The Margins of Mercy
The Moral Exclusion of Men
In the desperate aftermath of an earthquake in Haiti, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) excluded men from emergency food aid. WFP head Josette Sheeran announced the policy:
It is our methodology to distribute only to women to ensure that food gets to women and children in Haiti.
I described what happened in my first essay but, here, I want to focus on what didn’t happen - concern for men.
If the WFP had withheld food from almost any other group, say people of colour, they would have been universally condemned. Instead, they were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2020. What could explain such indifference to the fate of men?
Social psychologist Ervin Staub was the first to study this general phenomenon and, in 1987, to name it Moral Exclusion. Other scholars have followed and I’ll quote one of them, Susan Opotow, to explain:
Moral exclusion occurs when individuals or groups are perceived as outside the boundary in which moral values, rules, and considerations of fairness apply.
Moral exclusion can occur in degrees, from overt evil to passive unconcern.
My previous essay showed that the drivers for moral exclusion are present in feminism: stereotyping, prejudice, discrimination, dehumanisation and segregation. If there is evidence for moral exclusion of men, that should increase our confidence that feminism is indeed dangerous. So, in this essay, I will look at evidence for moral exclusion of men, feminism’s role and why it matters.
We can learn a great deal about people’s moral values from experiments. If a runaway trolley (“tram” for my Australian readers) was about to collide with and kill five people, would you push a bystander in front to stop it? If there was a male and a female bystander, who would you push? In 2016, a group of researchers found that 88% of people would push a man to his death. They also found that, given the ability to reduce a victim’s pain by sacrificing money, people would sacrifice less money to reduce the pain of a male victim.
Another group of researchers has found that, if a self-driving car is going to kill someone, people prefer it to kill men rather than women. And that translates directly to the real world, where drivers who kill men get 37% shorter sentences than those who kill women.
To look beyond the values of individuals, we can get a sense of society’s focus by examining a huge collection of books. (See paper for background.) As an example, the graph below shows how frequently women’s safety has been written about compared to men’s. We see a shift in the 1980s away from consideration of men’s safety – at a time when feminism’s power was growing rapidly. And the same pattern is present with other phrases relevant to moral exclusion - including men’s vs women’s rights, men’s vs women’s protection and sympathy for men vs women.
Source: Google Books Ngram Viewer
Some of the indifference to male welfare and rights may be long-standing. But these graphs reveal increasing moral exclusion coinciding with feminism’s ascendancy. Further, the examples that follow also show feminism’s influence – all are from post-1980 and most were the product of powerful feminists morally excluding their out-group.
I opened with the example of moral exclusion by the UN World Food Programme. Sadly, the UN provides other examples:
During the 2014 African Ebola outbreak, the UN official policy called for a reduced focus on men for medical supplies, food, care, social protection and economic assistance.
UN Women seized upon the fact that 11% of journalists killed were women in their campaign “Stop Targeting Women Journalists“ – displaying utter indifference to the 89% killed who are men.
A systematic analysis of UN documents revealed pervasive neglect of men’s rights and needs.
Even a feminist journal acknowledges:
UN have historically silenced or structurally rendered men and boy victims invisible—because they have been geared almost exclusively to the visibility and protection of women and girls
And Australia’s record on delivering health care to men is no better than the UN:
Three in four suicides are men but most suicide funding is targeted at women.
Research on men’s health receives only a tiny fraction of the spending on women’s health - one sixth or one tenth depending on how you count it.
New walk-in medical clinics in Queensland exclude boys and men.
Of the money allocated to men’s and women’s health, an average of 98% goes to women. In the last budget, men’s health spending was entirely removed - cut to zero.
When evaluating this apathy towards men’s health, bear in mind that Australian men already die more than four years earlier than women, yet the government is retreating from its responsibilities to men.
One of the defining features of moral exclusion is that moral rules and fairness aren’t seen to apply to the out-group. We can see this at work with Gender Equality which, as I argued in my first essay, doesn’t extend to males. And we have a host of Women's Rights that exclude men - such as women’s rights to work, education, health, freedom from violence and reproductive rights. All of this is part of a strategy to create new “rights” only available to women and curtail men’s existing human rights – a process feminists call “engendering human rights“.
Globally, the most prominent example of engendering human rights is, unsurprisingly, the UN in their Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). This convention created a host of Women’s Rights that exclude men and also calls for attacks on men’s existing human rights in the name of “positive” discrimination.
Locally, the Australian Sex Discrimination Commission has evolved similarly - into creating women’s rights not available to men and attacking men’s existing rights under the guise of “special measures”. Males are deemed so unworthy of protection that the Commission publishes a handy guide to infringing men’s human rights while remaining within the law. The situation in the UK is similar under the ironically named Equality Act. (At least the Australian Sex Discrimination Commission does what it says on the tin.)
One of the more serious rights routinely withheld from men is the right to asylum from persecution, as even The Guardian concedes:
Men and boys, all over the world, across countless situations, are being excluded from fundamental categories of protection under international legislation.
Similarly, the UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR, uses a classification system to give priority to women and girls while excluding males from such protection. Australia likewise has gender-specific refugee visas that exclude males.
Things are no better when we move from rights in the abstract to their legal enforcement. Law enforcement is increasingly withholding fair and equal protection from men. In London, police use a “harm index” to focus resources on the 100 offenders who pose the most risk. But the index only considers harm to women and girls – harm to men is ignored. The double standards don’t stop at policing. The UK has long had a “gendered approach to prosecutions” for coercive control - meaning that males are assumed to be perpetrators never victims. And the Australian state of Queensland is following the same path.
