Section 2: Issues of life, death, well-being, and safety
1. Homelessness
Overview: Men consistently make up a majority of the homeless population. They’re especially common among the long-term homeless, the homeless living on the street (instead of a shelter) [1], and the homeless deaths. Despite this, we’re actually less eager to support homeless men [2].
Approximately 70 per cent of Canada’s homeless are male. Dion Oxford of Toronto’s Salvation Army Gateway shelter for men tells us it is harder to raise funds for men’s shelters. “Single, middle-aged homeless men are simply not sexy for the funder,” he says.
This is likely related to male disposability. This can also be seen in an article from the British newspaper The Independent on the “growing problem” of homelessess among women [3]. The author calls it “distressing” that 1/4 homeless people in shelters and 1/10 homeless people on the street are women.
Examples/evidence: One study conducted in New York City and Philadelphia found that those who are chronically homeless are overwhelmingly male (and black). 82.3% were male in New York City, and 71.1% were male in Philadelphia [4]. UK homeless charity St Mungo’s Broadway found that men made up 87% of rough sleepers in London (those on the street instead of in shelters) [5]. Another UK homeless charity provides a break-down of homeless deaths by age and gender [6].
Images: http://i.imgur.com/ZaBwbCh.png
For more, compare the number of instances of “John Doe” to “Jane Doe” in the Toronto Homeless Memorial (it’s 135 to 13) [7].
One survey of homeless people in the United States found that homeless men were less likely to have access to health insurance and government benefits [8].
[1] http://bit.ly/1wQy1zt (coursepage for Sociology 498G at the University of Maryland)
[2] http://bit.ly/105BHF7 (Globe and Mail article “Should universities be opening men’s centres?”)
[3] http://ind.pn/1csgMuD (The Independent article “Homeless and broken: how women are catching up with men”)
[4] http://1.usa.gov/1E4g0lv (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration document “Current Statistics on the Prevalence and Characteristics of People Experiencing Homelessness in the United States”)
[5] http://bit.ly/1EY5Ve4 (St Mungo’s Broadway “Street to Home Bulletin 2013/14” report)
[6] http://bit.ly/1wd4hkF (document on mortality among homeless people from Crisis, a UK charity for the homeless)
[7] http://bit.ly/13TY55G (Toronto Homeless Memorial’s list of deaths from homelessness)
[8] http://bit.ly/1GGYLhO (Healing Hands article “Single Males: The Homeless Majority”)
2. Homicide, robbery, and physical assault
Overview: Although women are more often the victims of sexual assault, men are more often the victims of homicide, robbery, and the more injurious types of physical assault. Some dismiss this by noting that men are also more likely to commit these crimes, but a murder victim doesn’t receive any solace from his murderer being the same gender as him. (This argument is also often applied to dismiss higher victimization rates among other groups like racial minorities: “that’s just blacks killing other blacks, who cares”.)
Examples/evidence: The following table includes numbers on the gender of perpetrators and victims of homicide (using statistics from the United States [1]) and assault (using statistics from Norway on the more serious incidents requiring a visit to an urban accident and emergency department [2]).
Genders Homicide (USA) Assault (Norway)
Male → Male 65.3% 74%
Male → Female 22.7% 21%
Female → Male 9.6% 2%
Female → Female 2.4% 4%
Gender patterns in different types of violence can be seen in the 2008 data from Canada. Women are 1.2× more likely than men to be the victims of common assault, which is the less serious and less injurious form of physical assault. Men on the other hand are more often the victims of assault with a weapon or causing bodily harm (1.9× more likely), aggravated assault (defined as being wounded, maimed, disfigured, or having your life endangered: 3.6× more likely), robbery (1.9× more likely), and homicide or attempted murder (3.5× more likely) [4].
An even bigger disparity is visible in the Chicago Tribune’s page documenting victims of shootings in the city. Of the 100 shootings in a one-month period in early 2015 (January 20th to February 16th), 93 had male victims—and the other 7 were listed as “unknown gender” [4].
Some studies look specifically at rates of violence victimization by strangers. In Canada in 2008, men were 80% of all reported attacks by strangers [5]. In the United States in 2010, men were twice as likely to suffer violence from strangers [6].
[1] http://bit.ly/14Scr7r (“Homicide trends in the U.S.” from U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics)
[2] http://1.usa.gov/14SpK81 (“Gender and physical violence” by Steen and Hunskaar)
[3] http://bit.ly/1BeU619 (“Gender Differences in Police-reported Violent Crime in Canada, 2008” from Statistics Canada)
(Chicago Tribune page “Chicago shooting victims”, last updated 2015/2/19)
(“SNAPSHOT: Male Victims of Violent Crime” from National Victims of Crime Awareness Week)
[6] http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/vvcs9310.pdf (“Violent Victimization Committed by Strangers, 1993-2010” from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics)
3. Drug addiction and alcoholism
Overview: Women are by no means immune, but statistics do show that addiction affects men disproportionately. This should raise questions about what’s pushing men to substance abuse. Are they dealing with traumatic events, harmful attitudes and expectations, or a lack of social support?
