The moral pull of “women and children”

Victimized “women and children” are frequently featured in the media, yet the consequences of this phrase are far from clear. Across six experiments (N = 3115), we find that highlighting “women and children” as victims increases people's moral outrage, a strong emotional response to immoral acts that motivates people to want to punish wrongdoers. This effect could not be attributed to overestimating their victimization rates, to singling out just any victim group, or to equating “women and children” with civilians. Moreover, highlighting women as victims elicited moral outrage even when they were not paired with children or assumed to be mothers, suggesting that women's contribution to the moral pull of “women and children” is not reducible to these factors. Although women have the power to elicit moral outrage on their own, we find that this effect may be limited to gender-conforming women and may be related to the endorsement of traditional gender views as part of benevolent sexism. Altogether, these findings invite important questions regarding the long-term consequences of this phrase.