Читать онлайн "The Second Sexism: Discrimination Against Men and Boys" - Benatar David - RuLit

Research findings on the effects of spousal violence are mixed. Some have found that husbands inflict more damage on wives than wives do on husbands.45 It has been suggested that this is because husbands are generally bigger and stronger than their wives.46 However, other studies have found that wives inflict more damage on husbands.47 If weapons are used, the smaller size of women would make no difference to their capacity to cause injury. Yet other studies have found no difference in the severity of injury caused by male and female partners.48

Thus spousal violence is an exception to the trend that men are at greater risk of being the victims of violence, not because men are at lesser risk but because they are at comparable risk. However, the mistaken perception that wives do not batter husbands itself causes further disadvantage to males. Abused men are taken less seriously than abused women when they complain of abuse or seek help. There are also fewer resources to aid abused men.

With the exception of sexual violence and intimate partner violence, males are more likely than females to be the victims of violence. Both men and women have been shown, in a majority of experimental studies, to behave more aggressively against men than toward women.49 Outside the laboratory, men are also more often the victims of violence. This is true in a variety of contexts. Consider first violent crime. Data from the USA, for example, shows that nearly double the number of men as women are the victims of aggravated assault and more than three times more men than women are murdered.50 Statistics from England and Wales show a similar phenomenon there. During the 2008–2009 year, men “were twice as likely as women to have been victims of violence.”51 Young men, aged 16 to 24 were particularly at risk. Thirteen percent of them had been the victims of violent crime, compared with 3% of all adults.

In cases of conflict, men, even when they are not combatants, suffer more violence. For example, the overwhelming majority of deaths during the Belgian “rubber terror” in the Congo were males. Although there is apparently no direct evidence of the numbers killed, the subsequent significant demographic imbalance between the number of adult males and females in the population at the end of this period reveals that it was primarily male lives that were taken.52

Men were also the majority of victims of the Stalinist purges. Examining data from the Soviet census of January 1959, Robert Conquest concluded that although the casualties of war explain some of the sex imbalance in the population, the more significant imbalances were in older age cohorts that were less affected by combat losses in the Second World War and more affected by the purges. Thus, in the 55–59 age group, only 33% of the population was male. In the adjacent age cohorts, the proportions are very similar. About 38% of 40- to 54-year-olds were male, and nearly 35% of 60- to 69-year-olds were male.53

In South Africa, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission found that the overwhelming majority of victims of gross violations of human rights — killing, torture, abduction and severe ill treatment — during the apartheid years (at the hands of both the government and its opponents) were males.54 Testimony received by the Commission suggests that the number of men who died was six times that of women. Non-fatal gross violations of rights were inflicted on more than twice the number of men as women.55 Nor can the Commission be accused of having ignored women and their testimony. The majority of the Commission’s deponents (55.3%) were female,56 and so sensitive was the Commission to the relatively small proportion of women amongst the victims of the most severe violations that it held a special hearing on women.57

In the Kosovo conflict of 1998–1989, according to one study, 90% of the war-related deaths were of men, and men constituted 96% of people reported missing.58 According to the report of the Organization of Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) Kosovo Verification Mission, “young men were the group that was by far the most targeted in the conflict in Kosovo.”59 While women and girls constituted the majority of rape victims, men and boys were tortured and killed in much greater numbers.

These are but a few recent examples, in the long history of human violence, in which males have been the primary victims of mass murder and other serious human rights violations.60

Corporal Punishment

One category of violence that merits separate attention is corporal punishment, the punitive infliction of pain on the body (by means of flogging, caning, beating or smacking, for example). This is because, unlike violent crime, which is by definition illegal, and much violence inflicted on non-combatants in times of conflict, which is often a breach of either law or local or international norms, corporal punishment is either imposed by the law or it is legally and socially permitted, if not encouraged.

Although corporal punishment has been inflicted on both males and females, it has been imposed, especially but not only in recent times, on males much more readily and severely than on females.61 Distinct double standards exist.

One context in which corporal punishment has been inflicted — and still is inflicted in some countries — is the military. Because, as we have seen, the military has traditionally been an almost exclusively male preserve, females have been spared the brutal physical punishment, often for the most trivial of infractions, that has been inflicted on males in the military. Thousands of soldiers and sailors have been flogged. In the US Navy, for example, nearly 6000 floggings were inflicted in the period 1846–1847.62 In any given flogging up to hundreds of lashes would be inflicted on a single man. The cat-o’-nine-tails, a whip made of “nine small, hard, twisted pieces of cotton or flax cord, with three knots in each, fixed to a short, thick rope handle,”63 was used on the bare back, while the sailor on whom it was inflicted was tied with his arms elevated above his head. This punishment, which was administered in the presence of everybody on board, flayed the skin on the back and often also caused anterior damage as the whip curled round to the front of the sailor’s body. Boy sailors were made to “kiss the gunner’s daughter” — that is they were tied in a bending position, lengthways across the barrel of a cannon and then flogged on the (often naked) buttocks. Another penalty to which sailors were subjected was keelhauling,64 in which a man was tied to a rope and dragged under a ship, from one side to the other. In this process the barnacle encrusted keel lacerated his skin. When hauled too slowly men drowned. In the nineteenth-century Russian army blows “from the officers, flogging with birch rods and with sticks, for the slightest fault, were normal affairs.”65 In contemporary Singapore, conscripts are caned (although the frequency is not known).66 These are but a few examples drawn from many centuries and hundreds of countries in which men have been subject to harsh corporal punishment in the military.