In a once-sleepy Ukrainian village north of Kyiv, Mykola Moroz, nicknamed Kolia, answered his doorbell in the early months after Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion to find two Russian soldiers and their commander ready to take him into custody. As Kolia’s wife watched in horror, they put a bag over her husband’s head and dragged him from their doorstep. Days later, he was found with other unidentified men in an unmarked grave.
A PBS Frontline-Associated Press investigative report revealed that Kolia was targeted for execution because of a surveillance video on his cell phone that in fact was taken before the invasion and only related to his work as an electrician. It was just one example of the sham evidence that Russian troops have used to justify the killings of civilian men throughout the Russian-occupied Ukrainian territories. Today, stories of men like Kolia lay scattered in mass graves across small towns in eastern Ukraine — not an abnormality but rather almost standard operating procedure in war.
The same is true in war zones across the globe. The Costs of War project at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University estimated that there were 408,000 direct civilian deaths and as many as 4.3 million indirect civilian deaths from the post-9/11 wars. These are staggering numbers, and they have spurred myriad efforts to reduce civilian casualties. From the United Nations to Western capitals, the field of civilian-protection professionals has grown to encompass policymakers, humanitarians, and military personnel, all united by the shared goal of protecting civilians. Ensuring that civilians and their communities survive a conflict is both a moral imperative and a strategic necessity. Professionals in the protection field do this by analyzing the needs of vulnerable individuals or groups in a community and then developing the best approach to mitigate the risks they face.
Civilians generally classified as vulnerable during conflict are primarily women and children, with some attention focused on the elderly, disabled, and sexual minorities. However, there is one group that is frequently left out of the protection conversation: the vulnerable civilian male. It’s time to update this thinking and further adapt protection responses to respond to their lived realities on the ground.
It’s not common to discuss the needs of civilian men in conflict and may even strike some as strange or insulting to insinuate that they’re vulnerable. This comes from the way that gender representation on the battlefield builds internal bias about civilian males. In the modern lexicon, vulnerability is often conflated with weakness, and in most societies, men control the levers of power. Their relative number and strength can often make it easy to doubt that civilian men are vulnerable, even when they clearly are.
Conscription and Casualties
Research shows that from antiquity to the 20th century massacres of Kosovo, civilian men have been targeted for detention and forced conscription at far higher rates than their female counterparts. Men in conflict zones are frequently singled out for gender-based massacres or executions under the assumption that they are inherently capable of posing a threat to an armed actor.
While comprehensive data sets are hard to come by, a 2009 review from the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) in Norway, surveyed seven sets of casualty data disaggregated by gender. From their analysis, the researchers concluded that “men die more frequently than women in direct armed conflicts.” However not all of the data sets reviewed fully disaggregated combatant and civilian casualties to isolate the experience of male civilians, leaving some ambiguity in their findings regarding the vulnerability of the civilian male in contrast to male combatants. This is remedied in more recent work from the Action on Armed Violence’s 2019 review of available data. Within the data combatant and civilian deaths from explosive weapons was clearly disaggregated to reveal that male casualties constituted between 78 percent and 90 percent of the total civilian casualties reported across all six datasets reviewed. This led researchers to conclude that “male civilians were significantly more likely to become casualties of explosive weapons than female civilians,” supporting and strengthening the trend identified in the Oslo report.
Men also frequently face conflict-related sexual violence, which is often weaponized as a form of torture in detention. While such sexual violence against women is increasingly documented to improve response efforts, similar atrocities against men are not. In their 2022 report on humanitarian response to victims of conflict-related sexual violence, the International Committee on the Red Cross and the Norwegian Red Cross found that many “humanitarian agencies completely overlook” male victims and fail to provide them with effective medical or mental health interventions.
Sadly, these trends are alive and well on many contemporary battlefields. Across Sudan’s western region of Darfur, a Reuters special report in December 2023 detailed the testimony of Masalit women, which revealed the selective and mass killings of their male children and adult male family members by the Rapid Support Forces and allied Arab militias. In Ukraine, a 2024 report from the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights estimated that at least 60 percent of all civilian deaths are male. Additionally, Ukraine’s Deputy Prosecutor General has confirmed that 37 percent of the victims in documented cases of sexual violence by Russian troops are male.
Clearly, the research shows that civilian men face significant and distinct risks during conflict, so why aren’t civilian men generally considered vulnerable in conflict zones? The answer lies in human bias.
Understanding the Gender Battlefield Bias
Historically, societies generally (with some exceptions) have distinguished people in the battlespace between men who fight and women and children who do not. With the development of international humanitarian law (also known as the law of armed conflict or the law of war), the international community sought to formally distinguish between civilians and combatants. International treaties protect “people who are not taking part in the hostilities, including civilians, health workers and aid workers, and those who are no longer participating, such as wounded, sick and shipwrecked soldiers and prisoners of war.” Men still constitute the majority of combatants across the globe, and thousands of years of associating combat with men has generated an inherent bias against the concept of male vulnerability within society. So, while women and children are historically conceptualized socially as vulnerable civilians, men are not.
