Welcome to XY online

It’s a couple of days since the #MenChallengingSexism conference in Cardiff and we’re so pleased with the level of engagement by the men who attended over the weekend, as well as the support and encouragement of feminist organisations, individual women and our amazing guest speakers Maryam Namazie and Vaishnavi Sundar.

I tweet regularly on issues of men, masculinities, gender, and violence, at https://twitter.com/MichaelGLFlood. On this page, I regularly provide the list of many of my recent tweets. So if you don't use Twitter or follow me on Twitter, then you can find many of my recent tweets here. If Twitter ceases to exist or be functional, I may continue posting at Mastodon, at @MichaelGLFlood@mastodon.au.

University colleges have a vital role to play in building cultures of respect and safety on campus. What are the risk factors for sexual violence and harassment in colleges – the factors that make perpetration and victimisation more likely? Why are some colleges safer than others? What strategies are effective in preventing and reducing violence and abuse among students? How can we foster positive cultures in colleges, and how do these fit within a whole-of-institution approach to prevention?

Dr Jane Meyrick summarises part of her new sexual violence ‘explainer’ book #MeToo for Women and Men (click through blue highlighted hyperlinks to access source documents)

Working Together with Men is an innovative violence prevention project based on community engagement and mobilisation. The project aims to contribute to the prevention of violence against women by engaging men to develop and implement primary prevention strategies in their local communities.

Engaging men and boys is a key strategy for preventing the perpetration of sexual violence. Whilst prevention efforts among men and boys are growing, they remain limited in scope and scale. The evidence base for the effectiveness of sexual violence prevention work with men and boys is also small, although increasing rapidly, and shows mixed impacts.

This literature review was commissioned by Deloittes as part of its stocktake of sexual violence prevention in Australia. A condensed and revised version of this literature review was published as an Appendix in: Deloittes and M. Flood. (2020) Stocktake of Primary Prevention Initiatives in Sexual Violence and Sexual Harassment. Sydney: Deloittes.

Long before Covid-19 forced an artificial isolation on me, loneliness has been my companion.  I became aware of this loneliness when surrounded by the men I had spent time with during the last thirty years.  The irony of this did not go unnoticed – being lonely in a crowd is part self-choice, part self-defence.  I kept telling myself that I chose this path of solitude but if truth be told, it chose me.  And until I surrendered to it, the fear of being isolated was worse than the actual reality.