When reporting on death rates resulting from atrocities, there has long been a tendency to emphasise the number of women and children killed as a symbol of the level of horror of the crime perpetrated. To use a recent example, on 22 May the BBC reported that “[a]t least 243, including more than 100 women and children, were killed in Gaza”. In 2017, the Independent reported that “Donald Trump’s first US military raid kills 30 civilians, including 10 women and children”. This hierarchisation of deaths has been challenged by gender scholars, with Cynthia Enloe coining the notion of “womenandchildren” in her 1990 text "Bananas, Beaches and Bases" to critique the use of this abstract category. The normative assumptions that this terminology reproduces—that women are innocent and men are perpetrators—have been dissected in discourse and are worth exploring. But this normative analysis largely falls short of considering why such innocence is necessary when reporting atrocities. What does innocence contribute to the human rights project?
WOMEN AND CHILDREN
Reporting on women and children to emphasise the horror of an atrocity committed relies on dated gender norms that posit women as innocent victims and men as violent perpetrators. Ellie Bush describes this in her article, "Gendering Care and Control at the Humanitarian Borders of Europe," which explores the role of “feminised vulnerability” in the context of asylum-seekers and refugees in Greece. She describes how many of the services are available only to women, while men are at best ignored, and at worst presumed to be a threat. Women are granted a childlike innocence, rendering them more deserving of protection and safety because they do not pose a threat to the state. Bush writes, “This innocence…fits nicely with the Western imagination of the powerless refugee worthy of assistance”. Humanitarian commentators Howden and Kodalak have explored the notion of the “vulnerability contest,” which takes place in these refugee camps in the Greek islands, where those classified as “vulnerable” “get permission to move to the mainland or to more humane accommodation elsewhere on the island”. The term applies to lone children and women, families, or ill people, thus including everyone except healthy men. These humanitarian contexts are therefore highly gendered, dictating who is more deserving of protection.
Beyond the site of the refugee camp, this gendering occurs in a multitude of other contexts. The Centre for Feminist Foreign Policy has considered the gendering of drone warfare, in which civilian deaths of women and children are reported at a far higher frequency than men. They argue that “the difference between violence against ‘womenandchildren’ or violence against men relies on a discursive framework to determine if deaths are mourned and condemned,” and seeks to legitimise violence against men, regardless of whether they are a civilian or combatant. Reporting the deaths of women and children serves to highlight greater wrongdoing than those of men, because the status of “woman” and “combatant” are perceived to be incompatible—only men can be perpetrators, and women can only be innocent. This process is highly racialised. Lila Abu-Lughod’s “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?” explores the use of these binaries in order to justify neo-colonial intervention in Afghanistan, where the “innocent” women required protection from their “violent” male counterparts. Despite extensive coverage of these problematic normative frameworks, mainstream news sites continue to report on atrocities along gender lines. Why do they continue to rely on this highly gendered notion of innocence in order to report on human rights atrocities?
THE ROLE OF INNOCENCE
According to this framework, to be afforded protection from atrocities, one must fall into the category of “the innocent”. Innocence invokes pity, and pity enables the establishment of binary groups of people—those who pity and those who are pitied. In "A World Without Innocence" Miriam Ticktin describes the creation of a hierarchy of humanity in which the “fortunate” define themselves against a class of the “unfortunate”. She argues that:
The centrality of innocence to the political imagination is shaped by a search for a space of purity, one that constantly displaces politics to the limit of innocence, and thereby renders invisible the structural and historical causes of inequality. (p. 577)
This reliance on innocence obscures structural hierarchies that deliberately ensure that dichotomy remains between the fortunate and the less fortunate, because one group of people can only be fortunate if they are able to pity another group which is less fortunate. Ticktin argues that “it is the refusal to acknowledge the structural inequalities that allow them to be humanitarians, witnesses, or saviours”. (p. 583) This binary of those deserving of protection and those who do not preserves saviourism within human rights discourse, because the identity of the saviour can only exist if there is someone who needs saving, hence someone who is innocent. Reporting only on the deaths of women and children in order to emphasise the horror of a certain atrocity which has been committed simultaneously preserves outdated gender norms, while centring innocence as a required characteristic for mourning and upholding saviourism and structural inequality.
As Ticktin summarises, “Victims can be guilty but still victims”. (p. 587) Until we move beyond a narrative of innocence in human rights reporting, it will continue to perpetuate a saviour mentality. We must collectively seek horizontal, not vertical, interactions—to echo Abu-Lughod, “Can we use a more egalitarian language of alliances, coalitions, and solidarity instead of salvation?” (p. 788)
This article was written as part of the Human Rights Pulse Writer’s Workshop programme.
Iona works for a social justice organisation aimed at improving social mobility by teaching key employability skills in schools across London. Iona is an MSc graduate in Human Rights at the London School of Economics, where she focused her studies on postcolonial critiques of human rights, and the contention between citizenship law and human rights law.