In my research, I define this bias as the gender battlefield bias — an assumption that all men are both inherently belligerent and capable of their own protection in conflict zones. The effect of this kind of bias on Western populations can be seen in a 2023 study from researchers at the University of Oslo in Norway and the University of Gothenburg in Sweden on individual bias against civilian men in humanitarian settings and conflict zones. In their work, the researchers consistently found that the majority of evaluated respondents from the United States and the U.K. viewed civilian males as less likely to be victimized, less innocent, and less deserving of humanitarian aid.
This study helps crystalize what protection experts instinctively know: bias against civilian men stands in the way of recognizing and acknowledging male vulnerabilities in conflict zones. When actors ranging from national militaries to international NGOs fail to acknowledge the existence of the gender battlefield bias in their work, it prevents them from effectively and consistently including male vulnerabilities in their protection analysis. This creates an unstable premise that harms protection efforts in three distinct ways.
First, it undermines the ability to accurately advocate for civilians in conflict zones. In her 2005 paper on gender essentialisms and the protection of civilians, University of Massachusetts-Amherst Professor Charli Carpenter outlined how protection-based advocacy frequently uses references to “women and children” as shorthand for all vulnerable groups, omitting the needs of men. While this rhetoric can be hard to see at first, examining current protection reports shows us that this advocacy shorthand is still alive and well.
A recent example is the civilian casualty counts in a press release for their August 2024 report by the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) — an organization that has commendably borne witness to the continual suffering of Syrian civilians through all phases of the recently ended Syrian civil war. Their effective data gathering has made them a primary source for many international organizations monitoring civilian harm in Syria. The press release for the August 2024 report, similarly to many reports across the field, provides an accompanying graphic that gives a detailed breakdown of civilian casualties – but only for women and children, repeatedly omitting the mention of men or males. For example, the press release states:
The report documents the killing of 65 civilians, including 23 children and three women (adult female), in July 2024 at the hands of the parties to the conflict and controlling forces. Of the 65 civilians killed during this month, eight civilians, including two children, were killed by Syrian regime forces, while Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) killed two civilians. The report adds that the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) killed four civilians, including two children and one woman, while the US-led International Coalition forces killed one child. Finally, 50 civilians, including 18 children and two women, were killed by other parties, including 12 children who were killed by the Lebanese group Hezbollah.
Even in reference to cases of torture in detention, which presumably included at least some men, if not all, the press release uses the term “people,” seemingly at pains to avoid mentioning “men” or “males”:
On the subject of deaths due to torture, the report reveals that six people were documented as dying due to torture in Syria, in July 2024. Of these victims, four died due to torture at the hands of by Syrian regime forces, while two died due to torture at the hands of [the militia group Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham] HTS.
Advocacy that depends on this rhetorical shorthand fails to encompass the protection needs of all members of the community, regardless of gender, and perpetuates inaccurate narratives of gendered vulnerability to the international community and its decision-makers. When this form of bias leads individual professionals or organizations with responsibility for protecting civilians to assume civilian men are capable of their own protection in conflict zones, it also undermines the ability to build effective protective programming by failing to collect comprehensive data on protection risks for men. For example, a 2020 report by the All Survivors Project found that, while guidance on international protection policy increasingly recognizes the need to support male survivors of conflict-related sexual violence, data on related interventions is not disaggregated by gender, which leads to a lack of prioritization of male needs in programming. Intuitively, this makes sense — good programming needs to be built upon good data. But without prioritizing data that specifically focuses on better outlining protection needs for men, it’s not possible to create effective programming to address all aspects of their vulnerability.
Finally, the gender battlefield bias can result in policy decisions that put men in danger. Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine offers an example. For almost 3 years, the Ukrainian government’s travel ban has prevented men between the ages of 18 to 60 who qualify for conscription from leaving the country. While national conscription is legal, limiting the freedom of movement for Ukrainian men separates them from their families who have fled, limits their access to economic opportunities, forces them to stay in regions with high levels of humanitarian need, and leaves them vulnerable to Russian forces. Policies like this are built on the assumption that men can protect themselves in conflict zones, and such practices unintentionally result in increased risks that could become civilian casualties.
Overcoming the Bias
To dismantle the gender battlefield bias, it will be necessary to continue developing and implementing relevant protection programs and build on their successes. For example, a collaboration by several organizations to understand barriers to mental health services for male survivors of conflict-related sexual violence in Ukraine should be used as a building block for protection programming. It is only by funding, implementing, and then building on successful initiatives that those responsible for protecting civilians can work effectively to dismantle the gender battlefield bias worldwide.
For many, overcoming gender battlefield bias will be difficult in a time of ever-widening violent conflict in which civilian-protection needs have already outpaced the resources pledged. Many advocates for women and children may worry that focusing on male vulnerabilities in conflict zones will eclipse or detract from the urgent needs of women and children. While this concern is understandable, such a hypothetical is antithetical to the goal of community protection. Integrating analysis and programming on male vulnerabilities in conflict zones should not be done in a way that takes the focus away from women and children, but rather recognizes the vulnerability of men as a fundamental aspect of a comprehensive community protection strategy. Civilian-protection needs are interconnected, and by deconstructing this bias and integrating the lived reality of male civilians on the ground, the protection field can truly prioritize the protection of every member of a community.