We have allowed the demonisation and dehumanisation of male refugees. They are victims too | Zoe Williams

The Rwanda policy has been scrapped and the Bibby Stockholm is to be closed down. The policy on asylum seekers was almost a gift from the last government to this; it was so expensive and cruel that to abandon it was both common sense and a moral imperative. The Rwanda scheme cost £700m and, according to Yvette Cooper, ejected four people, all of whom left voluntarily. Had it not been ditched, the cost estimate for the next decade was £7bn . Using the Bibby Stockholm barge to house asylum seekers has cost taxpayers more than £22m to date. The expense itself was a performance of contempt and dehumanisation. No money could ever be found to clear the backlog, or help to establish safe routes; yet no amount was ever too much to make an asylum seeker feel despised.

So yes, great work everyone, voting those sadists out; but the migration debate, not just in Britain but across Europe and, of course, in the US, is sliding towards necropolitics – the politics of who gets to live and who has to die – a descent into barbarism that simply wouldn’t be possible if the category of refugees hadn’t been sorted, implicitly and explicitly, into the deserving and the undeserving.

The old distinction was between those fleeing persecution and economic migrants, but this has segued over time into women and children on one side, men on the other. Nigel Farage’s famous “breaking point” poster, unveiled during Brexit to raise the spectre of mass immigration, was dismaying at the time for its racist insinuation . It featured entirely men, which, with shocking visual bluntness, speaks to the point made by Prof Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, who was the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism from 2017 to 2023. “The category of ‘civilian’, which is supposed to be gender neutral, has really been stripped down to women and girls,” she tells me. “If you’re a boy child or a man from a certain geography, ‘civilian’ is no longer available to you. We’ve gendered it so deeply that men of certain skin colours, certain geographies, are presumptively terrorists, or presumptively criminal.”

Related: US and UK complicit in detentions at Syrian camps where torture rife, says Amnesty

By the time small boat crossings started to rise after Covid, it was routine for politicians, such as the former MP Scott Benton, to claim that any man aged 18 to 40 was an “economic migrant” – even while it was accepted that arrivals were mainly from Iraq and Iran, exceptionally dangerous nations from which most asylum applications are successful. When, in 2021, the then home secretary, Priti Patel, told the Commons that she’d had “enough of economic migrants pretending to be genuine refugees; enough of adults pretending to be children to claim asylum; enough of people trying to gain entry illegally ahead of those who play by the rules”, she was rehearsing all the ways in which you could no longer be male and authentically in need. Worse, your very existence as a man on an informal crossing meant you had trodden over someone genuinely vulnerable, seeking to arrive by rules that were, of course, in Patel’s imagination.

There has been no real challenge to this mindset. Progressives, broadly, responded: “You want women and children before you’ll believe in vulnerability, in universal rights, in crisis, in shared humanity? That’s fine, we have tons.” I didn’t even realise I’d fallen into this trap myself until I went to refugee camp in Lesbos in 2015.

Like everyone, I was looking for families, in order to give a “human” face to the tragedy. I met a 21-year-old guy who’d been doing a degree in Syria when he’d unwittingly become an enemy of Assad’s regime. He looked stringy and cerebral, the kind of kid who would take some maths to a gunfight, and he reminded me of my brother. I realised I’d become one of those people. The sort who can only understand sexual violence is bad because they have a daughter. The sort who can only understand men don’t deserve a chemical weapon attack because I have a brother.

A decade on, in the midst of the Gaza conflict, it’s incredibly rare to even hear men mentioned: it doesn’t mean you can’t find out – you merely subtract the number of children and women from the approximated total. But the omertà is deliberate. It insinuates that men’s deaths aren’t tragic, aren’t an outrage, and dares you to ask why not. If you flee a war zone as a man, you’re a coward; if you remain in one, you’re most likely a terrorist. It doesn’t stop at men, but seeps into the abstract idea of male children, whom the academic and author Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian describes as being “unchilded”, “born terrorists”.

In the refugee camps of northern Syria, an estimated 70,000 people are detained without trial, 30,000 of them likely to be children. There is so little access to the men’s camps that campaigners and legal observers simply don’t know the fundamental facts: how many are children and adolescents, whether they’ve been separated from their mothers, how many are British, how many were born there or trafficked there, what conditions are like, whether they’re being tortured.

In Dublin, meanwhile, rightwing groups gather outside housing earmarked for single male asylum seekers, calling for it to be burned down. Last week, four fires had been started there in just four days . “For centuries,” Ní Aoláin says, “we were a nation of mass export, sending men as economic migrants to other countries. Now we have a discourse where male migrants are demonised as inherently not entitled to fundamental rights, refugee status, asylum status.”

So it’s not enough to celebrate the reversal of two toxic policies; it’s too soon to rejoice at a return to humanity. Men and boys, all over the world, across countless situations, are being excluded from fundamental categories of protection under international legislation. In doing so, we hollow out the laws intended to protect us all.

• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist

• Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here .