Androcide is a term referring to systematically killingmales because of theirsex. Androcide-like instances could occur duringwar orgenocide. This may be due to the fact that malecivilians are often targeted during warfare as a way to remove those considered to be potentialcombatants, and during genocide as a way to destroy the entire community.[1][2]
The etymological root of thehybrid word is derived from a combination of the Greek prefixandro meaning "man" orboy,[3] with the Latin suffixcide, meaning killing.[4]
Androcide may be deliberate: for example, to degrade the offensive capabilities of an adversary.[5] Massacres of men and boys may be of this type. For example, during theKosovo War, theYugoslav forces underSlobodan Milošević were accused of massacring many male Albanians of "battle age" because they saw them as a threat.[6]
Androcide may also be part of a largergenocide. Perpetrators may treat male and female victims differently. For example, during theArmenian genocide,elite men were publicly executed. Afterward, average men and boys would be killed en masse, and the women and little children in their communities deported. Gendercide Watch, an independent human rights group, regards this as agendercide against men.[7] However, this gendered treatment of victims was not ubiquitous; in many locations, women and girls were also subject to massacre.[8]
Men's rights activists such as Paul Nathanson, author ofReplacing Misandry: A Revolutionary History of Men argue thatthe draft is a form of androcide. In many countries, only men are subjected to military conscription, which leaves them at greater risk of death during warfare compared to women.[9] Worldwide, males constitute 79% of non-conflicthomicides[10] and the majority of direct conflict deaths.[11]
Androcide has also been a feature of literature inancient Greek mythology[12] and in hypothetical situations wherein there is discord between the sexes.[13]
Generally, military services willforcibly conscript men to fight in warfare, inevitably leading to massive male casualties when faced with males on the opposing side.[14] Non-combatant males make up a majority of the casualties in mass killings in warfare.[15] This practice occurs since soldiers see opposing men, fighting or otherwise, as rivals and a threat to their superiority. Alternatively, they are afraid that these men will attempt to fight back and kill them for any number of reasons, including revenge, mutual fear, and self defense. Thus, they may kill preemptively in an attempt to prevent this possibility.[16]
Genghis Khan was among many recorded warlords who would often employ the mass, indiscriminate murder of men and boys he felt threatened by regardless of if they were soldiers, civilians, or simply in the way. In the year 1202, after he andOng Khan allied to conquer the Tatars, theyordered the execution of every Tatar man and boy taller than a linchpin, and enslaved the Tatar women for sexual purposes. This was done as collective punishment for the fatal poisoning of Genghis Khan's father,Yesugei, for which the Mongols blamed the Tatars according toThe Secret History of the Mongols.[17] Likewise, in the year 1211, Genghis Khan had planned on the wide-scale killing of males in retaliation for the revolt against his daughterAlakhai Bekhi, until she persuaded him to only punish the murderers of her husband, the event which caused the revolt.[18]
After theHaitian Revolution (1791-1804), the only slave rebellion in world history which successfully resulted in establishing an independent nation (Haiti),[19] black Haitian general and self-proclaimed monarchJean-Jacques Dessalines ordered his soldiers to massacre every remaining French person on Haiti. The motivation for this was the fear of reinvasion and re-establishment of slavery, which the French colonial military had attempted prior, as well as revenge for the French enslavement and torment of Africans.[20] The1804 Haitian massacre would exclusively target French males. Soldiers were generally unwilling to kill French women and Dessalines did not specify targeting them. It was only when Dessalines's advisors argued that the French would not be truly eradicated if French women were left to give birth to French men that he ordered the massacre of French women as well, at a later stage. Only those who agreed to marry black Haitian men were spared.[21]
DuringWorld War II, German soldiers killed millions of male Russian prisoners of war (POWs) via starvation, exposure to the elements, exposure to disease in cramped POW camps, or outright execution.[22]
A war crime with elements of genocide, in which more than 8,000Bosniak men and boys were killed and around the town ofSrebrenica in the aftermath of thesiege, during theBosnian War. The killings were perpetrated by units of theArmy of Republika Srpska (VRS) underRatko Mladić.