Again in Queensland, following a 2019 report, prison conditions are being improved – but only for women. The report completely ignored men’s prison conditions and whether they also needed improvement. Similarly, a taskforce noted that the practice of locking up children in Brisbane’s adult watch house contravened human rights obligations and should be discontinued – but only for girls. Boys did not warrant consideration and their plight is still ignored.
One of the key protections against exclusion is equality before the law. So it’s revealing to look at a Bench Book guiding local judges on this issue. It has a list of groups to whom equality before the law should apply: First Nations people, people with disabilities, children, women, lesbians, older people et cetera. Men are ignored – apparently undeserving.
Neglect of men’s legal rights is nowhere more evident than in protection against violence - especially domestic violence. An ever-growing number of nations have gendered legal protections against violence – i.e. laws that ignore violence against males. Countries include: USA, Mexico, India, Spain, Argentina and Brazil. Unsurprisingly, the UN advocates for the elimination of violence against women but neglects protection of males.
Australian government policies also demonstrate a general indifference to violence against males. The government committed to the principle “Every Australian deserves to live free from violence.” (Source 1 2) But, when that was translated to action, men were excluded – despite the fact that they are more than twice as likely to be victims of violence or homicide. Perhaps to obscure those facts, the Australian Institute of Criminology dashboard on “Homicide in Australia” ignores male victims, apparently they are judged unworthy of mention.
The UK strategy also excludes males from protection, but with the Machiavellian twist that they are counted in statistics as women – thus creating “evidence” that violence against women is the main problem.
One of the most distressing examples of the moral exclusion of men comes from US policy on drone attacks. Under this policy, male civilians over 15 aren’t counted as victims in the reckoning around drone attacks. (Sources 1, 2, 3)[1] Dead men are simply ignored - unworthy of consideration. This open season on males looks very like the definition of genocide from Chirot and McCauley: “killing by category, by membership in a group”.
As I write, one of today’s headlines says “450 Killed Including Women and Children”. Such headlines are commonplace and probably don’t give us pause. But what if the headline had instead been: “450 Killed Including Europeans”?
Such headlines are so frequent that one twitter account, Including Women and Children, posts these stories almost daily. Genocide Studies scholar Adam Jones analysed such reporting and concluded:
[M]ales tend to assume the status of "non-persons" in analyses and reportage of conflict and genocide. Most commonly, they are effaced from the picture.
One of the clearest examples comes from Nigeria.
On 14 April 2014, 276 girls were abducted from their school in Nigeria by a terrorist group - Boko Haram. The world united in outrage and concern - led by news media, celebrities and social media. Thankfully, over the next 3 years, most were released or escaped - though many remain unaccounted for.
But there is more to this than most are aware. Just weeks before the abduction of the girls, Boko Haram were at a different school in Buni Yadi. They set the girls free, locked the boys in the school and burned it down. 59 boys died horrible deaths:
Some of them had been slaughtered like livestock, the blood still all over their necks; others had burned to death, their hands still hung in the air from when they tried to writhe their way out of the flames. Others had bullet wounds all over their body.
There was little media coverage in Australia or elsewhere and no public concern.
In fact, Boko Haram had long been killing and kidnapping males and continues to do so to this day. In 2018 they attacked a village in Borno:
The insurgents came and gathered us in one place, they asked women to go and macheted the males.
Men were butchered “into pieces”. There was no coverage in Australian media, and no public outrage.
By 2016, it was estimated that 10,000 boys have been abducted – but, unlike the 276 girls, their fate only generates indifference. (Sources 1, 2) By 2022, it was estimated that 50,000 people had been murdered – almost all male. Yet, after most of the girls were released in 2017, the UN focus evaporated. An academic book on Boko Haram has multiple chapters analysing the impact on women and girls, but the word “boys” appears just three times in the entire book. One writer summed it up:
The kidnapping of girls became a movement.
The mass killing of boys became a footnote.
Clearly, the moral exclusion of males is real and it is morally abhorrent. The fact that feminists reserve moral concern for their in-group reveals a chilling moral void at the core of feminism. To quote Genocide Studies scholar Adam Jones:
[N]o meaningful claim to humanity, fairness, or analytical accuracy can be advanced by those who, consciously or unconsciously, would consign half the human race to second-class status in the humanitarian and policy equation.
And the future may be even bleaker. Scholars including Susan Opotow and Ervin Staub warn that moral exclusion may ultimately corrupt society as a whole. Professor Straub explains:
As they harm their victims, the perpetrators and the whole society change, progressing along a continuum of destruction...
Feminism has shattered our bonds of shared humanity. As the scope of our moral obligations has shrunk, so also has our society - now diminished to only encompass the feminine. We need to rebuild what’s been broken, renew our shared humanity, and begin to heal.
PS: I’m rather excited that this essay is apparently the first time the concept of moral exclusion from social psychology has been applied to contemporary gender politics. For the right kind of nerd, that’s pretty cool!
My next two essays will look at why feminism is this way and what draws people to it. Please subscribe to be notified when they are published.
[1] Multiple sources confirm this Obama-era policy but there has never been an official statement. Nor has it been publicly rescinded, so it is presumably still in force. Also, there is a caveat that a male may be included in the reckoning of victims if his innocence is proven - but it seems that has never actually happened nor is it likely.
Wow, that is really powerful, chilling stuff.
The research is astonishing. Truly impressive scholarship.
The message is disturbing & unarguable.
Very well done!
Thank you.