Androcide is a term for the systematic killing of men, boys, or males in general because of their gender. Not all murders of men are androcides in the same way that not all murders of women are femicides. Androcides typically happen during war or genocide. Typically, men are not targeted because of misandry, or a base hatred of men. Rather, male civilians are targeted during warfare as a way to remove potential combatants, and men are targeted during genocide as a way to destroy the entire community. Perpetrators of androcide are overwhelmingly male.

Etymology
Androcide is a coordinate term of femicide and a hyponym of gendercide. The etymological root of the hybrid word is derived from a combination of the Greek prefix andro meaning "man" or boy, with the Latin suffix cide, meaning killing.

Causes
Androcide may be deliberate: for example, to degrade the offensive capabilities of an adversary. Massacres of men and boys may be of this type. For example, during the Kosovo War, the Serbian military under Slobodan Milošević routinely massacred male Albanians of "battle age" because they saw them as a threat.

Androcide may also be part of a larger genocide. Perpetrators may treat male and female victims differently. For example, during the Armenian genocide, elite men were publicly executed. Afterward, average men and boys would be killed en masse, and the women and little children in their communities deported. Gendercide Watch, an independent human rights group, regards this as a gendercide against men. Men were not the sole victims of the Armenian genocide; women and girls were also subject to massacre, death marches, rape, sex slavery, and forced conversion.

Men's rights activists such as Paul Nathanson, author of Replacing Misandry: A Revolutionary History of Men argue that the draft is a form of androcide. In many countries, only men are subjected to military conscription, which leaves them at greater risk of death during warfare compared to women. Worldwide, males constitute 79% of non-conflict homicides and the majority of direct conflict deaths.

Androcide has also been a feature of literature in ancient Greek mythology and in hypothetical situations wherein there is discord between the sexes.

Warfare
Generally, military services will forcibly conscript men to fight in warfare, inevitably leading to massive male casualties when faced with males on the opposing side. Non-combatant males make up a majority of the casualties in mass killings in warfare. This practice occurs since soldiers see opposing men, fighting or otherwise, as rivals and a threat to their superiority. Alternatively, they are afraid that these men will attempt to fight back and kill them for any number of reasons, including revenge, mutual fear, and self defense. Thus, they may kill preemptively in an attempt to prevent this possibility.

Examples

In warfare
 Genghis Khan was among many recorded warlords who would often employ the mass, indiscriminate murder of men and boys he felt threatened by regardless if they were soldiers, civilians, or simply in the way. In the year 1202, after he and Ong Khan allied to conquer the Tatars, and ordered the execution of every Tatar man and boy taller than a linchpin, and enlsaving Tatar women for sexual purposes. This was done as collective punishment for the fatal poisoning of Genghis Khan's father, Yesugei for which the Mongols blamed the Tatars according to The Secret History of the Mongols. Likewise, in the year 1211, Genghis Khan had planned on the widescale killing of males in retaliation for the revolt against his daughter Alakhai Bekhi, until she persuaded him to only punish the murderers of her husband, the event which caused the revolt.
 After the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), the only slave rebellion in world history which successfully resulted in establishing an independent nation (Haiti), black Haitian general and self-proclaimed monarch Jean-Jacques Dessalines, ordered his soldiers to massacre of every remaining French person on Haiti. The motivation for this was the fear of reinvasion and re-establishment of slavery, in which the French colonial military had attempted prior, as well as revenge for the French enslavement and torment of Africans. The 1804 Haitian massacre would exclusively target French males, soldiers were generally unwilling to kill French women and Dessalines did not specify targeting them, it was only when Dessalines's advisors argued that the French would not be truly eradicated if French women were left to give birth to Frenchmen that he ordered the massacre of French women as well, at a later stage. Only those who agreed to marry black Haitian men were spared.
 During World War II, German soldiers killed millions of Russian prisoners of war (POWs) via starvation, exposure to the elements, exposure to disease in cramped POW camps, or outright execution.
 During the Kosovo War of 1998-1999, Slobodan Milošević's men killed many young Albanian men because they were perceived as threats or potential terrorists.

As part of genocide
 During the Armenian genocide of the 1910s, Turkish irregulars massacred Armenian men. Men were the traditional heads of the family, so killing them meant that the remainder of the community was defenseless and without leadership. The women were then subjected to rape, sex slavery, kidnapping, forced conversion, and forced marriage. Although men were typically massacred first, women were also massacred or died during death marches. Both the murder of men and the sexual violence against women furthered the plan to exterminate the Armenian population.
 Analysis of existing mortality estimates of the Cambodian genocide show that men accounted for 81% of all violent deaths and 67% of all excess deaths in this period. The killing of about 50–70% of Cambodia’s working-age men lead to a shift in norms regarding the sexual division of labor and correlates with present-day indicators of women’s economic advancements and increased representation in local-level elected office.
The Anfal genocide of 1988 killed between 50,000 and 182,000 Kurds and thousands of Assyrians during the final stages of the Iran-Iraq War. This act committed during the Anfal Campaign was led by Ali Hassan al-Majid, under the orders of President Saddam Hussein. Anfal, which officially began in 1988, had eight stages in six geographical areas. Every stage followed the same patterns: steer civilians to points near the main road, where they were met by the jash forces and transported to temporary meeting points. After transport, they were then separated into three groups: teenage boys and men, women and children, and the elderly. The men and teenage boys were never to be seen again. Women, all children, and the elderly of both genders were sent to camps; men were immediately stripped out of their clothes, only wearing a sharwal, and were executed. Gendercide Watch also regards this case as a gendercide against men. Many Kurd men and boys were killed in order to reduce the chance of ever fighting back. Paul Nathanson theorized that men kill other men in order to protect their territory and ward off attacks.
 The Rwandan genocide of 1994 caused the death of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Tutsi people. Men were the primary targets for killing, while women were the primary targets for rape and mutilation. Because of this, Gendercide Watch describes the Rwandan genocide as a gendercide against men, even though men were not the sole victims; Tutsi women were also murdered.

Plants
With regards to plants, androcide may refer to efforts to direct pollination through emasculating certain crops.

Mythology
In the Ancient Greek myth of the Trojan War, accounts of which are largely legendary, the Greeks killed all the men and boys of Troy after conquering it. Even infants and the elderly were not spared; the Greeks wanted to prevent a future Trojan rebellion or uprising. The female Trojans were raped and enslaved rather than being killed.

See also
 Genocide
 Srebrenica massacre
 Male expendability
 Violence against men
 Misandry
 Feminicide

References

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Killings by type
Homicide
Violence against men
Massacres of men