Telegraph: "Unsere Einstellung, was Gewalt gegen Männer angeht, ist überholt"

Der britische Telegraph enthielt gestern einen Artikel mit zentralen Gedanken, wie sie sich auch in meinen Büchern zu diesem Thema finden – insbesondere in den Passagen darüber, dass bei Männern das Recht auf Leben geringer geschätzt wird – die aber in deutschen Leitmedien noch heute nicht geäußert werden:

While as a society we rightly give lots of attention to protecting women against violence, from warnings about predatory cab drivers to reports on women’s refuges, from the understanding that it’s wrong to hit a woman to walking women home, very little seems to be being done to protect men, or to dissuade anyone from the idea that it’s also wrong to hit a man. Is male life cheaper?

(...) In 2009, the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo, published a report, Armed Conflict Deaths Disaggregated by Gender, which found that the number of men who are killed directly - that last word mattering - far outstrips the deaths of women. Women do die and suffer, of course, whether in acts of insurgency, or attacks, including rape, on the civilian population, or from secondary effects, such as diminished hygiene or healthcare. Men, meanwhile, combatants or no, are considered to be legitimate objects of violence.

(...) And yet the gender bias is never spoken of – but why? The fact that men commit violence more than women may be part of it – do we imagine that the higher death rates are somehow just deserts? This would only be true if those individuals committing the crimes also happened to be the victims, which we know is not the case – a glance through the list of victims includes a roll call of good Samaritans, unfortunate bystanders, police officers and so on. And in any case, what sort of callousness is it for a society to choose to let one of its constituent groups rip itself to bits, without questioning the reasons for the phenomenon?

If society is not to keep assuming it’s OK for men to get hurt and killed, we could do worse than start in the cinema. While Helen Mirren is calling for fewer women to be killed on film, it might be worth looking at the male body counts on display. Little attention is paid to the legions of male cops, soldiers, heavies and henchmen I’ve seen slaughtered, without my getting the impression that these deaths were intended to be any more than set dressing. If when I mentioned those categories, you thought anything like, "yes, but they’re the sort of people who are meant to die in films", we may have hit the core of this problem. Whilst voices are raised, periodically, against movie violence, that its victims tend overwhelmingly to be men never seems to get a mention. I’d encourage anyone interested to keep a tally, to learn what it is they are consuming.

When female stereotypes began to be dismantled, much of what was sloughed off were the outdated cultural assumptions. Although they had long behaved with subservience, as society required, women are not somehow biologically suited to subservience – this much we know. And if that is true, then perhaps men are not naturally predisposed to committing violence, much less to being condemned to suffer its effects.