"Innocent Women and Children"

In 2007, when I was deciding which grad school to attend, I was contacted by a professor at the University of Pittsburgh's Graduate School of Public and International Affairs explaining why that school was the best fit for me.  That professor was Dr. Charli Carpenter, and obviously her appeal worked as I currently live in Pittsburgh.  I ended up taking a class on international humanitarian law with Dr. Carpenter, which I absolutely loved.  

Upon my decision to attend Pitt, my dad immediately went online and ordered Dr. Carpenter's book, "Innocent Women and Children": Gender, Norms, and the Protection of Civilians.  Welp, it is now 2019.  So it took me 12 years to actually get around to reading it.  Unless you are super into international humanitarian law, and have a scholarly bent, I would not recommend this book.  It is an academic work, and is written as such.  It me a while to get back my grad school brain.

"Innocent Women and Children" posits the idea that the international community's emphasis on the vulnerability and, indeed, lack of agency, of women and children ignored the very real danger that men and older boys experience in conflict zones.  When aid organizations and activist groups push for humanitarian intervention, either by military or monetary means, they frequently make appeals to voters' and donor's consciences by describing the plight of women and children.  Sometimes this takes the form of "x number of people were killed, including y many women and z many children."  The implication, in these scenarios, is that somehow the killing of women and children is worse than the killing of men.  Dr. Carpenter's argument is that we have become conditioned to think that men can and should take care of themselves and that men and older boys are all one AK-47 away from becoming combatants, whereas women and children are inherently not capable of taking up arms.  This, of course, completely ignores the roles of women in modern militaries (the IDF and female Kurdish fighters in Syria being very visible examples), and the very real problem of child soldiers.  She presents a couple case studies - Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia - in which this disregard for men as potential victims of war led to aid organizations evacuating women, children, and the elderly, and leaving men and older boys behind to be massacred.

The Geneva Conventions are very clear.  Age and gender are irrelevant in determining whether someone is a combatant.  An ex-Navy SEAL, as long as he doesn't take up arms, is a non-combatant and should be treated as such.  However, there is a perception that this isn't the case and that such a person is a constant threat and as such is a legitimate military target.  Belligerents are able to legitimize their actions by showing that they evacuate women and children from the battlefield, and use these actions to help stave off international intervention.

I find Dr. Carpenter's arguments convincing because, as a former board member of a non-profit dedicated to fighting human trafficking, I can confirm that everyone is very concerned about the sexual exploitation of women and children, but few people are concerned about men being trafficked as laborers.  Of course, Dr. Carpenter acknowledges that women and children face different vulnerabilities.  They are more vulnerable to sexual assault and exploitation (though men are also sexually assaulted in war zones), and also to malnutrition and disease after the bulk of the fighting is done.  Small children and pregnant women are, of course uniquely vulnerable for medical reasons, but older children and women who are not pregnant are not especially vulnerable to starvation, it's just that by that point men are not around, having died in the fighting.  Her primary argument is that if the chief concern is who dies, then, because men are more likely to be targeted during fighting, they are the most vulnerable and thus should receive significantly more attention from the aid community.