Mobilising men is a vital part of social change towards gender equality, but it is under-developed in Australia.
Violence
A few weeks ago, I attended a training on gender-based violence, run by a local social service organization, which sought to involve representatives from different community settings in engaging men in anti-violence work. Conversation centered around identifying the ways in which gender-based violence lies on a continuum, ranging from sexist comments and ‘rape jokes’ to sexual assault and domestic violence.
Achieving gender equality must, and has, involved efforts to understand the vulnerabilities and risks that adolescent girls and young women face every day – but how much do we know about the realities of adolescent boys and young men? This report takes a deeper look at the daily lives of adolescent boys and young men around the world and at how they can join the movement towards improved health and gender equality.
The Working Together with Men resource is for people interested in creating projects that work with men to prevent violence against women in their communities.
This is a grassroots, community mobilisation approach that has been piloted across the west of Melbourne (Australia) since 2016. We used what we learnt from these pilots to create a project model that can be reproduced anywhere.
What are the links between mass shootings and masculinity? This XY collection brings together news commentaries on how individual men's perpetration of mass shootings is shaped by particular norms and behaviours associated with patriarchal masculinity. Items include commentary on incidents that took place in:
How can we use communications and social marketing strategies to engage men in building healthier masculinities? What appeals and language work in reaching, engaging, and changing men?
Women’s Health in the South East, a community organisation in Melbourne, organised a webinar titled “Healthier Masculinities and Values-Based Messaging: In Theory and in Practice”, held on April 8 2020.
How does men’s participation in the social movement to prevent violence against women change their relationships with other men and with women? How does it affect their understanding and practices of masculinity?
What role do men have in the work of challenging gender inequalities and building gender justice? This chapter examines the experiences of men as deliberate agents of a feminist masculinity politics, exploring key challenges in men’s efforts to take up profeminism. This first challenge is overcoming one’s own sexist and violence-supportive attitudes and behaviours. Men may be disinterested in or resistant to efforts to involve them in progressive change because of widespread sexist and violence-supportive attitudes and relations.
Shift, a violence prevention project at the University of Calgary, has released “Supporting Best Practices: Guidelines for Funding Programs That Engage and Mobilize Men & Boys in Violence Prevention”. Although these guidelines were written for Alberta, Canada, they have a wider relevance in guiding funding and support for efforts to engage men and boys in violence prevention.
Men’s responses to #MeToo, and other forms of feminist advocacy on rape and sexual harassment, range from enthusiastic support to hostile backlash. There are common forms of resistance among men to these campaigns, including defensive denials that men’s violence is routine, a focus on ‘other’ men, and complaints that #MeToo has ‘gone too far’. And for many men, there is simply mute discomfort. Masculinity is implicated directly in men’s perpetration of rape and sexual harassment, but also in men’s widespread inaction or complicity in the face of men’s violence against women.