Understanding global security - Peter Hough

SOCIAL IDENTITY AS A THREAT TO SECURITY
overpopulation has prompted government measures to restrict the number of
children per family. Although the scale of this phenomenon is uncertain, and the
ethics of killing unborn infants unproblematic for many, it is clear that hundreds of
thousands of female lives are not lived every year as a result. Rummel is unequivocal
in ranking this phenomenon alongside other, better-recognized human security
threats.
the accumulation of such officially sanctioned or demanded murders comprises,
in effect, serial massacre. Since such practices were so pervasive in
some cultures, I suspect that the death toll from infanticide must exceed that
from mass sacrifice and perhaps even outright mass murder.
(Rummel 1994: 65–66)
Baby girls in a number of countries are frequently murdered soon after birth,
usually by starvation or wilful neglect when ill, while ultrasound scans of pregnant
women also make gender-based abortions increasingly common. In China, where
families with more than one child are strongly ‘discouraged’, the 2002 population
census revealed a sex imbalance of 116 males to every 100 females. The disparity
was as high as 135 to 100 on the island of Hainan (Gittings 2002). The Chinese government’s
alarm at the social effects of such an imbalance prompted them to restrict the
availability of ultrasound scans, meaning that infanticide must now be the major
explanation for the disparity.
The fact that an individual’s sex can be the source of their insecurity cannot
be seen more clearly than in them being fatally discriminated against before even
being able to live their life. During a woman’s lifetime, sex-based domestic violence
remains a significant threat. It has been estimated that half of the women in the world
who are murdered are killed by male partners (Krug et al. 2002). The inaccuracy of
the conventional externalizing of security threats is never more apparent than in this
instance, where the threat comes not only from within the individual’s own country
but from within her own, immediate family.
It is important to note, however, that the victims of ‘gendercide’ are not always
women. In both inter-state and intra-state war the systematic culling of men ‘of
fighting age’ among enemy non-combatants has long been a military tactic. The mass
killing of potential soldiers was a feature of the early German campaign in the USSR
in the Second World War and was evident in the Serb massacres of Kosovar Albanians
in the run-up and duration of the 1999 Kosovan War (Jones 2000). Additionally, it
is males who form the bulk of war casualties, as they do of criminal murders and
industrial accidents. It is a paradox of human life that it is far safer to be born a boy
but grow up as a woman.
Sexual orientation
Aside from nationality, ethnicity, religion and gender, a further form of identity
subject to life-threatening discrimination is homosexuality. Many people have been
killed and continue to be killed purely on the grounds that they practise consensual
sexual activities with other people of the same sex. Homosexuals were targeted
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