On the occasion of Remembrance Day in grade six and as my classmates and I cut small poppies out of red construction paper, we learned about the brave young Canadian men who died fighting for our freedom and were laid to rest in Flanders Field. A striking memory of this history lesson was that I secretly congratulated myself for being a girl. If I ever found myself in the midst of a war, it was the boys who would have to fight. A narrow escape from a dreadful fate!

R. Charli Carpenter's Innocent Women and Children is a poignant investigation into how local and global norms on civilian protection are gendered. While this in itself is not a new contribution to the study of international relations, Carpenter uniquely extends her analysis to focus on a particular group of civilians made vulnerable because of gender essentialisms, civilian men, a group little studied by gender experts.

According to Carpenter, gender essentialisms reproduced in the “civilian protection regime” strongly associate all women, children, and the elderly as innocent, vulnerable bystanders. All men, on the other hand, are associated as combatants. In practice, such global gender norms “legitimize belligerent's sex-selective targeting of men and boys” (p. 89) during wartime, and justify nonhumanitarian intervention when sex-selective massacres occur. In effect, men of combat age are the first to be targeted in times of war, and yet humanitarian action to protect civilians is more likely to be taken only when women and children are involved.

To illustrate her argument, Carpenter critically examines the discourses of UN bodies and transnational advocates for enforcement of the civilian protection regime, finding few to no references to “innocent men” but a plethora of appeals for urgent actions based on the terminology “innocent women and children.” Through her careful analysis of international legal documents and statements, we see how the slaughter of women and children—real or fictionalized— is often used by international actors to justify humanitarian intervention. For instance, the targeting of women and children by Serb forces in Kosovo was frequently evoked by humanitarian bodies, the media, and activists to justify the NATO-led humanitarian intervention in 1999. In contrast, gender essentialisms also function as an excuse for nonaction, such as in Rwanda in 1994 when the United States and other major powers avoided using any reference to women and children, let alone to the term “genocide.”

To explore the role of gender norms at the level of the practical, Carpenter turns to an in-depth case study of Srebrenica, where seven thousand men were executed by the Bosnian Serb Army (BSA) after the fall of the enclave in 1993. Despite the fact that civilian men were suspected of being combatants by the BSA and therefore would most likely to be targeted for execution, humanitarian actors evacuated only women, children, and the elderly. Carpenter suggests that belligerents forbid humanitarians from evacuating men of combat age, and the humanitarian actors—although aware of what may happen to the men—are unwilling and unable to extend them protection. She interviewed humanitarian workers who had worked in Srebrenica during the evacuation and found they were aware of these biases and what may happen to men. However, most reported being totally restricted by the demands of belligerents. The BSA threatened to stop convoys of women and children if men were found on board. Despite this, the author still feels that gender essentialisms guided some aspect of their decision making.

While Carpenter convincingly presents the case that men are more likely be targeted first for killing (as are women for other gender-related harms), her argument that men are not the majority of total combatants is less so. Of course not all men are combatants, and some women are. But I was not convinced that men and women are equally engaged in combat the majority of the time. Her intention is to trouble gender essentialisms, but the fact that sex is one of the greatest indicators of one's role in conflict remains unchallenged by the book. Whether norms create this reality, or the reality fuels the norm, is not resolved.

Other doubts crept in. If it is the case that intervention is more likely to occur when women and children are considered to be the greatest targets of killing, what happened in northern Uganda where the majority of combatants in that region's 20-year-old conflict were children abducted from their homes and killed en masse by the Ugandan forces and rebel groups? Despite an enormous effort by transnational advocates and attention inside the UN, intervention was not forthcoming. To what degree does gender essentialism affect decisions to intervene over (or more likely in relation to) other determining factors, such as economics, politics, race? Missing from Carpenter is an examination of the overlapping and intersecting roles of multiple social constructions. Not only is violence against women in war time somehow constructed as “more atrocious” than that committed against men, but even more complex hierarchies count in far greater ways that determine intervention and nonintervention.

Still, as Carpenter fairly claims, Innocent Women and Children is meant to “scratch the surface” (p. 167) of investigation into how gender essentialisms have affected the actual protection of civilians, particularly a group that to date has been considered gender neutral, men. Her book is a significant contribution in this regard, and is certain to stimulate critical reflection on scholarship.

The book is also a useful contribution for humanitarian practitioners, though perhaps shy of recommendations on what, exactly, a humanitarian should do when facing belligerents who are not exactly fond of international principles. Some 30 years after cutting out poppies and being thrilled I was a girl who would not have to go to war, I was housed for seven days at a military outpost near the border of the Congo, surrounded by members of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) and the Sudanese People's Liberation Army. While officially part of an observer team to the peace talks ongoing in the region, I side-barred to help a humanitarian agency negotiate the release of women and children being held “in captivity.” The LRA presented us with 105 women and children so that we could see they were in good heath, but refused their release. We appealed to them on humanitarian grounds. One local woman came along and appealed to them as a mother. The LRA did not budge: They were a “family” and their “wives” and children would remain with them. In the meantime, our “guards” were young, male youths carrying AK rifles and empty stares. We did not bring up the subject with their senior commanders that they had been abducted at a young age. We knew they would never release them. But we also did not raise the fact that their “wives” were also abducted, and being raped, technically, by them. Instead, we used the term “innocent.”

Would a more impartial and principled approach suggested by Carpenter have made a difference?