Examples/evidence: According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, approximately 17% of men and 8% of women will meet criteria for alcohol dependence (which is a higher standard than simply binge-drinking) at some point in their lives. They also note that men “consistently have higher rates of alcohol-related deaths and hospitalizations than women” [1]. The 2012 National Survey on Drug Use and Health in the United States found that rates of current illicit drug use to be 11.6% for men and 6.9% for women [2], and the 2009 New Jersey Household Survey on Drug Use and Health found that “[m]ales (14%) were significantly more likely than females (5%) to abuse or be dependent on alcohol, drugs or both alcohol and drugs in the past year” [3].
[1] http://1.usa.gov/1guimo6 (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “Fact Sheets - Excessive Alcohol Use and Risks to Men’s Health”)
[2] http://1.usa.gov/1y5QAqF (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration “Results from the 2012 National Survey on Drug Use and Health: Summary of National Findings”)
[3] http://bit.ly/1C0Qca7 (New Jersey Department of Human Services “2009 New Jersey Household Survey on Drug Use and Health”)
4. Suicide
Overview: Like drug/alcohol addiction, there are many women who commit suicide but the fact is that men still kill themselves at disproportionately high rates.
One study reports that although rates of fatal suicide behaviour are higher among men, rates of nonfatal suicide behaviour are higher among women. It says that women have higher rates of suicidal thoughts while there was no gender difference in suicide planning or suicide attempts [1]. The implications of this are not clear, but it is relevant to mention. Do men choose different, more deadly methods? Are they more “certain” or hopeless when engaging in suicidal behaviours, resulting in higher fatality rates? Either way, the end result is more dead men than dead women.
Examples/evidence: Suicide is the single biggest cause of death for men aged 20-45 in England/Wales [2]. In Canada in 2011, the rate of suicide among men was three times higher than among women [3]. In the United States in 2012, men were almost four times more likely to kill themselves. The graph below provides historical data on suicide in the United States [4].
Images: http://i.imgur.com/ikXWibu.png
Middle-aged men and poor men are especially at risk, according to the Department of Health in England [5]. Unfortunately, many people’s response to the issue of male suicide is to be more critical than supportive [6].
The Samaritans report says most people have no idea what they can do to combat male suicide. Too many they say, simply “ ‘upbraid’ men for being ‘resistant to help-seeking’ or ‘not talking about their feelings.’ ”
Mental-health specialists especially, says the Samaritans report, “need to move from ‘blaming men for not being like women,’ ” to designing projects and public services that can help them.
(“Suicidal Thoughts and Behaviors Among Adults Aged ≥18 Years — United States, 2008-2009” from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)
(“More Statistics, Yet Still No Strategy…” from CALM: Campaign Against Living Miserably)
[3] http://bit.ly/1u1g1mf and http://bit.ly/1BVOxVx (“Suicides and suicide rate, by sex and by age group” from Statistics Canada)
[4] http://bit.ly/1rKWJ4R (from the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, which cites the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Data & Statistics Fatal Injury Report for 2012)
(The Guardian article “Suicide numbers rise sharply, especially among middle-aged men”)
(Vancouver Sun article “Men and suicide: The silent epidemic”)
5. Life expectancy gap
Overview: Men’s health is lagging behind women’s health according to many metrics. The most important of these is life expectancy, where men are losing out on an average of 4-5 years of life compared to women. Part of the gap (1-2 years) seems to be biological, but there are cultural/social factors (which we can fix) as well.
Examples/evidence: My two main sources are an article “Mars vs. Venus: The gender gap in health” from a 2010 edition of the Harvard Men’s Health Watch [1] and the series of papers by Barbara Blatt Kalben called Why Men Die Younger: Causes of Mortality Differences by Sex for the Society of Actuaries [2].
One piece of evidence for why only part of the gap is biological is that it has actually grown over the past 100 years. The table is from the United States, and the chart is from Canada (measured from the age of 7 to take infant mortality out of the picture).
Year Females Males Gender gap
1900 48.3 46.3 2 years
1950 71.1 65.6 5.5 years
2000 79.7 74.3 5.4 years
2007 80.4 75.3 5.1 years
Images: http://i.imgur.com/zieTb8R.png
The German-Austrian Cloister Study provides interesting insight onto how much of the life expectancy gap is biological. Monks and nuns have similar lifestyles, and so their life expectancies are less influenced by the behavioural/social factors that exist in the general population. As it turns out, nuns live just one year longer than monks [3].