During theArmenian genocide of the 1910s, Turkish irregulars massacred Armenian men. Men were the traditional heads of the family, so killing them meant that the remainder of the community was defenseless and without leadership. The women were then subjected to rape, sex slavery, kidnapping, forced conversion, and forced marriage.[24][25] Although men were typically massacred first, women were also massacred or died duringdeath marches.[26] Both the murder of men and the sexual violence against women furthered the plan to exterminate the Armenian population.[27]
Analysis of existing mortality estimates of theCambodian genocide show that men accounted for 81% of all violent deaths and 67% of all excess deaths in this period.[28] The killing of about 50–70% of Cambodia’s working-age men lead to a shift in norms regarding the sexual division of labor and correlates with present-day indicators of women’s economic advancements and increased representation in local-level elected office.[29]
TheAnfal genocide of 1988 killed between 50,000 and 182,000Kurds and thousands ofAssyrians during the final stages of theIran-Iraq War. This act committed during the Anfal Campaign was led byAli Hassan al-Majid, under the orders of PresidentSaddam Hussein. Anfal, which officially began in 1988, had eight stages in six geographical areas. Every stage followed the same patterns: steer civilians to points near the main road, where they were met by the jash forces and transported to temporary meeting points. After transport, they were then separated into three groups: teenage boys and men, women and children, and the elderly. The men and teenage boys were never to be seen again. Women, all children, and the elderly of both genders were sent to camps; men were immediately stripped out of their clothes, only wearing asharwal, and were executed. Gendercide Watch also regards this case as a gendercide against men.[30][31] Many Kurd men and boys were killed in order to reduce the chance of ever fighting back. Paul Nathanson theorized that men kill other men in order to protect their territory and ward off attacks.[32]
TheRwandan genocide of 1994 caused the death of hundreds of thousands of ethnicTutsi people. Men were the primary targets for killing, while women were the primary targets for rape and mutilation. Because of this, Gendercide Watch describes the Rwandan genocide as a gendercide against men, even though men were not the sole victims; Tutsi women were also murdered.[33][34][35]
With regards to plants, androcide may refer to efforts to direct pollination through emasculating certain crops.[36]
Incannabis cultivation, male plants areculled once identified to prevent fertilisation of female plants due to the fact unfertilised female plants produceparthenocarpic fruits.
In theAncient Greek myth of theTrojan War, accounts of which are largely legendary, the Greeks killed all the men and boys ofTroy after conquering it. Even infants and the elderly were not spared; the Greeks wanted to prevent a future Trojan rebellion or uprising. The female Trojans were raped and enslaved rather than being killed.[37]
^Peterson, Merrill D. (2004)."Starving Armenians": America and the Armenian Genocide, 1915–1930 and After. University of Virginia Press. p. 41.ISBN9780813922676.
^Nathanson, Paul (2015).Replacing Misandry: A Revolutionary History of Men.without referring to the androcide of course that many societies have imposed at a later stage of the life cycle in the form of military conscription
^Gibbons, Jonathan (2013)."Global Study on Homicide"(PDF).www.unodc.org. United National Office of Drugs and Crime (Vienna).
^Skempis, Marios (2014).Geography, Topography, Landscape: Configurations of Space in Greek and Roman Epic. p. 172.
^Morgan, Robin (1977).Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist. p. 3.
^Nathanson, Paul (2015).Replacing Misandry: A Revolutionary History of Men.without referring to the androcide of course that many societies have imposed at a later stage of the life cycle in the form of military conscription
^HSR (2005), "Assault on the vulnerable", inHSR, ed. (2005).Human security report 2005: war and peace in the 21st century. New York Oxford: Published for the Human Security Center, University if British Columbia, Canada by Oxford University Press. p. 111.ISBN9780195307399.Citing Jones (2000), "Gendercide and genocideArchived 2018-06-18 at theWayback Machine" p. 186.
^Srivastava, U.S. (1980).Golden jubilee commemoration volume, 1980. p. 51.
^The Secret History of the Mongols: Translated, Annotated, and with an Introduction by Urgunge Onon (2001). pp. 53-54, 57, 61, 111-135, 205
^Weatherford, Jack (2010).The Secret History of the Mongol Queens: How the Daughters of Genghis Khan Rescued His Empire. New York: Crown Publishing Group.
^Burnet, Jennie E. (2012). "Remembering Genocide".Genocide Lives in Us: Women, Memory, and Silence in Rwanda. University of Wisconsin Press. p. 107.ISBN9780299286439.
Derderian, Katharine (2005). "Common fate, different experience: gender-specific aspects of the Armenian Genocide, 1915–1917".Holocaust and Genocide Studies.19 (1):1–25.doi:10.1093/hgs/dci001.PMID20684092.
Girard, Philippe R. (2011).The Slaves Who Defeated Napoleon: Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian War of Independence 1801–1804. Tuscaloosa, Alabama: The University of Alabama Press.ISBN978-0-8173-1732-4.
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