That is the message the media gives by ignoring the 10,000 boys kidnapped by Boko Haram to be tortured and trained as Jihadists, as well as the untold thousands more they have murdered by burning them to death. Yes, that’s right, they burn little children to death, but you probably know Boko Haram only as those guys who kidnap schoolgirls. By now, you have probably skipped through a near-relentless stream of articles claiming that these evil people specifically hate girls and don’t want them, and them alone, to be educated. Which is a really funny way of saying that they mainly murder and kidnap little boys while just letting the girls go. Though that isn’t to say that the media won’t report on murdered men and boys, as long as they can be discretely included in a large random massacre, or quietly stepped over by speaking as if women were targets of the attack as well.
The Public Focus Is Only On The Girls
Almost every article, book, and news report about Boko Haram is actually about the 200 kidnapped kids who happen to be girls – it ignores the boys entirely, and that is shameful. Even articles talking about the terrorists themselves will simply label them bad men and, even then, focus more on the women and girls who have joined (or been forced to join) Boko as suicide bombers. Not the majority who are male. We need to address the women too, of course, but to do so at the expense of those 10,000 boys is to ignore the main issue.
It is very easy to tell how much people care about a crisis, and it’s victims, from the tone and urgency with which it is reported… or not reported. Articles decrying the taking of the 200 girls as a great tragedy of the age report the case with an level of high-octane emotion justifying the crime. But that emotion is conspicuously absent when it comes to reports about the 10,000 boys, which tend to be clinical and calm in tone and rarely report harrowing personal stories (such as this one). The Wall Street Journal article (linked above) asking where the coverage is for the boys almost blandly informs people about this faceless group of murderers, who have been steadily abducting boys to use as slaves and canon fodder. These are all very good reasons will never see Michelle Obama holding up a board saying #BringBackOurBoys, or see the President of America sending hundreds of soldiers to try and take them back. But all of these things are just symptoms of a far darker and more insidious problem.
They Just Don’t Care.
The fact is that both genders simply have more empathy for girls and women than they do for boys, and this has been proven by multiple studies. This lack of empathy is why both genders think it funny when a man is mutilated, but utterly horrific when a woman is mutilated. Which in turn helps to explain why FGM is illegal but Male Genital Mutilation is perfectly wonderful. It is why society is so very ready and very willing to sacrifice men for the personal gain of society in general and women in particular, and why more and more studies show both genders are more comfortable with violence towards men. It is why the Washington Post is comfortable to ask outright if it’s not okay to just fully hate men, and admit it. All of these facts jar with our public narratives. They point not towards the systematic ‘Patriarchal Oppression’ of women, but a system where both genders show extreme care and support towards females – and it is simply expected.
To put it very bluntly – men love women, and women agree that they should be loved.
Men die for everyone, especially women – and we not only glorify and expect that sacrifice, we used to kill people (i.e. literally just men) if they refused to do it. This is why nobody seems to care that more boys were murdered than girls were kidnapped just during the famous Boko Haram attack where the 200 girls were taken. Most people just can’t summon as much empathy for a dead child if that child turns out to be male. Especially not if that boy might already be half-way towards being one of Boko Haram’s killers.
Something Needs To Be Done About The Boys. Right Now.
We are fighting a lack of sympathy that seems built into our very genetics as a species. We are facing a real battle. We are about to try and convince the media, and the world, that boys must be cared for as well. Not even when governments pledge to end Boko Haram are any provisions made for rescuing the boys. As far as the world is concerned, those boys don’t even exist – or joined voluntarily. Yet they are victims too.
But we at Men Are Human are ready for the fight. We are willing to wade in. Are you?
We need the personal stories of men and boys in crisis. We need to spread them to the world and train the world in empathy for boys and men. Not just girls. So we are making this the number one personal plea of this website: We Need You To Speak Out. And we can help you do it. Spread the word about this issue. Share this article if you can, and tell us your story on our forums so we can help to change the world.
Thank you for reading.
A simple Google search will show that this story was covered on WTTW, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, PBS, Vanity Fair, The Irish Times, Pulitzer Center, UNICEF, the Economist, Christian Today, NPR National Geographic, and many more media outlets.
Of course there are some, and what are the names of those articles? The forgotten boys. What about the 10,000? we cite some of them. It saw brief coverage, and then vanished just as quick. There was no major campaign – not like with the girls, who were in 5he papers every day for months. It does crop back up occasion, and many of those articles are more recent than this one. That’s the point. The boys are worse off, but the girls get all the coverage. The 10,000 are still not common knowledge.