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[gendercide_watch@hotmail.com: Announcing: Gendercide Watch <www.gendercide.org>]




    ================= Begin forwarded message =================

    From: gendercide_watch@hotmail.com ("Gendercide Watch")
    To: cej@bht.com
    Subject: Announcing: Gendercide Watch <www.gendercide.org>
    Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 10:27:58 PST

    
    Greetings --
    
    I am very pleased to announce that after many months of effort by our 
    dedicated trio, "Gendercide Watch", our Web-based educational initiative to 
    confront gender-selective mass killing worldwide, has now been launched at 
    <www.gendercide.org>.  A mission statement, along with "What Is 
    Gendercide?", follows this message.  An initial complement of twelve 
    gendercide case-studies has been posted to the site, and a dozen more will 
    follow in coming months.  Please do what you can to spread the word!
    
    Furthermore, I would like to issue a personal invitation to those on this 
    mailing list to consider becoming "affiliates" of Gendercide Watch.  This 
    involves no time or financial commitment on your part (though contributions 
    of either are most welcome!).  Rather, it is simply a statement of support 
    for the broad goals of the project.  If you are interested in adding your 
    name to the "staff & affiliates" page, please write to this address with a 
    short biographical description, institutional affiliations, and links to any 
    Web-based projects you might be involved in.  We're hoping to get a diverse 
    and international group of affiliates together to buttress the credibility 
    of the site and its contents.
    
    Please let us know of any glitches you find on the site -- we are still 
    doing a little last-minute scenery painting.  And thanks to those who've 
    offered solidarity and support over the last (busy!) few months.
    
    All the best,
    
    Adam Jones
    Executive Director, Gendercide Watch
    
    ======================================
    
    1) MISSION STATEMENT
    
    GENDERCIDE WATCH seeks to confront acts of gender-selective mass killing 
    around the world.  We believe that such atrocities against ordinary men and 
    women constitute one of humanity's worst blights, and one of its greatest 
    challenges in the new millennium.
    
    GENDERCIDE WATCH is working to raise awareness, conduct research, and 
    produce educational resources on gendercide.  In particular, we seek to 
    dispel stereotypes that blame victims and survivors for their own suffering. 
       Among our activities is the maintenance of a website,
    www.gendercide.org, which represents our major means of outreach and public 
    education.  This site includes a constantly growing data-base of 
    case-studies and other research materials on gendercide.
    
    GENDERCIDE WATCH seeks contacts and affiliations with scholars and students, 
    activists, and other individuals who share our concerns and will allow us to 
    learn and benefit from their diverse efforts.  We manage a moderated 
    mailing-list that will link concerned individuals and institutions in many 
    countries.  This list will allow staff and subscribers to issue "urgent 
    action" notices as cases of gendercide arise, and to provide word of 
    important available resources.
    
    =============================
    
    2) WHAT IS GENDERCIDE?
    [n.b. A number of the case-studies referred to here are currently under 
    construction; our aim is to have the full complement in place by the end of 
    this year.  The case-studies already uploaded are (in alphabetical order): 
    Bangladesh, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Colombia, Incarceration/The Death Penalty, 
    Maternal Mortality, Military Conscription/Impressment, Jewish Holocaust, 
    Kosovo, Montreal Massacre, Nanjing Massacre, Soviet POWs, and Srebrenica.]
    
    Gendercide is gender-selective mass killing. The term was first used by Mary 
    Anne Warren in her 1985 book, "Gendercide: The Implications of Sex 
    Selection." Warren drew "an analogy between the concept of genocide and what 
    I call gendercide." Citing the Oxford English Dictionary definition of 
    genocide as "the deliberate extermination of a race of people," Warren 
    wrote:
    
    	By analogy, gendercide would be the deliberate extermination
    	of persons of a particular sex (or gender). Other terms,
    	such as "gynocide" and "femicide," have been used to refer
    	to the wrongful killing of girls and women. But "gendercide"
    	is a sex-neutral term, in that the victims may be either male
    	or female. There is a need for such a sex-neutral term, since
    	sexually discriminatory killing is just as wrong when the victims
    	happen to be male. The term also calls attention to the fact
    	that gender roles have often had lethal consequences, and that
    	these are in important respects analogous to the lethal
    	consequences of racial, religious, and class prejudice.
    
