Gendercide is the systematic killing of members of a specific gender. The term is related to the general concepts of assault and murder against victims due to their gender, with violence against women and men being problems dealt with by human rights efforts.
Gendercide shares similarities with the term 'genocide' in inflicting mass murders; however, gendercide targets solely one gender, being men or women. Politico-military frameworks have historically inflicted militant-governed divisions between femicide and androcide; gender-selective policies increase violence on gendered populations due to their socioeconomic significance.
Gendercide is reported to be a rising problem in several countries. Census statistics report that in countries such as China, the male to female ratio is as high as 120 men for every 100 women. Gendercide also takes the forms of infanticide and lethal violence against a particular gender at any stage of life. The World Bank describes violence against girls and women as a “global pandemic.” One in three women experiences gender-based violence in their lifetime. In research released in 2019, 38% of murdered women were killed by an intimate partner.
Etymology
The term gendercide was first coined by American feminist Mary Anne Warren in her 1985 book, Gendercide: The Implications of Sex Selection. It refers to gender-selective mass killing. Warren drew "an analogy between the concept of genocide" and what she called "gendercide". In her book, Warren wrote:
By analogy, gendercide would be the deliberate extermination of persons of a particular sex (or gender). Other terms, such as "gynocide" and "femicide," have been used to refer to the wrongful killing of girls and women. Nevertheless, "gendercide" is a sex-neutral term in that the victims may be either male or female. There is a need for such a sex-neutral term since sexually discriminatory killing is just as wrong when the victims happen to be male. The term also calls attention to the fact that gender roles have often had lethal consequences and that these are in important respects analogous to the lethal consequences of racial, religious, and class prejudice.
Femicide
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Femicide is defined as the systematic killing of women for various reasons, usually cultural. The word is attested from the 1820s. According to the United Nations, the biologically normal sex ratio at birth ranges from 102 to 106 males per 100 females. However, ratios higher than normal – sometimes as high as 130 – have been observed. This is now causing increasing concern in some South Asian, East Asian, and Central Asian countries. Such disparities almost always reflect a preference for boys as a result of deeply embedded social, cultural, political and economic factors.
The most widespread form of femicide is in the form of gender-selective infanticide in cultures with strong preferences for males such as China and India. According to the United Nations, male-to-female ratios have experienced radical changes from the normal range.
Sex ratios at birth over time in China:
- 106:100 in 1979 (106 boys for every 100 girls, close to the upper limit of the 'normal' range)
- 111:100 in 1988
- 117:100 in 2001
- 120:100 in 2005
In India, parents may prefer male children because they desire heirs who will care for them in their old age. Additionally, the cost of a dowry, the family's price for their daughter to be married off, is very high in India, while a male heir would bring a dowry to the family by way of marriage. According to the British publication, The Independent, the 2011 census revealed 7.1 million fewer girls than boys aged under the age of seven, up from 6 million in 2001 and from 4.2 million in 1991. The sex ratio in the age group is now 915 girls to 1,000 boys (109 boys for every 100 girls), the lowest since records began in 1961.
The honor killing and self-immolation condoned or tolerated by the Kurdish administration in Iraqi Kurdistan has been labeled as "gendercide" by Mojab (2003).
There have been reports of femicide in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico where 411 assassinations of women were qualified as serial and/or of sexual characteristic, by domestic violence, intimate femicides and hatred against women. The response to these murders has included the criminalisation of feminicide in the country.
Contemporary mechanisms of gendercide lie within sexualized violence against women; the females of "sub-Saharan Africa (Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola) in areas that are also at the heart of the "AIDS belt", are not only at-risk due to living in places where there are "current cases of large-scale rape", but are also susceptible to contracting HIV. Less popularized tactics of gendercide against women include the systemic withholding of critical medical, and nutritional care, predominantly occurring "across the belt of "deep patriarchy" extending from East through West Asia and into Northern Africa"; here. Adam Jones, a co-founder of Gendercide Watch, an online research platform created to spread awareness, estimates that the denial of healthcare for women equates to approximately the same toll as that of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide per year.
Over 200,000 die from bleeding, with many giving birth in buses or bullock carts. Lack of health education restricts commonplace medical knowledge; thus, bystanders are unable to offer assistance. In addition, the casualty rate from self-administered abortions is roughly 75,000. Eclampsia, a condition possible pre-, during, and post-childbirth, is characterized by seizures due to high blood pressure, and its effects kill another 75,000 through damage to the brain and kidneys. Moreover, 100,000 die from sepsis, contracted through untreated infections of the uterus and remaining fragments of the placenta that poison the bloodstream. Also, female casualties due to labor obstructions stagger around the 400,000 range.