The Harvard Men’s Health Watch article provides various non-biological reasons for the gap.
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Men experience more work stress/hostility, which can increase the risk of hypertension, heart attack, and stroke.
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Men have less social support. Social support has been shown to protect against the common cold, depression, heart attacks, and strokes.
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Men are more likely to smoke, drink, or do drugs.
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Men are less likely to go to the doctor and make use of health-care (and actually less likely to have access to it). From the article: “Women are more likely than men to have health insurance and a regular source of health care. According to a major survey conducted by the Commonwealth Fund, three times as many men as women had not seen a doctor in the previous year …”.
Although that article does not mention it, differences in awareness, attention, and funding between men’s health and women’s health could also be part of the gap [4].
There are at least 7 new agencies and departments devoted solely to women while there is not one office for men or male specific ailments. Men’s health advocates long have pushed for an Office of Men’s Health to act as a companion to the Office on Women’s Health, established in 1991. Instead of rectifying that disparity, the new health care law intensified it.
[1] http://bit.ly/1vvKc7x or https://archive.is/3roDD
(“Mars vs. Venus: The gender gap in health” from the Harvard Men’s Health Watch)
[2] http://bit.ly/1lDnXeg (Why Men Die Younger: Causes of Mortality Differences by Sex from the Society of Actuaries)
[3] http://bit.ly/1vBZeMo (“Causes of Male Excess Mortality: Insights from Cloistered Populations” by Marc Luy), http://www.klosterstudie.de/ (German-Austrian Cloister Study homepage")
(The Daily Caller article “Does Obamacare discriminate against men?”)
6. Workplace injury and death
Overview: Men are quite a bit more likely than women to get injured at work, and they’re overwhelmingly more likely to die at work.
Examples/evidence: In the United Kingdom in 2010/11, the rate of major injuries was almost twice as high for men as it was for women (130.5 compared to 68.8 per 100,000 workers) [1]. The difference in workplace deaths is even more stark. A study of workplace deaths in Canada from 1993 to 2005 found that the number of male deaths in 2005 alone was more than double the total number female deaths in the whole 22 year period from 1993 to 2005 [2]. In the United States in 2006, men were 54% of the workforce but 92% of workplace deaths [2].
(“Reported injuries to employees by age and gender” from the UK Health and Safety Executive)
[2] http://www.csls.ca/reports/csls2006-04.PDF (“Five Deaths a Day: Workplace Fatalities in Canada, 1993-2005” by Andrew Sharpe and Jill Hardt for the Centre for the Study of Living Standards)
[3] http://1.usa.gov/1pvu0Ch (“Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries” from the Bureau of Labor Statistics)
7. Hate crimes targeting gay men
Overview: Hate crimes based on sexual orientation disproportionately target homosexual men, with homosexual women being the victims noticeably less often.
Examples/evidence: Here’s the break-down of sexual orientation motivated hate crimes in the United States in 2012 [1]:
- Anti-male homosexual bias — 54.6%
- Anti-homosexual bias (i.e. gender-neutral homophobia) — 28.0%
- Anti-female homosexual bias — 12.3%
- Anti-bisexual bias — 3.1%
- Anti-heterosexual bias — 2.0%
In Canada in the same year, 80% of hate crimes motivated by sexual orientation targeted men [2]. Among all hate crimes, those based on sexual orientation were the most likely to involve assault and physical injuries.
The targeting of gay men (over lesbian women) for hate crimes is not unexpected, considering the history of state repression of homosexuality targeting gay men. In the United Kingdom, the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885 (also known as “An Act to make further provision for the Protection of Women and Girls, the suppression of brothels, and other purposes”) recriminalized male homosexuality as “gross indecency”. Until decriminalization in 1967, 50,000 gay men were convicted, including author Oscar Wilde (sentenced to two years of hard labour in 1895) and mathematician Alan Turing (who accepted chemical castration as an alternative to prison in 1952; he killed himself two years later). Sir David Maxwell Fyfe (Home Secretary 1951-54) talked of a “new drive against male vice” to “rid England of this plague” [3] [4] [5].
A similar targeting of gay men was found in Nazi Germany, although with even more severe consequences. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “[t]he vast majority of homosexual victims were males; lesbians were not subjected to systematic persecution”. Many survivors have testified that in concentration camps, homosexuals were treated especially harshly (compared to other inmate groups), not only by guards but also other inmates. Victims of the homosexual holocaust were widely refused both recognition and reparations after the war. Some even remained imprisoned by the post-war government [6] [7].
Interestingly, according to the 2012 data from Canada, men are more likely than women to be the victims of all types of hate crimes, not just those related to sexual orientation (although those had the highest disparity at 80% male victims). The other four categories were race/ethnicity, religion, other, and unknown, and they ranged from 61% to 72% male victims [8].
