And then there's war. The basic format, long established, continues to be mostly men being required to kill mostly other men. In 2009, the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo, published a report, Armed Conflict Deaths Disaggregated by Gender, which found that the number of men who are killed directly - that last word mattering - far outstrips the deaths of women. Women do die and suffer, of course, whether in acts of insurgency, or attacks, including rape, on the civilian population, or from secondary effects, such as diminished hygiene or healthcare. Men, meanwhile, combatants or no, are considered to be legitimate objects of violence. Just consider the values at play when the media reports on terrorist attacks with phrases such as '20 people were killed, including women and children'. Conscription in times of war has been almost exclusively of men, century after century, and only a small handful of countries, including North Korea, currently conscript women – this may go some way to explaining the IPRI’s findings. Is this bias because we collectively expect men to be good at violence, or because it is their cultural role to die?  The emphasis seems to remain on protecting women from harm, but men are afforded no such protection. On the Costa Concordia, as on the Titanic, women and children were evacuated first, reinforcing the convention that male life is less valuable, or secondary. Surely not every male on board was a family man, putting the safety of his partner and children before his own: some must have been men whose lives were deemed less important than those of the women leaving the ship merely because of their sex.  And yet the gender bias is never spoken of – but why? The fact that men commit violence more than women may be part of it – do we imagine that the higher death rates are somehow just deserts? This would only be true if those individuals committing the crimes also happened to be the victims, which we know is not the case – a glance through the list of victims includes a roll call of good Samaritans, unfortunate bystanders, police officers and so on. And in any case, what sort of callousness is it for a society to choose to let one of its constituent groups rip itself to bits, without questioning the reasons for the phenomenon?  If society is not to keep assuming it’s OK for men to get hurt and killed, we could do worse than start in the cinema. While Helen Mirren is calling for fewer women to be killed on film, it might be worth looking at the male body counts on display. Little attention is paid to the legions of male cops, soldiers, heavies and henchmen I’ve seen slaughtered, without my getting the impression that these deaths were intended to be any more than set dressing. If when I mentioned those categories, you thought anything like, "yes, but they’re the sort of people who are meant to die in films", we may have hit the core of this problem. Whilst voices are raised, periodically, against movie violence, that its victims tend overwhelmingly to be men never seems to get a mention. I’d encourage anyone interested to keep a tally, to learn what it is they are consuming.  When female stereotypes began to be dismantled, much of what was sloughed off were the outdated cultural assumptions. Although they had long behaved with subservience, as society required, women are not somehow biologically suited to subservience – this much we know. And if that is true, then perhaps men are not naturally predisposed to committing violence, much less to being condemned to suffer its effects.  Is there a concern that recognising that men have these dual, divergent roles in violence – that they are victims as well as perpetrators – risks taking the focus off women? It doesn’t have to, and indeed mustn’t. But compassion is not a zero sum game. Let’s say there are more male burglars than female ones: no-one suggests that police should not attend a break-in at a man’s house.  If we can start to understand that the ultimate distillation of male-on-male violence – male suicide – has causes that can be understood, and that some them are rooted in society’s perpetuation of ideas of what men are, we can perhaps begin to imagine that other facets of male violence – perpetration and victimhood – might similarly be understood as cultural constructs that can be dismantled, rather than as forces of nature. When it comes to male violence, focussing the attention exclusively on women is not merely to misunderstand the problem, but to miss the opportunity to start fixing the problem. No-one will be gladder to put a stop to male violence than men.  N Quentin Woolf’s novel The Death of the Poet is published by Serpent’s Tail
In focusing attention on the consequences women face from male-perpetrated   violence, have we missed a bigger issue, that the majority of victims of   violence are men?