Their framing of the 1ac impact as universal invisibilizes gender as a structuring logic of conflict and violence which makes their impacts inevitable

Research in the social sciences on violence that is not identified as “gendered” often falls into the bracket of “mainstream” violence research. Such research focuses chiefly on incidences involving boys/men, although this may not be acknowledged forthrightly in these analyses, and a systematic structural gender analysis is commonly missing from mainstream violence research. The de-emphasis on gender in such research occurs in the context of patriarchal gender systems in which researchers are invariably situated. Empirically, it is quite clear that violence is a highly gendered social occurrence, so feminist explanations provide context for the continued discounting of its centrality in core explanations. The gendered nature of violence is identifiable “through perpetrators’ characteristics, their decision-making, and its effects,” as Kaiser and Hagan (2015, p. 79) noted in a study on genocide in Darfur, wherein they concluded that all studies of such offenses should consider gender. Given that research focusing on the violence of boys/men is largely constitutive of “mainstream” social science inquiries into violence, the absence of a systematic structural gender analysis is both endemic and largely unacknowledged, a theoretical shortcoming that is aided by multiple conventions within the social sciences. Beyond the segregation of topics on women, gender, and “gendered” violence into specialized subareas, these conventions include the overrepresentation of men as research subjects in violence research without categorizing such research as specialized, the absence of identifiers for men in research that is presented as the study of people, and underpinnings of gender essentializing based on largely unspoken presumptions of biological determinism. These latter points collectively lend themselves to the discounting of men as gendered actors, and to the interpretation of social life, culture, and social structure through a shallow understanding of gendered processes when men, especially, are studied. Multiple studies have found that girls/women are underrepresented in samples used in criminological assessments in both sociology and criminology journals (Hannon & Dufour, 1998; Hughes, 2005; Sharp & Hefley, 2007). That men commit more violence than women traditionally justified the tendency to focus research and theoretical development on men (Britton, 2000; Hannon & Dufour, 1998), yet this reasoning is inconsistent with general principles of social science methodology where comparison is the foundation of social inquiry. “When researchers sample only men because men commit more crime,” Hannon and Dufour (1998) noted, “they are often sampling around the dependent variable by excluding a group known to be disproportionately located on one side of the mean” (p. 64). Significant differences in the perpetration of violence based on gender should justify more research focusing on women and gender, not less, given that social conditions and expectations for women provide a contradistinction to 1100 Violence Against Women 29(5) men worth exploring as scholars theorize on the cultur men worth exploring as scholars theorize on the cultural and structural (rather than individual or pathological) roots of violence. Additionally, the theoretical shortcomings associated with oversampling men are compounded by the tendency in scholarship to reference studies conducted on men as representing the proclivities, conditions, and opportunities of all people. Hannon and Dufour (1998) found that about 90% of articles with samples of boys/men overgeneralized in their title for both time periods. When the sample was comprised of women, the title reflected the sample composition in all cases except one, indicating the tendency to include identifiers for samples of women. Contemporary scholarship often builds upon a scaffold of overgeneralized research presented as research about human conditions and behaviors. In a similar manner, societal and historical harms largely perpetrated by men are often discussed in nongendered terms, allowing for the neglect of gendered perspectives in assessments of these social occurrences. For example, Chief Executive Officers of the transatlantic investment banking system who contributed to the 2008 global economic crisis played a role in “inflicting endemic and catastrophic levels of systemic violence upon the global population at large” (Ellis & Wykes, 2013, p. 85). Although a group largely consisting of men inflicted tremendous harm, these acts are not typically conceptualized as a form of men’s violence, demonstrating “the massive falsification of consciousness that patriarchy [and capital hegemony] continues to purvey” (Ellis & Wykes, 2013, p. 85). With respect to climate change, Cuomo (2011) observed that “the implication that humans as a species have caused climate change” is misleading and obscures the “people and particular cultures, nations, industries, and economic systems” (p. 697) overwhelmingly responsible for these environmental impacts. “Men, primarily wealthier heterosexual white men from the global North,” wrote Wonders and Danner (2015) “have disproportionate influence over decisions shaping the causes, consequences, and responses to climate change through their domination of economic and political decisionmaking” (p. 403). Universalizing responsibility for social issues such as climate change detracts from an acknowledgment of the systems and groups primarily responsible for these global harms that disproportionately impact women and other vulnerable populations (Wonders & Danner, 2015). With respect to mass atrocities such as genocide, Nyseth Brehm et al. (2016) observed that the de-emphasis of social characteristics such as gender is common in the literature, which often focuses on men but does not analyze gender. Talking about men in general terms not only treats the exclusion of women as nonsignificant, but also renders men as a social group invisible. When it comes to violence, women’s gender is more likely than the gender of men to be marked as a factor in their collective behaviors or experiences. Because men are treated as “generalized people,” their behaviors/social conditions are implicitly framed as nongendered. Women are identified and separated out, and thus become the group that “needs to be explained” through a gendered analysis. By failing to explicitly equate gender with boys/men and their behaviors, numerous researchers fail to incorporate a meaningful gender analysis in their work (for a detailed discussion, see Ellis & Wykes, 2013). When scholars include gender in their assessments, the treatment is often shallow, such that it does not capture the extent to which gender structures social life. In an analysis of over 300 pieces in three of the most highly ranked journals in criminology, Sharp and Hefley (2007) found that nearly 85% of the articles either ignored gender, focused solely on men, or simply controlled for gender in the analysis. Similarly, in Davies and True’s (2015) analysis of research on conflict-related sexual violence, they argued that such studies “unintentionally compartmentalize gender, often treating it as a single, isolable variable,” and in doing so, “neglect the volume of feminist research that reveals that gender cannot be disaggregated from instrumentality and political violence” (p. 496). Although research on conflict-related sexual violence has been consequential in reconceptualizing these acts as mass atrocity crimes and as political in nature, the research also ignores the centrality of gender in explaining this class of violence, rendering theoretical explanations, and thus policy responses incomplete (Davies & True, 2015).5