    Warren explores the deliberate extermination of women through analysis of 
    such subjects as female infanticide, maternal mortality, and witch-hunts in 
    early modern Europe. Gendercide Watch includes all three of these as 
    case-studies of gendercide. In addition, we include cases of mass rape of 
    women followed by murder, as has occurred on a large scale in recent decades 
    (see the case-studies of gendercide against both women and men in Nanjing in 
    1937 and Bangladesh in 1971). We also feature a case-study of the Montreal 
    Massacre (1989), a gender-selective mass execution of young women that is 
    indelibly imprinted in the minds of millions of Canadians, and which shocked 
    many others worldwide.
    
    The difficulty with Warren's framing of gendercide, though -- and this is 
    true for the feminist analysis of gender-selective human-rights abuses as a 
    whole -- is that the inclusive definition is not matched by an inclusive 
    analysis of the mass killing of non-combatant men. Gendercide Watch was 
    founded to encourage just such an inclusive approach. We believe that 
    state-directed gender-selective mass killings have overwhelmingly targeted 
    men through history, and that this phenomenon is pervasive in the modern 
    world as well. Despite this prevalence of gendercide against males -- 
    especially younger, "battle-age" men -- the subject has received almost no 
    attention across a wide range of policy areas, humanitarian initiatives, and 
    academic disciplines. We at Gendercide Watch feel it is one of the great 
    taboos of the contemporary age, and must be ignored no longer.
    
    Accordingly, we offer case-study treatments of gendercide against men in 
    political, military, and ethnic conflicts over the last 
    century-and-a-quarter. If the case-studies numerically outweigh those of 
    mass killings of women in wars and other conflicts, this reflects our 
    conviction that men are, indeed, generally the victims of the most severe 
    gender-selective atrocities in such situations.
    
    Case-studies range from The Paraguayan War of 1864-70 to the gendercides in 
    Kosovo and East Timor in 1999. Other cases of gendercide against men include 
    the Indonesian genocide of 1965-66, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Jammu/Kashmir, Sri 
    Lanka, Burundi, Colombia, and Iraqi Kurdistan. We analyze little-known 
    gendercides such as the Nazi murder of 2.8 million Soviet prisoners-of-war 
    in just eight months of 1941-42 -- possibly the most concentrated mass 
    killing of any kind in human history. The ambiguous case of Stalin's Purges 
    in the USSR receives case-study treatment because of the sheer scale of the 
    gender-specific killing (tens of millions of men). It is harder to say 
    whether Stalin's mass murders were intentionally gender-selective, in the 
    manner of the Serbs in Kosovo or the Nazis in Occupied Russia. Should they 
    truly be considered acts of "gendercide"? Where such difficulties and 
    ambiguities arise, we will do our best to acknowledge them and open them for 
    discussion.
    
    As feminists have sought to move beyond traditional political-military 
    framings of conflict and violence, we seek also to understand institutions 
    rooted deep in human history that have consistently been "gendercidal" in 
    their impact on men. Four of these institutions have been discussed 
    alongside "non-traditional" institutions that overwhelmingly or exclusively 
    target women (maternal mortality, female infanticide, and rape/murder). For 
    men, the case-study institutions are: corvée (forced) labour, military 
    conscription, imprisonment/the death penalty, and violence against gays.
    
    Part of our educational brief is to encourage a re-examination of certain 
    "classic" cases of genocide through a gender-inclusive lens. Our case-study 
    of the Jewish holocaust, for example, points to little-appreciated but 
    strongly-gendered "phases" leading up to the eventual root-and-branch 
    extermination of European Jews. Similar trends are found in the Armenian 
    genocide of 1915-16 and the genocide against Rwandan Tutsis in 1994. In none 
    of these cases do we claim that the gendering of the atrocities was all (or 
    even primarily) one-way. Nor do we suggest that the gender dimension of the 
    Jewish holocaust, or the Armenian or Rwandan genocides, is the dominant or 
    most important dimension of these horrific events, which swept up all 
    sectors of the targeted populations. But policymakers, humanitarian workers, 
    and scholars of genocide have worked to identify reliable indicators of the 
    onset of genocide, as a means of intervening promptly and effectively to 
    suppress it. We feel the inclusive analysis of gender throws fresh and 
    important light on these global crises and issues. Our goal is a world that 
    is safer for women, men, and their children.
    
    =============================
    
    (end)
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