Women And Children And Everyone Else First

Morwari Zafar suggests that humanitarians who use the phrase “women and children” as a “single term of reference” are misguided:

To address civilian casualties in terms of women and children in the context of war is one thing. However, extending the paradigm in international development is both myopic and wholly insufficient.

This is not to deny that women and children bear a devastating spectrum of atrocities, including targeted sexual violence as casualties of war when men are often combatants. The consolidation of women and children therefore can be a positive association, by ensuring adequate protection and prioritization during a crisis, as political scientist R. Charli Carpenter notes.

However, a study of the Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia by Laura Shepherd states that “in evacuating ‘women and children’ as synonymous with the ‘civilian population,’ protection agencies replicated the notion that the remaining population was composed of ‘fighters’ and legitimised [the Bosnian Serb army’s] targeting of those individuals.” As such, socially constructed norms about women and children as “innocent civilians” ended up marginalizing men who were not necessarily combatants. In development discourse, separating women and children by a conjunction only binds them together as mutually dependent, helpless victims whose protection and well-being rest in the hands of higher, more capable authorities, who are often male in patriarchal contexts such as Afghanistan.