Women and children are most often the fatal victims of air bombardments and other explosive weapons in the four-year Syrian war that has killed roughly 80,000 civilians, according to study results released Tuesday.
Researchers at the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters at Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium say that while men make up the overall majority of civilians killed in the war, nearly 25 percent of all civilians killed by explosive weapons were women and children.
Children are most likely to be killed by shells and ground-level explosives in Syria — more so than men, according to the study, which was published Tuesday in the British Medical Journal.
“Our analysis indicates that using explosive weapons in populated areas in Syria has disproportionately lethal effects on women and children and should be urgently prohibited,” the authors wrote. “If we are looking for root causes of the migrant and refugee crises in Europe today, this is surely a major contributor.”
The researchers, led by epidemiologist Debarati Guha-Sapir, wanted to know how many Syrian civilians have been killed by the war, as well as their demographics and how they were killed.
Knowing whether women and children have been targeted, or how civilians have died, can clarify whether human rights have been violated. But such a protracted conflict as the Syrian war makes it difficult to track fatalities, and epidemiologists say that detailed breakdowns of the weapons used to kill people during war aren’t often studied.
In Syria, rumors of chemical weapons use have dogged the government of President Bashar al-Assad as it battles insurgent groups, and deadly barrel bombs dropped by the Syrian army on opposition-held regions have driven civilians into neighboring countries in recent months.
So the researchers honed in on data gathered by the Center for Documentation of Violations in Syria (VDC), one of four groups whose tally of fatalities helped form a comprehensive 2014 U.N. report that said more than 191,000 people had been killed in Syria between March 2011 and April 2014. (PDF)
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http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/9/29/25-percent-of-syrian-war-deaths-women-children.htmlMisleading headline, but the study itself is of interest. Why so few? Comparatively speaking, I mean. One would expect the ratio to be roughly 1/3 women, 1/3 children and 1/3 men when looking at civilian deaths by indiscriminate destructive systems such as explosives.
Social factors may play a part - women stay indoors more (especially in ISIS controlled territory) so are more protected?
