Gender discrimination is okay as long as it goes one way.
Some people really do see young men as the greatest threat on public roads, which is why a road safety lobby group has proposed that males should be banned from getting a driver’s license until they are at least 21. The group, Australasian College of Road Safety (ACRS) is advocating for this controversial move in Australia, but before you breathe a sigh of relief, these kinds of ideas tend to travel across oceans.
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More specifically, ACRS is pushing to have this measure encoded into the law in New South Wales. Undoubtedly, if successful the group will then move to other states in Australia and the idea could spread to other countries from there.
To justify this proposal, ACRS points out that young males are disproportionately involved in fatal car crashes. For example, in the state of New South Wales between the years 2011 and 2021, three times as many men have died in collisions than women. Now, any logical person would say that doesn’t prove anything because dying in crashes doesn’t mean you’re the cause, but hold on, there’s more.
Ann Williamson, ACRS’s president, says younger drivers are involved in almost a quarter of all crashes in New South Wales even though they make up around 15% of all drivers in the state. So you see, the only natural conclusion is to ban young men from the road because there’s simply no other way to make everyone safe.
Now, it’s clear this data is being cherrypicked, but that’s not stopping this radical push. Instead, the insistence of these professionals is to single out young men, not young women, because it’s okay to discriminate based on gender when it hurts males but never the other way around.
In The Guardian, we get a real doozie of a justification from Rebecca Ivers, a professor at the University of New South Wales who also heads up a global research program which focuses on how to prevent and manage bodily injuries. “Men are overrepresented in injury from pretty much the time that we can crawl. It’s no different with driving and I think we’re increasingly understanding that we do need to actually start putting a gender lens on that.”
Ivers isn’t wrong, males from the time they’re tiny tend to get hurt more often as they’re less risk adverse. That continues into their adult years, with men occupying the highest-risk jobs where being physically maimed or killed is far more common.
At least Ivers went on to admit the problem of road fatalities is something the whole community has to take responsibility for, instead of unloading all the blame on young men. She wants to see families get involved in formulating a solution, which sounds better than punishing all young men because of a few bad apples. Ivers characterizes the problem as “a system failure” and she’s not wrong.
Still, there are those who will use it to justify demonizing young men who already are constantly told they’re the problem with society, stricter laws will be put into place, and gender discrimination will be codified. Then people wonder why men commit suicide and are homeless at far higher rates than women.
Source: The Guardian
Images via (in order): Kindel Media, Ron Lach, Elijah O’Donnell
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