Gender and Combat

In its article about the contentious issue of civilians-to-combatants killed in Gaza, the New York Times lists the current death toll as 1,865—including 429 children and 243 women. Similar statistics have come from NPR, BBC, the Washington Post, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, ABC, and a particularly gender-focused post from NDTV, leading more than a few frustrated observers to ask: what about the men? Why does one pregnant woman get an article to herself, when over a thousand grown men are left anonymous? Do women's and children's lives matter more than men's? The obvious answer, as per Israel's justification for the attacks, is that any adult male Palestinian could be a member of Hamas, so his killing is more okay. The NYT article further clarifies: men between the ages of 20 and 29 are most likely to be militants, so gender is relevant. Any man could be a terrorist. He could also be an innocent civilian, but this is Gaza. Killing thousands of innocent people is a risk worth taking. If you kill enough people, they will stop attacking you (see also: Six-Day War, Yom Kippur War, First Intifada, Second Intifada, every conflict in human history. Love cannot drive out hate, only genocide can do that). We'll save "how to create world peace" for another post. Back to gender.

Gaza is a particularly polarizing example because Israel's claims of targeting militants have been met with so much doubt and anger, but reporting of deaths "including women and children" is not new to anyone, and it is a problem. Men are stronger, men are built for war, men are… more able to withstand drone attacks and car bombs? Or just more deserving? Men are overrepresented in armed forces around the world for various reasons: legislation mandating armed service for men or forbidding it for women, reports of sexual harassment, cultural stigmas against "tough" women, and beliefs that masculinity and violence are inherently connected, among others. This is a men's issue, but it's also a women's issue. It is unacceptable that men's deaths are understood to be more morally okay than those of women, and it is also unacceptable that women's role in war is often reduced to that of the innocent victim.

What role do women have in war and armed conflict, beyond adding sympathy to reporting? That varies by context. In conflicts such as those in Liberia, Lebanon, and northern Uganda, women have been kidnapped and forced to fight against their will. In conflicts around the world, women have been taken as prostitutes due to demand by male soldiers or lack of other options, from Japan's "comfort women" in World War II to the Civil War in Sierra Leone to a current increase in prostitution within Syrian refugee camps. Similarly, domestic violence increases in times of war. In some cases, war brings increased regulation of women's dress and lifestyles under the guise of religious devotion, such as in a recent commission by ISIS of women to regulate the lives of other women. The commission, of course, was appointed by men. Just over a week ago I went to a presentation by CARE Austria, who worked with CARE in Nepal, Burundi, and Uganda to study women in post-conflict areas. A Nepal-specific issue was that while many women did fight in Nepal's decade-long conflict, many other women stayed home while their husbands fought and died. In a region where the practice of sati, in which widows are burned at their husbands' funeral pyres, is still practiced often despite being illegal, the influx of Nepali widows meant that thousands more women dealt with this stigma (the full report can be found here). And, of course, women sometimes want to fight. This last point is worth noting: while men's deaths are underreported even when they have no interest in a conflict, women who choose to fight may be imagined as victims of forced combat because no woman would choose that. This denies agency from two genders: for women the agency to choose to fight, for men, the agency not to.

 I have just finished Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's fantastic novel Half of a Yellow Sun, set during the Nigerian Civil War of 1967-1970. While fictional, it does not shy away from (spoiler alert) topics such as gang rape, the impacts of war on families, and heightened gender roles as young men are kidnapped to be soldiers women are left at home to handle any and all domestic burdens. Isabelle Allende's incredible House of the Spirits deals with similar issues, and there may be something to it: while journalists can document the number and genders of people killed in an attack with relative ease, they are less likely to learn about increased domestic violence, gang rape, or gender-based violence within armed forces until later. Adichie and Allende have hindsight and historical research to their advantage, and they use it well.

So are both women and men underrepresented in headlines about armed conflict? Perhaps misrepresented is a better word. Both of their contributions--intentional or not--are ignored or misunderstood to an incredible scale. Pointing out mainly the women and children who are victims of campaigns that kill all genders and all ages both posits women as victims and posits men's lives as less valuable, their deaths less significant. On-the-ground war reporting cannot possibly give us all the information in real time: the domestic violence, forced prostitution, widows shunned by their communities, and other stigmatized issues that happen behind closed doors. It also cannot give us a profile of every man killed, though it would do well to stop placing women in a special category of inherent nonviolence. However, we as readers can look with a critical eye at what is going on and who it is affecting, knowing that the story may be told very differently in the future.