Violence

07 May 2009

Male involvement in sexual violence prevention has increased sharply over the past decade. Organizations such as Men Can Stop Rape, The Oakland Men’s Project, One In Four, and the White Ribbon Campaign have received tremendous interest from both within, and outside of, the established anti-rape movement. The past ten years have also seen some sexual assault crisis centers (SACCs) renewing the social change “roots” of their work by developing or strengthening primary prevention projects - projects intended to prevent the initial perpetration of sexual violence. Many of these SACCs, sometimes in conjunction with campus-based sexual violence programs, have recognized the need for prevention programming that connects with young men. The rationale for this heightened interest in male-focused programming comes from the fact that males commit the vast majority of sexual violence, and are thus in a powerful position to generate change. To this end, these programs often seek participation from male allies in order to gain greater insight into what types of messages and methods might resonate with men in their larger community, offer positive, non-violent alternatives to traditional masculinity, and/or model constructive cross-gender collaboration.

07 May 2009

Drawing on the Personal Safety Survey (PSS), I address four points. First, PSS data suggest that rates of violence against women in Australia have declined. Second, the PSS shows that there are high rates of violence against males, and there is a striking contrast in women’s and men’s experiences of violence. Third, PSS data may be (mis)used to claim that one-quarter of the victims of domestic violence are men. Finally, I examine the limits of the PSS’s definitions and measurements of violence, and the constraints they impose on our claims about the extent of domestic violence against women and women’s versus men’s subjection to domestic violence.
See below for this article, in PDF.

26 Apr 2009

An outline of strategies for the primary prevention of violence against women, focused on engaging and working with men.

20 Apr 2009

“I’m sorry I make you feel like shit.”
“It’s just your privilege as a man.”
It’s 2:30am on a Sunday night, and while more words were spoken prior to those and after those, it’s those that tore me open. It was that brief exchange that broke through my walls of fake emotion and defense and allowed everything else to pour into me.

20 Apr 2009

In December last year, local domestic violence committees in South West Sydney joined together to conduct a forum to tease out a variety of issues concerning men as victims that were being raised within their community. The forum was initiated by the committees’ as a way to highlight and discuss the key issues which include the acknowledgement of men as victims, establishing referral pathways and the importance of accurately reporting on research findings regarding prevalence. Stephen Fisher was one of nine panellists who participated on the day.

20 Apr 2009

... Parallel to having a society in which women are raised to be targets, we’re raising our men to target. Men chose to perpetrate sexual violence, at whatever form of sexual violence, because they live in a culture that teaches men lessons about who they are as men, how to act as men, how to treat women, how to “get” sex, and power. All men are part of these cultures and all men learn these same lessons. To some degree, all men are at some risk for perpetrating different forms of sexual violence. For some reasons that we don’t yet fully understand, some men choose to actually perpetrate sexual violence, while others don’t. Some of these lessons include teaching men that they should be the initiators/aggressors in terms of dating and sexual activity (and where is that line between initiating and aggressing?), teaching men that they have the right to have the final say in some aspects of our relationships, and the lessons that men are taught about women, power and sex.

Please see the attachment below, in Word.

20 Apr 2009
From around 2005 until early 2006, I delusionally entertained an idea of myself as ungendered. Then a radical activist friend, Yolanda Carrington, pointed out to me how politically absurd this notion of mine was. And I realized that the white male supremacist mind—mine in particular—is quite capable of generating lots of mental CRAP. How could I have grown up in a deeply white male supremacist society, and not be socially and interpersonally gendered? Her point was that regardless of what I thought of myself as, I am in a real world where gender—and race—matter, a lot. And being gendered, as a woman or man, a girl or a boy, is not something one can escape. Privileges and power are distributed based on how we are perceived, and according to our anatomy. The anatomy is biological, but the political meaning is entirely social.
18 Apr 2009

Michael Kaufman discusses the need to both address and involve men in ending violence against women (VAW), a few of the pitfalls and guiding principles, and shares his thoughts on what is the most developed example of this work, that is, the White Ribbon Campaign.
Please see below for the attachment, in PDF.

09 Apr 2009

By Julian Real, 2007, with invaluable input from Celie's Revenge

Here's a list of what men can do:

First, recognize and accept that the personal is political, and that interpersonal behavior is part of your political work as a responsible humane being. Stop either/or'ing the private and the public, the personal and the social, the interpersonal and the institutional. All are breeding grounds for male domination of women and children.

Given the above:

09 Apr 2009

By George Marx, 1987.

I. INTRODUCTION

This paper focuses on men's anti-rape organizing from the perspective of one member of a men's pro-feminist anti-rape group. We work at educating ourselves and other "normal" men. I hope that a lot of my ideas will be adaptable to others' situations. I will try to separate issues into fairly distinct sections, although they will inevitably overlap.