Fathers have a vital role to play in preventing and reducing men’s violence against women and in building a non-violent future.
Dads, Gender, and Violence Prevention
There is a strong rationale for engaging fathers in efforts to prevent men’s violence against women.
Positive father involvement is good for children, mothers, families, and fathers themselves.
There is a wealth of evidence that fathers’ positive involvement in parenting and care work is good for children and families. Fathers’ positive involvement also is good for mothers’ relationship satisfaction, their parenting, and men’s own wellbeing.
This does not mean that father presence is a necessary condition for children’s wellbeing. Children raised in a variety of households and family structures can do well.
Healthy paternal involvement has positive impacts. In turn, unhealthy and negative paternal involvement has negative impacts. Violent, absent or neglectful fathers can cause long-term harm to their children and families.
There are links between positive father involvement and the absence of violence against partners and against children. A series of studies find that when men are involved in parenting and domestic work, they are also less likely to use violence against women.
It is not necessarily the case that positive father involvement leads to lower levels of violence. The links between them may reflect the influence on both of other factors. Men with more gender-equitable attitudes may be more likely than other men to be involved fathers and to be non-violent in their households.
Biological fathers are not the only men who can be positive influences for non-violence. Other men also can play vital roles. For example, in a study among young adults whose parents had separated, those who experienced high involvement by fathers or other adult men (step-fathers, grandfathers, etc.) reported more positive behaviours in intimate relationships.
Fathers can have powerful influences on their sons and daughters. Domestic and sexual violence are driven above all by gender-unequal norms, practices, and relations, and men who engage positively as fathers are well placed to shift these in their families. They can encourage strong norms of non-violence and respect, model shared decision-making, and challenge rigid gender roles and gender stereotypes.
Men may be able to play a particularly important role in fostering boys’ gender-equitable identities and behaviours.
Just as abuse can be passed down from generation to generation, so can nurturance. The sons of involved and nurturing fathers are more likely to be more nurturing and gender-equitable as fathers themselves and less likely to become violent in their intimate partner relationships as men. The daughters of nurturing fathers are more likely to value equitable partner relationships.
There are also more pragmatic reasons to engage men as fathers in anti-violence advocacy. Most men are fathers, fathering is an important life experience for many men, and fathering therefore provides opportunities to involve men and boys in learning, reflection, and action.
Engaging fathers in prevention
In the field of violence prevention work with men and boys, there is growing interest in engaging men as fathers. Fatherhood is a key ‘entry point’ that can be strategically leveraged to support male engagement.
More generally too, the last decade or so has seen the flourishing of initiatives and programs aimed at fathers.
Evidence of effectiveness
Do programs among fathers work?
The literature on effectiveness is sparse. Few evaluations dealing with father engagement have undergone robust evaluation, few parenting interventions disaggregate findings by gender, and most address only short-term impacts. Still, there is a small body of encouraging evidence.
Fatherhood interventions: Reviews of interventions aimed at fathers document a variety of positive effects e.g. on father-child interactions, fathers’ perceptions of the quality of father-child relationships, love for and acceptance of children, attitudes about child rearing, and parental satisfaction and efficacy. There is evidence that fathering programs can produce positive changes in men’s attitudes and behaviours, including in parenting, household work, equitable decision-making, relationship and sexual satisfaction, contraception and condom use.
Fathers’ support groups: One important strategy among fathers is peer-to-peer support programs. Studies among fathers find that these can have positive impacts on fathers’ parenting, relationships with their intimate partners, and children’s health.
Two further streams of work with fathers have a stronger focus on violence prevention and reduction: fathers’ education programs addressing gender equality and/or violence, and programs for fathers who use violence.
Fathers’ education programs: There is some evidence that formal education programs among fathers can reduce fathers’ perpetration of violence against partners and children. For example:
- MenCare is a global campaign to promote men’s involvement as equitable, responsive, and non-violent fathers and caregivers.
- Evaluations document positive changes in men’s attitudes and behaviours, including in care and household work, equitable decision-making, contraception and condom use, and the perpetration of violence against partners and children.
Some evaluations are based on comparison only of pre- and immediate post-intervention data, limiting any claims about the longer-term impact of the programs. However, some evaluations have involved longer-term follow-up.
An evaluation of the REAL Fathers Initiative found that men who participated in the intervention had lower rates of perpetration of intimate partner violence and physical child punishment after the intervention and at long-term follow-up eight to 12 months later.
Programs for fathers who use violence: Finally, fathering programs for men who use violence show some positive impacts.
For example, participants in the Caring Dads program show greater ability to reflect on their harmful fathering practices, awareness of the impact of their behaviour on their children, takeup of parenting skills, and improved psychological wellbeing. Female partners report feeling safer and experiencing fewer instances of domestic and family violence. These evaluations also find that it can be hard to shift fathers’ hostile attitudes towards mothers, and that fathers typically underreport their domestic and family violence perpetration.
The evidence base is limited, with few robust impact evaluations involving pre- and post-intervention assessment, measures of both attitudes and behaviours, long-term follow-up, or large sample sizes.
Nevertheless, fathering programs and groups clearly have the potential to make positive change in men’s parenting and in turn to generate positive impacts among children, relationships, and men themselves.
Building caring masculinities
I have not spoken much about masculinity yet, even though it’s my favourite topic. But it’s clear that men’s involvement in parenting is constrained by traditional masculine norms emphasising breadwinning, self-reliance, stoicism, and dominance.
Men with more traditional masculine attitudes are less likely to be involved in positive fathering and more likely to show negative fathering behaviours. For example;
- A US study found that fathers who agree more strongly with traditional masculine norms were less involved in parenting and more likely to use harsh discipline than other fathers.
- A New Zealand study found that fathers with more sexist attitudes show less responsive parenting towards both daughters and sons. Fathers with higher levels of hostile sexism expressed less warmth, were less engaged with their child, were less sensitive to their child’s needs, and were more intrusive or controlling.
- An Australian qualitative study among first-time fathers found that they continued to felt constrained by hegemonic masculine ideals, facing conflict between traditional masculine discourses and progressive discourses ideals encouraging fathers to be caring and nurturing.
So one key task here is to shift these traditional masculine norms and foster alternative, progressive ones.
But we must also tackle the institutional and structural barriers to men’s parenting. A variety of studies find that social policies and work arrangements shape father involvement, and that smart policy reform can increase fathers’ involvement.
Conclusion
We need much more intensive efforts to involve fathers in violence prevention, as part of a comprehensive strategy for engaging men in prevention. We need to raise the bar for what it means to be a good father. We need to encourage fair divisions of caring and household work, shift traditional norms of care work and manhood, and foster a culture of positive fathering.
To really build positive fathering in Australia will take policy reform, widespread programs of education and support, and culture change.
END
Citation: Flood, M. (2024). Fathers Building a Nonviolent Future. Fathering Summit: The Changing Culture of Fatherhood, Sydney, March 14.
Note: This is in part a summary of Flood's paper, launched at the Fathering Summit (below). The slides from this talk are available here.
Also see the paper itself:
Flood, M. (2024). Engaging Fathers in a Non-Violent Future. Sydney: The Fathering Project.