Violence

There’s been an important shift in several different communities and scenes lately. In the kink world, in atheism circles, among feminist folks and their allies, in pagan communities, I’ve been seeing more people than ever before talking about the effects of sexual coercion, assault, harassment, unwanted attention, and other related topics. Of course, none of this is particularly new and women have been talking about it for years. But what’s different is the nature of the dialogue.

The Centre for Research on Men and Masculinities (CROMM) is hosting a two-day conference titled Engaging Men in Building Gender Equality. The conference focuses on and seeks to advance efforts to address men’s roles in building gender equality.

This report is a comprehensive examination of the roles bystanders can play in preventing sexual harassment in the workplace. The report draws on and synthesises insights from diverse bodies of scholarship and practice regarding violence prevention, whistle blowing, employee voice, workplace justice and workplace bullying. While there are significant organizational, legal and socio-political challenges in developing bystander approaches to sexual harassment, the paper argues that they also offer substantial promise.

Here's a new report of interest. Richard Eves writes, "... My focus here is on the churches and how some churches are grappling with the problem of violence against women (particularly violence in the domestic or marital sphere). It is important to take into account that violence against women is violence based on gender, because this demands a broader study of all the ways that gender, including masculinity, is constituted..."
See http://asiapacific.anu.edu.au/blogs/pacificinstitute/2012/04/03/christi….

In South Africa, men are increasingly rejecting widespread stereotypes of manhood by stepping forward to challenge gender roles that compromise their well-being and the health of their partners and their families. This case study documents the Sonke Gender Justice Network’s Fatherhood project, which was designed to reduce HIV transmission and address related problems, such as gender-based violence, women’s overwhelming burden of care, and the preponderance of children in need of care and support.

See http://www.icrw.org/publications/allowing-men-care for the report regarding this work.

Calls for greater male participation are now a commonplace in work on sexual and reproductive health and rights. The need to engage men in efforts to prevent sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) and promote sexual health and gender equality is well accepted. But we know less about the optimal forms of such engagement, particularly when it comes to moving beyond a focus on changing individual men’s attitudes and behaviours.

I’ve often found myself trying to explain to people that rape culture and patriarchy aren’t just bad for women. If you draw attention to a form of violence that is primarily aimed at women by men, and a form of social oppression that is intended to provide men with dominance over women, a lot of people will think you must be hostile to men, or want to take something away from men. Nothing could be further from the truth.

During the run up to Christmas and into the New Year, our attention in the UK was brought several times to what worryingly seemed like a recurring story in the press about a man who had just murdered members of his family.

The first version of the story in December took the form of a newly unemployed policeman -Tobias Day- who killed his wife, his six-year-old daughter and seriously injured his two other children before then killing himself.

We have had 25 years of research on men and masculinities. The relationship between men as gendered beings, power and change has been central in this research. This article presents some of the main findings that most researchers within critical studies on men will agree on, and then it discusses how to better understand men’s relationship to power and marginalization, change and gender equality in future research. It is explorative in its style, and an invitation to further debates on these important questions.