…the post invasion violence…

In Iraq.

I’d appreciate it if a moderator could make the corrections in the comment and delete these two errata.

Too often, because of the dominant number of cases involving women, it is easy to forget that women are not the only victims.

I don’t think that’s the reason. Firstly it’s not clear that women are the greater number of victims. It’s rare that male victims are even looked for. When they are, they tend to be found in large numbers. In Liberia, for example, only one study looked for male victims and found more than female victims. See the trackback above to Feminist Critics for citation and analysis.

Secondly even where the burden of victimisation does fall unequivocally upon one gender, for example more than 90% of civilians killed in the post invasion violence are adult men, yet we do not forget that women are victimised too. In fact, I’d conjecture that most people would be surprised to discover that these figures are so one-sided Indeed, many people believe, falsely, that women and children are the majority of victims of modern war.

In my opinion, the erasure of male victims of sexual abuse, and the promotion of the minority female victims of non-sexual violence are two aspects of the same media phenomenon – the process, scholarly analysed here by Dr. Adam Jones, by which ‘”unworthy” male victims tend to be marginalized or ignored entirely in mass-media coverage” which ‘deficit is … contrasted with the attention given to the victimization experiences of “worthy” victims, such as women, children, and the elderly.’

Let me be clear: The initiative that began Monday to end the silence is not focused on one gender or limited to a single specific region.

From the introductory post:

Today begins a very important initiative called Silence Is The Enemy to help a generation of young women half a world away.Why? Because they are our sisters and children–the victims of sexual abuse who don’t have the means to ask for help … I’m asking all of you–bloggers, writers, teachers, and concerned citizens–to use whatever platform you have to call for an end to the rape and abuse of women and girls in Liberia and around the world.

Etc. Etc.

It’s not enough to say that its not focussed on one gender when it clearly has been. It’s not enough to intend to include male victims when you use language that excludes and erases them. It’s not enough to make the occasional post about male victims while the vast majority of the posts by you and prompted by you discuss the issue as though they don’t exist. All these approaches have the effect of marginalising and anomalising male victims.

I agree that there is a silence in the media about the rape of women in the central Africa war, indeed about that war generally, but it’s not so profound that you weren’t able to find eight reports to link to in the first paragraph of your post after the separator. You could easily have found many more. In contrast, you would be hard pressed to find a single article that makes more than a fleeting reference to male sexual victimisation.

Given that level of erasure, it’s not enough even to avoid explicitly exclusionary language. Saying, for example “use whatever platform you have to call for an end to rape and abuse in Liberia and around the world.” does nothing to make the invisible visible. Say rather “…end the rape and abuse of men, women and children…” or, if you prefer “woman and men”. The order doesn’t matter. Visibility does.

Please change the way you right about these issues in your future blogging, and consider editing the posts you’ve already made.