Adam Jones drafted possible solutions to aid the crisis in Africa. He concluded treatment "would mean training some 850,000 health workers, according to UNICEF and World Health Organization reports, as well as [funding] the necessary drugs and equipment. The total cost would be US $200 million, about the price of half a dozen jet fighters".
Androcide
Androcide is the systematic killing of men or boys for various reasons, usually cultural. Androcide may happen during war to reduce an enemy's potential pool of soldiers.
Examples include the 1988 Anfal campaign against Kurdish males that were considered "battle-aged" (or approximately ages 15–50) in Iraqi Kurdistan. While many of these deaths took place after the Kurdish men were captured and processed at a concentration camp, the worst instances of the gendercide happened at the end of the campaign (August 25 – September 6, 1988).
Another incident of androcide was the Srebrenica massacre of approximately 8,000 Bosniak men and boys on July 12, 1995, ruled as an act of genocide by the International Court of Justice. From the morning of 12 July, Serb forces began gathering men and boys from the refugee population in Potočari and holding them in separate locations, and as the refugees began boarding the buses headed north towards Bosniak-held territory, Serb soldiers separated men of military age who were trying to clamber aboard. Occasionally, younger and older men were stopped (some as young as 14 or 15).
According to genocide scholar Adam Jones, “non-combatant men have been and continue to be the most frequent targets of mass killing and genocidal slaughter, as well as a host of lesser atrocities and abuses.”
Third gender
Gendercide against third gender people is the systemic killing of people who do not fit within the Western gender binary. Deborah Miranda uses the term gendercide to identify the Spanish colonial practice of systemically targeting joyas (the Spanish term for third gender people) in an attempt to exterminate them. Qwo-Li Driskill writes how this violence was waged against people now understood as two-spirit.
In 1513, Spanish explorer Vasco Nuñez de Balboa encountered about forty Indigenous men dressed as women. He commanded his soldiers to execute them through making them prey for their war dogs, which were specially bred mastiffs or greyhounds. They were dismembered and eaten alive by the dogs. Third gender people from around the area were rounded up in service of Spanish authority. Miranda writes that "the Spanish had made it clear that to tolerate, harbor, or associate with the third gender meant death."
In his 1775 memoir, Spanish soldier Pedro Fages wrote that about two or three joyas could be identified in each Indigenous Californian village and were "held in great esteem" in their communities. Fages sought to initiate a swift reduction of the joyas, writing "we place our trust in God and expect that these accursed people will disappear with the growth of the missions. The abominable vice will be eliminated to the extent that the Catholic faith and all the other virtues are firmly implanted there, for the glory of God and the benefit of those poor ignorants."
In fiction
The 2015 film No Men Beyond This Point is a science fiction mockumentary set in an alternate timeline in the 1950s nine months after a near-Earth object almost hit Earth in 1952, making it possible for women to reproduce by parthenogenesis and without men. Men are no longer born, and they have disappeared from all critical positions. Sex is outlawed, and the male sex becomes a dying breed. The few remaining men are kept in reserve and are no longer part of the society, except for a few men who are allowed to do low work. In this world where women are wearing the pants, are asexual, and have no male offspring, it is now up to the quiet and modest household helper Andrew Myers to ensure that the male does not die out. The 37-year-old is the youngest living man on Earth and works for a family made up only of women.
The 2003 film Matrubhoomi: A Nation Without Women, an Indian movie directed by Manish Jha, features a dystopian situation resulting in 2050 from accumulated violence against women over many years. A wealthy man in one village discovers the existence of a young woman not too far from his home, and he buys the woman as a sex slave to be used by him and his sons. In this wretched town in which only men exist aside from her, the wealthy man's family is torn apart while the victim finds herself mercilessly dominated by more men. The film received critical acclaim, with the frank nature of the brutality and despair portrayed being cited by many reviewers, and it sparked increased debate over the contemporary problem of rape in India and other human rights issues in the nation.
The 1985 book The Handmaid's Tale depicts a story of a fascist military dictatorship controlled by a clique of theocratic ideologues. With the population of both men and women having been vastly cut down, fertile women are relatively scarce and mass numbers of non-fertile women are forced into becoming unpersons. Fertile women are regarded as property with few rights, being unable to read and do other basic activities. Canadian author Margaret Atwood created the work as a warning about totalitarianism and oppression of women in the modern age; in particular, she had experienced a fellowship in the then divided Berlin in the early 1980s, visiting the Soviet-dominated areas and witnessing a general despair, which helped inspire the book's beginnings.
In The Walking Dead (TV series), Oceanside's backstory is that the Saviors rounded up and executed every man and boy over 10. It is not until the penultimate episode of season 8 that it is revealed to have all been orchestrated by Simon and not Negan.