(FBI 2012 Hate Crime Statistics page “Incidents and Offenses”)
(Statistics Canada page “Police-reported hate crime in Canada, 2012”)
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_Law_Amendment_Act_1885
(Wikipedia page “Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885”)
(The Independent article “Gay men call for equity following Alan Turing pardon”)
(The Daily Beast article “The Castration of Alan Turing, Britain’s Code-Breaking WWII Hero”)
(United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Holocaust Encyclopedia page “Persecution of Homosexuals”)
(United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Holocaust Encyclopedia page “Lesbians and the Third Reich”)
(Statistics Canada page “Characteristics of hate crime victims, by motivation, Canada, 2012”)
8. Sexual assault in prison
Overview: The fact that men make up such a large majority of the prison population means that the prevalence of rape and sexual assault in prison (and our culture’s attitude of indifference) is especially a concern for men.
Examples/evidence: Different studies report quite different numbers on sexual assault rates in prison. Here are three studies that provide a range of numbers, starting with the lowest.
- Finding: 1.91% of prisoners have experienced a completed sexual assault over their lifetime [1].
- Finding: 4.0% of prison inmates (and 3.2% of jail inmates) reported one or more incidents of sexual victimization (either by another inmate or by faculty staff) in the previous 12 months [2].
- Finding: 21% of inmates had experienced “pressured or forced sexual contact” since being incarcerated in their state [3].
The third study explains why findings differ so much. First, male inmates under-report sexual assault, so non-anonymous surveys give lower numbers. Second, different definitions of sexual assault change the numbers substantially. Completed rapes are much rarer than genital fondling and failed attempts at intercourse.
[1] http://1.usa.gov/17spDkI (“Prison Rape: A Critical Review of the Literature” by Gerald G. Gaes and Andrew L. Goldberg)
[2] http://1.usa.gov/1nHaS1N (“Sexual Victimization in Prisons and Jails Reported by Inmates, 2011–12” from the Bureau of Justice Statistics)
[3] http://bit.ly/17sGrbg (“Sexual Coercion Rates in Seven Midwestern Prison Facilities for Men” by Cindy Struckman-Johnson and David Struckman-Johnson)
9. Gendercide
Overview: Gendercide (gender-specific mass killing) often targets men, although the gender of the victims generally receives less attention than when women experience gendercide. Adam Jones, genocide researcher and political science professor, points out that targeting men can seem so “natural” that “almost no media commentator bothers to mention it” [1]. In the opening essay of his compilation Gendercide and Genocide, Jones argues that the group most consistently targeted for mass killings throughout history has been non-combatant men between the ages of 15 and 55, as they are typically seen as the largest danger to the conquering force [2].
Examples/evidence: In what the former Secretary General of the United Nations Kofi Annan called the worst crime on European soil since the Second World War, over 8,000 unarmed civilians [3] were massacred in the small mountain town of Srebrenica in Bosnia in 1995. Two characteristics united the victims: they were Muslim, and they were male [4].
Although Srebrenica had been designated a U.N. “safe area” three months earlier, “[t]housands of men and boys as young as 10 were rounded up and murdered … Serbian TV footage shows woman and children being separated from the men and put on buses” [5]. The busses were searched to make sure men weren’t on them [6]. According to the BBC, 23,000 women and children were allowed to leave while men aged 12-77 were taken “for interrogation”—two days later, reports of massacres started to emerge [7]. The “five-day orgy of slaughter” included 60 truckloads of male refugees being “taken from Srebrenica to execution sites where they were bound, blindfolded, and shot with automatic rifles”, and other victims being “hunted down like dogs and slaughtered” and pushed into mass graves with industrial bulldozers. It was described by a war-crimes tribunal as “truly scenes from hell written on the darkest pages of human history” [5].
David Benatar also gives the Rwandan genocide as an example of gendercide. In The Second Sexism (chapter 4), he explains that Hutus “were determined to seek out and murder Tutsi boys … They examined very young infants, even new-borns, to see if they were boys or girls. Little boys were executed on the spot.”
[1] http://bit.ly/179RhTW (Adam Jones’ article “Terminal Sexism: Men, women and war in ex-Yugoslavia”)
[2] http://adamjones.freeservers.com/g_and_g.htm (Gendercide and Genocide book page)
[3] http://nyti.ms/1xG5lwY (New York Times article “Mladic Arrives in The Hague”)
[4] http://bit.ly/179Ro1H (Adam Jones’ article “Pity the Innocent Men”)
[5] http://cnn.it/1BuQbuE (CNN article “Srebrenica: ‘A triumph of evil’”)
[6] http://bit.ly/165HfD1 (document from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia)
[7] https://archive.is/gLVGY
(BBC article “Srebrenica massacre verdicts upheld at war crimes tribunal”)