You might remember the "#BringOurGirlsBack" campaign in 2014.
Boko Haram had kidnapped 300 young schoolgirls from a city called Chibok, located in a local goverment area also called Chibok in Nigeria. This story went viral, causing protests globally.
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Politicans and celebrities made use of the opportuinity as well.
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In the end, there was enough attention on the whole ordeal that .. well, read for yourself.
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That's nice and all, US military intervening to rescue children out of the clutches of a terrorist group, but the same group has been kidnapping boys for years and continued to do so after this incident as well. The number of boys kidnapped in the years following this incident was >10000. Seems they have more need for boy soldiers than they have for young girls.
In addition, shortly before this incident, again, a number of boys in the thousands had been killed, many of them burned alive, when Boko Haram set fire to schools in the area. In general, it seems that they
let the girls in the schools they targeted leave unharmed most of the times.
It's almost as if pro-female bias is some innate feature of human nature and can be found in any place and most groups around the world. Even
child-killing terrorists feel the need to practice some chivalary. They must have felt pretty virtuous making sure no innocent
girls would come to harm.
Well, except in those cases where they did harm them, but the point still stands. They conciously expanded real effort to protect at least some girls out of some moral concerns that did not apply to the killing/kidnapping of young boys.
The point I'm trying to make here:
All those mentally well-adjusted citizens you interact with every day carry within them some of that same pro-female bias. As a collective, they have enormous amounts of power to affect positive change in the world. And the idea of 300 young girls being abducted was enough to
unite them under a cause. Tens of thousands of boys being abducted and killed was not.
It's not like these people don't care about boys at all. Just, not quite as much. Not enough to elicit some real outrage in them. And about grown men they care even less. About us they might honestly not care at all.
Imagine being one of those boys being burned alive. Imagine if they could see these same terrorists who are about to kill them politely lead a group of girls out of another school to safety. Feel some of the anger this
unfairness demands.
So, while the average citizen might not be "out to get us", many of them will also have zero interest in helping us. Us dying would not be enough to trigger a strong emotional response in them. Even if we were completly innocent. And children. And being set on fire.
So, the difference between these normal people and the mental case saying to us "You don't need a girlfriend, you need to die" is the gap between active sadism and passive indifference.
Obviously most people would not let a boy die if it was withing their power to safe him. They wouldn't want to think of themselves as child murders and they also wouldn't want to be seen that way by others. But if those two pressures abate our misery on it's own is not enough to motivate them into action. Not all of them. Not a majority. Not enough to make waves in the public concious.
