We need to talk about the way we talk about men
By: Mark Normington
Tags: Refugees, Charity, Violence, Men, Gender Equality

It’s become something of an annual tradition, when images of small boats making their way across the English Channel once again start to appear on our TV screens, to rehash the same tired debate about whether the UK should honour its international obligations to take in those seeking asylum.

Public attitudes towards refugees remain alarmingly hostile. 27% of UK adults have “no sympathy at all” for asylum seekers, according to a YouGov survey, with 22% described as having “not much sympathy” for them. Racism and Islamophobia doubtless play their role in this, but there is another underexamined source of hostility: most of the refugees crossing the Channel are young men.

‘Males of military age’

For 2019, 53% of asylum applicants to the UK were adult men, compared to 24% adult women and 23% children. Much has been made of the prevalence of adult men amongst those making the dangerous journey to Britain’s shores by reactionaries such as Nigel Farage.

In an interview on Talk Radio in August, Farage used the fact that the majority of those arriving by boat were young men to argue that they could not really be refugees. ‘Although Nigel, there are also some poor children being put on these boats too,’ the host Dan Wootton argued back in response — the underlying assumption that young men would never be vulnerable enough to qualify as refugees remaining glaringly unaddressed.

Farage would later describe the arrival of these young men in the UK as an ‘invasion’ — the kind of military language which is often deployed by the far right to portray asylum seekers not as people fleeing a desperate situation who are worthy of our compassion, but as a hostile force which means great harm to UK citizens, particularly women and children.

A sample of tweets showing the way that young male refugees are disparaged as dangerous and illegitimate

When coming out of the mouths of well-known xenophobes and online reactionaries, it’s easy to see these opinions as the bigoted nonsense that they are. However, I am concerned that many of the underlying assumptions about men which underpin these views are not the sole preserve of the far right.

The uncomfortable truth is that many of us, who normally think of our views on gender as considerably more enlightened and progressive, agree with the notion that adult men can never really be vulnerable, not the way women and children can; that men are inherently violent and threatening; that they are a risk to our women and children; that we need to exclude them from our spaces in order to keep everyone else safe.

Until we reckon with these anti-male biases which many of us hold, our movement will be institutionally incapable of challenging the hostility toward male refugees which is robbing them of the dignity and compassion they deserve. At the same time, we must not give an inch to those who wish to cynically exploit men’s issues in order to turn back the clock on gender equality.

Who counts as vulnerable?

It should be a fairly easy case to make for why ‘military age’ men fleeing active warzones should be granted refugee status. A tragic feature of many modern-day conflicts is that the distinction between combatant and civilian is eroded to the point where all men capable of fighting are seen as potential threats and therefore legitimate targets. For example, under President Obama’s drone strike policy, all military age males within a strike zone were by default counted as combatants, ‘unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.’

‘The iron-clad rule is that if a non-combatant was there, if a woman or a child was there, no operation would proceed.’

They are also vulnerable to other gender-based threats, including forced conscription and sex-selective massacres. During the first four years of the Syrian Civil War, three quarters of all civilians killed were adult men. Not to mention the fact that the vast majority of combat fatalities are male.

Despite this, there is an unwillingness within the NGO sector to ever classify adult men as vulnerable, even in situations where this is clearly warranted. I’ve written previously about the fact that many NGOs intentionally exclude men from definitions of “gender-based violence”, so that the term is used synonymously with “violence against women”, thus erasing the lived experience of men who are targeted with violence as a result of their gender.

Additionally, by using phrases such as “innocent women and children” as a byword for civilians, and “especially vulnerable groups” — which in the words of Professor Charli Carpenter, ‘with rare exceptions…tends to include every possible category except able-bodied adult civilian males’ — international organisations fuel the harmful idea that men should be excluded from the category of ‘vulnerable’ in all circumstances.

Take for example the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Many studies suggest that men are significantly more likely to die from the disease than women, due to a range of biological and societal factors. However, this did not stop the avowedly progressive agency UN Women from tweeting, ‘The world’s women continue to pay the highest price during the pandemic.’

It appears that we are so insitutionally blind to the possibility that men could be victims that we simply cannot see it, even when the numbers are right before our eyes.

If the very organisations which should be most vocally supporting the rights of refugees cannot bring themselves to acknowledge any circumstance under which men could be subject to additional risk due to their gender, no wonder it has proven so easy for toxic attitudes about the illegitimacy of adult male asylum seekers to become so widespread.

I imagine many readers will object to my reasoning here on the basis that, given the privileged position of men in society, it is perfectly valid not to classify them as vulnerable as this label should be reserved for groups which hold less systemic power and privilege.

However, unless we understand the concept of male privilege to mean that it is everywhere and always an advantage to be a man no matter the circumstances (a definition which I do not think is sustainable), then we must accept that there will be certain situations in which maleness comes with additional vulnerabilities which we should acknowledge and be sensitive to. The fact that men are privileged in general does not mean that we can blanketly apply this to any particular situation and expect it to hold true.

Many of us in the progressive movement are getting pretty good at analysing the ways in which categories of disadvantage intersect to produce multiple vulnerabilities. What we are less good at is recognising the circumstances in which the intersection of maleness with a disadvantaged identity serves not to lessen vulnerability but to enhance it.

