In this “Conversation with Authors,” we spoke with APSR author Anne-Kathrin Kreft about her open access article, co-authored with Mattias Agerberg,“Imperfect Victims? Civilian Men, Vulnerability, and Policy Preferences.”

APSR: The first question is two-fold. Where did you get the inspiration for this paper? How did this co-authorship come about?

Anne-Kathrin Kreft: In terms of co-authoring, Mattias and I were both members of the same PhD. cohort at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, and we both had an interest in issues of gender and politics. I was working more in the area of conflict, and he works more on corruption. That’s when we first started talking about different ideas and realized, okay, let’s just collaborate. This paper is our third collaboration. It builds on one of our previous projects where we looked at public perceptions of conflict-related sexual violence, how people perceive the victims of sexual violence, and to what extent they support intervention.

APSR:  So, the inspiration for this paper came from prior collaboration?

Anne-Kathrin Kreft: Yes. I’ll also add that I wrote my dissertation on sexual violence against women. Many times, when I presented that work, I got the question: “But what about men? Men are also victims of violence.” That was the initial impetus motivating me to think “Okay, let’s write a paper about men.”

APSR: What did you find most difficult in researching or writing about the misperceptions of male victimization?

Anne-Kathrin Kreft: Having worked on sexual violence and conflict before, I was, of course, used to working with difficult material: you read a lot about victimization of civilians, how this violence affects people, and the suffering involved. It’s still really depressing, and eye-opening, to engage in-depth with the literature on men’s vulnerability in war. The qualitative literature on the humanitarian response to conflict, in particular, is quite difficult because it shows how men are frequently neglected in these responses. Both in the humanitarian response and in news coverage of war, there tends to be a major focus on women, on women’s victimization and on the need to empower women. The men in these conflicts fall between the cracks, which to me was really shocking to read about. That was, I would say, one of the challenging things in researching and writing this article.

The other challenging part, which is, of course, related, is that we are concerned with the victimization of men in this paper, but we also don’t want to diminish the vulnerability of women and the victimization of women in war. We don’t want to open ourselves up to other people instrumentalizing our argument for the purpose of saying “It’s not the women who are the victims, it is actually the men.” We try to be as balanced as possible in our writing for this paper to ensure that we don’t open ourselves up to this kind of instrumentalization. Men are victims in war; women are victims in war. In the aggregate, their victimization experiences differ, but it’s not an either/ or by any means.

APSR: What was the major thing that surprised, confounded, or excited you as you were conducting your research or writing the article?

Anne-Kathrin Kreft: Honestly, both Mattias and I agree that the entire process of research and publishing this paper was so straightforward. Mattias said it was the most straightforward paper we’ve ever written since we’ve been working on these topics in different ways in prior projects. Going in, we had ideas for the theory, from which it was quite easy to generate hypotheses. We are fortunate that we then found support for each of our hypotheses across different experiments. We were able to replicate our results across the two countries surveyed. In that sense, it is surprising in itself that we were able to find this clear indication of anti-male biases existing in how people perceive victims of conflict, particularly how people perceive men in war. This is an interesting finding but a real-life problem because we also observe the impact these biases have on policy preferences and policy implications.

I think one of the things that we found exciting was the more exploratory dimension in the project where we looked at providing more information about men in war in an attempt to correct misperceptions. What would happen if we informed people about the vulnerability of men, that men in war are often specifically targeted in massacres, that they’re even considered legitimate targets of violence? If we inform people of these realities, do they change their perceptions?

We find that they do! We find that when we tell people “Men are often specifically targeted in the most lethal forms of violence,” then our respondents are more likely to say, “Okay, we can take on male refugees, we can accept male refugees.” Our corrections were able to reduce anti-male bias.

Of course, this result was exciting and encouraging. It’s reassuring to know that gendered perceptions aren’t set in stone, and that when they aren’t based in reality, we can change them and update people’s priors. Merely by providing more information, we can change people’s biases. That was certainly one of the most exciting and encouraging aspects of this research.

APSR: You mention in the paper that this research could shed light on other gendered protection norms such as violent crime or natural disasters. Can you elaborate on this? How might your research speak to, for example, perceptions of mass shooting victims in the United States or survivors of natural disasters like earthquakes or wildfires?

Anne-Kathrin Kreft: Our suggestions for future research are motivated by the findings in the paper that people hold gendered protection norms in the context of armed conflict. Armed conflict is, of course, a messy situation where sometimes it’s not clear if someone is a perpetrator of violence, if they’re a member of an armed group, or if they’re truly a civilian. Because these uncertainties exist, and because most of the combatants in war are male, people have doubts about the innocence of men who are targeted and killed in war. We find support for this argument in our experiments: As soon as we mentioned that men are the victims, people were less likely to perceive these victims as innocent.

What if we apply the same logic to forms of violence that occur domestically that are also seen as predominately male-perpetrated violence? For example, gang violence is an area where men are typically, and in the awareness of the public, the ones who perpetrate the violence. Might we find similar patterns of anti-male bias against victims of gang violence?

What if we apply this argument to a context in which innocence is arguably less ambiguous, as in the case of a mass shooting, or in the case of an earthquake or other natural disaster? Men are not any more guilty than women are of a natural disaster occurring, right? If we test this context and still find that people are more likely to support interventions that benefit women, then we need to further explore what drives gendered protection norms besides gendered perceptions of innocence. To what extent is this dynamic about, for example, perceived self-sufficiency, agency, or perceived fragility of men and women? Generally, how our results may depend on a context of violence is an open question that I think it would be interesting to explore further.

APSR: As we’ve discussed, there are many options for future research in the paper. Do you have plans to expand this paper and theory further? Or is this an area that you’d like other scholars to take on?

Anne-Kathrin Kreft: For now, we do not have specific plans for further collaborations. I never say never, because in the past we’ve collaborated, taken time off, then went back to collaborating. We work well together, and we complement each other’s work. I bring more of the theoretical dimension to our work and Mattias has the in-depth methods skills.

As far as future work in this area, I am intrigued by what we just discussed. How do these norms and perceptions play out in the case of natural disasters? Are norms different when we have violence as opposed to when we have a natural disaster? I find these questions extremely fascinating, and maybe that’s something I will get back to down the line. At this point, there are no concrete plans to continue but it’s something that definitely still interests me.

Generally, if anyone is interested in men’s victimization in war and the humanitarian response to men who have escaped war zones, I would really encourage them to investigate the qualitative literature that I mentioned earlier. This literature is fascinating and would be a great place to start reading if anyone wants to know more about these topics.

– Anne-Kathrin Kreft, University of Oslo

– Mattias Agerberg, University of Gothenburg