It's about the difference between acknowledging in research and acknowledging publicly in mass media to actually raise support for male victims world wide.
First, that's a political goal that several groups (HRW among them) already perform.
Second, let's break something down from that article you picked out:
I do not pretend to have read every word of every article posted these sources -- far from it. Rather, I was confident that I could zero in on a sufficiently wide range of material to generate some propositions about the coverage of events within war-torn Kosovo. The task was made easier by print and electronic media's "pegging" of content through headlines. Many of the claims made here pertain to media "focus," which in such a news culture I see as reducible to the headline and "lead," that is, the opening paragraphs of the standardized news story. (These opening paragraphs are ever more important, as news is chopped into smaller bits for the benefit of advertisers and, allegedly, readers with low attention spans.)
Although the article does not operationalize its arguments via a formal content analysis, it is my belief that the vocabulary and frameworks presented here will be useful in developing more statistically-based and methodologically-rigorous studies of this type. In a late section of the paper, I also explore some of the more accurate and responsible media coverage of male victimization in the Kosovo conflict.
Translation: this a qualitative, subjective exercise that makes the case for there being a potential problem worthy of actual rigorous analysis to be done in the future [by someone else].
The authors conclusions may or may not be valid; however, on the basis of his methodology, which did not use a representative sampling of media coverage, he can't actually draw meaningful conclusions. It's called selective sampling, and while it's valid to make a case for further research (as he has partially done), it's not a valid method of conducting a rigorous analysis from which meaningful conclusions can be drawn.
It's like if I tried to argue that games represent women as three-dimensional characters, and selected Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Tomb Raider (reboot), Bioshock Infinite, and Metroid as the examples from which I draw conclusions. I might be able to effectively argue that there is some indication the games industry is creating three-dimensional female characters that bears further study, but I can't argue that it is a meaningful or widespread phenomenon in the industry.
Or, in a shorter and quipped version:
absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.Now, is gender-based crime against men covered by media in the same way as it is against women? Likely not. Is that fair? Not particularly. Is the problem ignored? No. Although media often emphasize sexualized violence against women, violence and crime against
people is the measure against which international intervention and assistance is balanced concerning violence. It's also worth noting that, particularly in the developing world, targeted aid measures toward female health and education has been shown to raise the standard of women for everyone, which isn't exactly a surprise as those measures typically help bring better childhood outcomes, improved gender equality and raise economic output, which benefits both genders.
