Fathering

How do we prevent our sons from becoming rapists?

Media headlines lately have been dominated by violence – young men’s violence against other men outside pubs and in the street, and men’s sexual assaults of women. Most boys and men do not use violence. But a minority do. The confronting truth is, some of the boys growing up right now will force or pressure a girl or woman into sex.

Meaningful engagement with men and boys is increasingly recognized as critical to gender equality and equity, necessary not only for women’s empowerment, but also for transforming the social and gender norms that reinforce patriarchy and inequality and harm both women and men. The primary challenge embedded in this work is how to engage men and boys effectively without instrumentalizing them as a pathway to women’s empowerment on the one hand, or marginalizing women and girls in gender equity work on the other.

This working paper:

  • Reviews existing knowledge on child marriage and informal unions between girls and boys/men in the Global South;
  • Explores the attitudes of male family and community members on child marriage and the role of masculinity in shaping these attitudes; and
  • Surveys interventions currently working with men and boys to see what can be built upon more systematically in the future work on child marriage.

Please see below for the full report, in PDF.

How can parents raise feminist sons? How, for example, can mothers and fathers encourage their sons to grow up to respect girls and women? Here are some recent and accessible discussions of raising boys:

Also see the bibiography of works here: http://www.xyonline.net/content/ii-raising-sons-raising-boys. And these online pieces:

Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association (PCA/ACA) National Conference: San Diego, CA, April 12-15, 2017 I am looking for papers for multiple panels for the PCA/ACA Motherhood/Fatherhood Area on any aspect of motherhood and or fatherhood in popular culture. Possible topics to consider include, but are not limited to, the following:

Call For Papers: The Future of Fatherhood: What’s next in fathering practice and research?

The EMERGE (Engendering Men: Evidence on Routes to Gender Equality) project has produced a new policy briefing which makes the case for re-framing policy on gender equality in order to more productively factor in men and boys, and suggests actions and approaches that policy makers can take to do this. The briefing, along with an accompanying practice brief and a conceptual framing paper, is available here.
 

That we need to work with men and boys has become a key mantra of health programmes globally, particularly those concerned with HIV, violence and more recently sexual and reproductive health and rights, and yet there is very little known about how effective these programmes are, nor of the challenges, opportunities and politics of this work. A special issue of Culture, Health and Sexuality draws together a number of globally recognised authors to reflect on the field, as well as provide provocative insights into the politics and processes of working with men and boys.