With this article I would like to launch the International Gender Empathy Gap Day for which there can be no better symbolic date than 11 July.
On 11 July 1995, after three years of siege,
fanatical Serbs overrun the Bosnian city of Srebrenica and murdered some eight
thousand boys and men during the following days. The UN safe area, into which
countless people had fled, was handed over without a fight by the UN observers.
The Serbs separated male and female: Women and children were taken off in buses
and released between the fronts in no-man's-land, the men were executed and
buried. UN observers were involved in the illegal deportation of more than
three hundred men, knowing what was ahead of them.
Two years before the massacre, the UN had
already evacuated women, children, the elderly and the sick from the besieged
city, while denying men access to the convoys, even though everyone knew that
the men were particularly vulnerable, and even though the declared aim was to
provide aid "on the basis of an assessment of needs and vulnerability as
well as risks to which [civilians] are exposed".
Four years after the fall of Srebrenica,
despite all these experiences, the UN decided that "civilians, in
particular women and children, have the right to receive humanitarian assistance".
The media had made the male victims invisible,
as is customary in such cases. Usually by not mentioning them in the first
place, and if it could not be avoided, by ignoring their sex and speaking of
"people" or "victims". Or with
sentences like this one about the excavation of the bodies of 251 people killed
at that time: "The majority of the victims, including 12 women and 5
children, were executed by Bosnian Serb troops.” Because the 93 percent of men
murdered deserve no special mention. As political scientist Adam Jones,
co-founder of Gendercide Watch, rightly says: The formula "including
women" means nothing more than the exclusion of men.
The events regarding Srebrenica are no
exception, but a widespread reality in a world that still denies men and boys
the simplest empathy. #killallmen, "Mimimi" and "I bathe in male
tears" are the everyday expression of this. While #blacklivesmatter, men's
lives are meaningless. #bringbackourgirls arouses global solidarity, but no one
cares about abducted or abused boys or those who are forced to be
child-soldiers.
International aid organisations such as UNICEF
take it for granted that children have to be evacuated with their mothers in
escape situations, while the father apparently is not important. And this,
although it is known that the safety of fathers and husbands could have effects
beneficial to women and children: "If you want to help women, help
men," anthropologist Barbara Harrell-Bond sums up this fact.
I therefore call on all people who believe in the indivisibility of human rights and who have
retained their empathy to remind the world every year on 11 July about men's right to physical and
psychological integrity and to draw attention
to double standards in this respect in blogs, articles and reader’s letters,
with actions, video experiments and whatever else your imagination dreams up.
PS: If you publish an article about the Gender Empathy
Gap Day and send me a link, I will link it under my own article on 11. July.
Note: For reasons of objectivication I slightly changed this article on 1 July 2018.
Note: For reasons of objectivication I slightly changed this article on 1 July 2018.
Sources:
R. Charli Carpenter: „Innocent Women and Children“
(Ashgate Publishing Limited, Hampshire / GB and Burlington / USA 2006)
http://adamjones.freeservers.com/effacing.htm
https://www.avoiceformen.com/men/srebrenica/
Janice Fiamengo wrote an article mentioning International Gender Empathy Gap Day for the Epoch Times, although I would call the day either International Folkhalf Empathy Gap Day or International Sex Empathy Gap Day.
AntwortenLöschenhttps://www.theepochtimes.com/who-cares-about-male-suffering_3891890.html