‘Including women and children’

The idea that adult men are unlikely to be genuine asylum seekers is reinforced by the widespread belief that they are legitimate targets of violence, therefore any attempt to flee such violence would itself be illegitimate.

It is highly common when deaths from violent incidents are reported in the media that special mention is made when women and children are amongst the victims. This is even the case when adult men constitute the majority of victims. Take for example the fact I mentioned above that adult men made up 75% of all civilians killed in the first four years of the Syrian Civil War. The study from which this statistic is taken was reported with the following headline: ‘Quarter of civilians killed in Syrian War are children, women’.

Or take this Guardian article with the headline ‘End violence against female aid workers’, which half way down the piece admits that ‘men in the humanitarian sector experience three to six times higher attack rates than women overall…’

The implicit message being sent by this special focus paid to female and child victims is clear: violence against men is normal; violence against women and children is an aberration worthy of particular condemnation.

Leave no-one behind…except for half the world’s population. Logo for the UN International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women

This trope is so common that we may not even see it, or be aware when we use it. Or if we do use it we may not consider the harmful message that it sends. The oft-repeated call by NGOs to end violence against women, without commensurate calls to stop violence being committed against men — and the tendency to declare that women are most affected by phenomena even when they kill men at a greater rate — reinforce this regressive idea that it is perfectly natural for men to be the targets of violence.

While there’s clearly nothing wrong with an indvidual organisation choosing to focus their energies on advocating on behalf of female or child victims, it becomes a problem when this is repeated on aggregate to such an extent that it is only ever women and children whose victimisation is being discussed. For instance, no reasonable person would criticise a lung cancer charity for not paying sufficient attention to other types of cancer. Yet, if all of the most prominent cancer charities focused exclusively on lung cancer, this would create a false impression in the public mind that other types of cancer are less serious and therefore less deserving of resources and support.

Of course, it is absolutely right that we draw attention to the gendered impacts which women face, and to advocate for the rights of children to be respected. Additionally, we must not allow our analyses of violence to exclude female victims, or forms of violence which disproportionately affect women such as sexual violence during conflict which was so shamefully ignored for so long.

But we must be careful to do this in such a way as not to minimise male victimhood and perpetuate negative stereotypes. When men are the primary victims of something, we must not shy away from highlighting this.

I can understand why there is a certain reluctance within progressive circles to be seen to be advocating on behalf of men. Political advocacy on men’s issues does not exactly have the best rep, largely thanks to reactionaries such as self-styled ‘men’s rights activists’ who only bring up men’s issues in bad faith in order to harm the cause of gender equality.

Yet we must realise that conversations about these issues will happen whether we choose to participate in them or not — the choice before us is whether we want to work to move those conversations towards progressive solutions, or allow the far right to continue using them as a recruiting tool to reel in vulnerable young men.

Violence as male pathology

The association of men with violence is nothing new. The view of men as warriors and protectors, and on the flipside as rapacious invaders, is arguably as old as gender roles themselves. It’s a great shame that, despite the welcome upheavals of traditional notions of gender which have taken place over the past few decades, it still lingers with us.

Most disappointingly, this archaic gender essentialism has been given something of a progressive makeover in recent years through the emergence of concepts such as ‘male violence’ and ‘toxic masculinity’ which — though I’m sure they are well-intentioned — have the unfortunate effect of further reinforcing the link between maleness and violence in the public mind.

It has been argued that it’s perfectly reasonable for maleness to be linked to violence — after all, the vast majority of violent acts are committed by men, so it is only right that gender forms a significant part of our analysis of the causes of violence.

However, this view is complicated by the fact that as well as the majority of perpetrators of violence, men constitute the majority of its victims. This fact is counterintuitive, since it is given little prominence in public discourse about violence. Yet it is backed up by research carried out by reputable bodies such as the United Nations Development Programme, which in its landmark 2014 report on interpersonal violence found that 82% of all homicide victims were men, as well as a disproportionately high number of those treated in hospital for physical injuries as a result of interpersonal violence. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime reported a similar figure (81%) in its 2019 Global Study on Homicide. Reliable global data for non-lethal violent offences is harder to come by, though trends from countries which do have such data suggest that men are similarly disproportionately the victims of non-sexual violent crime.

To understand why this should complicate our way of thinking about violence, consider our response when islamophobic types try to capitalise on terrorist attacks carried out by self-professed Muslims in order to claim that there is something inherently violent about Islam and its followers.

The usual (and correct) response from progressives goes something like this: You cannot tarnish an entire group of people because of the actions of a minority. The fact that some people carrying out terror attacks happen to share one characteristic with other Muslims does not mean that those other Muslims bear any responsibility for the terrorists’ actions, and nor do they have a special duty to call out and condemn those acts of terror.

Moreover, the idea that Muslims act as some kind of homogenous bloc is shown to be absurd by the fact that the majority of victims of terrorism globally are themselves Muslim. Any kind of analysis which lumps together the perpetrators of terrorism with the people they are most likely to harm, and then claims that together they constitute a unified group which bears collective responsibility for acts of terrorism, is at best hopelessly flawed and at worst intentionally deceptive.

In the same way, to argue that violence is a ‘male problem’ erases the distinction between victim and perpetrator — a distinction which is far more important than the fact that they both happen to have similar physiology. If we want to properly understand the causes of violence, we need a much more nuanced analytical framework than one which views the problem at the level of magnification of an entire half of humanity.