On refugees being cast as “invaders” and “fighting-age males”

In the UK as elsewhere, we’ve recently seen the far right orchestrate a campaign against refugees, presenting them as dangerous to women and girls and the vanguard of an invasion aimed at destroying Britain. Asylum seekers, forced by the goverment into hotels pending the examination of their claims, have found themselves surrounded by angry mobs, demanding their removal from the neigbourhood. In one wave of riots, a hotel was set on fire, and the occupants feared for their lives. Recently in Northern Ireland there was a violent pogrom against anyone with dark skin, where people were burnt out of their homes. Calls for violence against refugees spread on social media and the perpetrators, when punished for incitement, have been lauded as free-speech heroes. I’ve heard from black friends that verbal abuse and physical assaults have become more common.

A big part of the far-right narrative which is often picked up and repeated by mainstream journalists and politicians concerns the demographic character of those who arrive on small boats, the purported “invaders”, who are described as being overwhelmingly (even “all”) young men, and sometimes as being of “fighting age” or “military age”. Part of this story is a belief that “genuine” refugees would be overwhelmingly women and children, the most vulnerable, and that these are the kind of people who warrant humanitarian concern, if anyone does. There is a presumption, then, that young men are somehow illegitimate refugees, who do not deserve sanctuary but should be removed from the country as soon as possible.

This prejudice against young male refugees is directly contrary to what even a short period of reflection and an examination of the facts would produce. In conflict after conflict, the story is the same. When a town or a city is conquered by one side or another, the first thing they do is to separate the young men (those of “fighting age”) and kill them. It is what happened in Srebrenica in 1995 where around 8000 men and boys were murdered. In the current conflict in Sudan, from whence many refugees arrive in the UK, militias have been rounding up all the males over the age of ten and killing them (before raping the women), as Nicholas Kristof reports.

It is terrible to be in danger of murder by your ethnic or political opponents, but this is hardly the only risk faced by men and boys. You are also liable to be coerced into joining a militia yourself, to become a solder, even a child soldier. If you join a militia because you have little choice but to do so, then you may well find yourself a perpetrator and a war criminal rather than a victim.

Putting oneself in the position of a responsible parent of a young man or boy in a conflict zone, then, the best way to care for your child might well be to find a way for them to flee beyong the borders to a place of safety. That way, they will be less likely to be murdered or forcibly conscripted. To get them out may well require the expensive services of the people smugglers so demonized by Western goverments and the journey may be somewhat dangerous itself, but your child will be better off that if they had remained in place.

The characterization of young men as invaders and sexual threats when they are overwhelmingly victims is, in a sense, a kind of admission by the far right of what they consider the essential nature of men to be. They promote a cult of masculinity and aggression themselves, and of men as both the “protectors” but also the owners of women and girls. They cast men fleeing persecution as potential rapists, but what they actually seem to be concerned about is not the safety of people they care about but the appropriation of what belongs to them by nature. The notion of men as victims, and as legitimate escapees from murder and violence, just does not fit with their view of the world.