physical protection.”

A former construction worker, Daniel Long, who says he left the industry due to safety concerns said:

“It would be quite difficult for women trying to enter the construction industry – it’s a male dominated area and most of the builders I know wouldn’t happily want to let a woman carry heavy, concrete blocks in front of them. They’d struggle getting respect from fellow builders.”

“I worked in construction for two years before leaving, mostly in narrow corridors without supervision. It was OK being left to get on with things but more training at the beginning is important. I had no idea about protective footwear and that kind of thing and just got the facts from other guys on site.”

—Infographic: Arinite Health & Safety 

 

Thanks Crisis for putting real homeless men in your TV adverts

by 2 Comments

We’ve been critical of homeless charities who don’t treat the issues as a gender problem or remove men from their advertising campaigns this year.

So it’s only fair that we give credit where credit is due to the homeless charity, Crisis, whose Christmas advert features real film of real homeless men (who account for around 90% of rough sleepers in the UK. Here’s their TV advert for this Christmas which is narrated by the actor Sir Ian McKellan:

http://youtu.be/f7M_dMosJPo

You can also see a longer film showing some of the homeless men in the advert speaking about the experience of sleeping below:

If you want to make a charity donation and help homeless men this Christmas visit the Crisis website today.

—Photo Credit: Crisis

If you liked this article and want to read more, follow us on Twitter @insideMANmag and Facebook

Also on insideMAN:

So why are men disposable?

by 3 Comments

On Monday we posted an article questioning why news reports of armed conflict highlight numbers of female deaths, but tend to leave unmentioned the number of casualties who are male — even when more men than women have been killed.

The article triggered a passionate debate across Twitter and Facebook — some arguing men’s deaths shouldn’t be highlighted because men are responsible for starting wars in the first place; others saying that deaths of conscripted men and of male civilians, are being unjustly minimised by a “hierarchy of victimhood”.

One of insideMAN’s regular readers, Darren Ball, was part of the discussion. Here’s his response.

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.

‘Visceral and innate’

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-times 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.

‘What about the menz?’

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]?” Is 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.

By Darren Ball

What do you think? Should we give equal importance to male deaths in conflict as we do to female deaths? If not, why not? Tell us what you think in a tweet or a comment.

Photo courtesy: State Library of South Australia

Also on insideMAN:

 

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

by 20 Comments

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

If you liked this article and want to read more, follow us on Twitter @insideMANmag and Facebook

Further reading: