This technical brief considers and recommends promising strategies to improve health outcomes among boys and men by promoting social connection and support. It describes what influences relationship building and friendships among boys and men and how the quality and longevity of these relationships can influence their health behaviours and outcomes throughout their lives.
Working with Boys and Men
Male engagement in family planning/reproductive health refers to the involvement of men and boys—where appropriate—as FP method users, supportive partners, and agents of change in order to actively promote gender equality and transform inequitable or harmful gender norms, including, but not limited to, harmful forms of masculinity across the life stages. Ultimately, this approach aims to improve FP/RH outcomes for men and women in cooperative ways that protect and encourage women’s agency.
This report examines violence prevention education with boys and young men. Exploring how best to work with boys and young men in classrooms and other face-to-face settings, it identifies six standards for best practice in this work.
The report focuses on educational strategies aimed at the primary prevention of domestic and/or sexual violence, focused on boys and young men, and provided face-to-face in schools and other settings.
Unpacking the Man Box makes five vital contributions to our knowledge of men’s conformity to masculine norms and the impacts of this conformity.
The first two contributions help us to map men’s patterns of conformity and non-conformity to traditional masculine norms.
Gender-inequitable norms of masculinity are widely recognised to sustain the disempowerment of women and girls, underpinning inequalities in gender-based access to economic opportunities and decision-making power, as well as harmful practices such as gender-based violence. Dominant forms of masculinity also undermine boys and men’s wellbeing, with particular harm to their physical and psychosocial health.
While empowering women, girls, and gender-diverse individuals remains a cornerstone of gender-based violence (GBV) work, boys and male-identifying youth also play a key role in the prevention of GBV. Providing boys and male-identifying youth with opportunities to explore their identities, reflect on their own understandings of masculinity, and advocate for gender equality are some of the ways they can be allies in advocating for transforming social norms.
Traditional models of how to be a man face growing criticism in the twenty-first century, with increasing attention to the harms they cause among men, women, and communities. Social norms regarding manhood are diverse across cultures, history, and within any one society. But one version of manhood increasingly is seen as a problem, the version in which men are expected always to be tough, aggressive, risk-taking, stoic, heterosexual, homophobic and transphobic, emotionally inexpressive, hostile to femininity, and dominant.
Men in politics as agents of gender equitable change is a research project that examines why men in politics decide to support gender equality, how they explain and frame their work in this area, and how their actions are perceived by women politicians, activists and students.
How are domestic and sexual violence workplace issues, and what can we do to prevent and reduce them? This talk provides an accessible introduction to the workplace prevention of domestic and sexual violence. Men in particular have a positive role to play in violence prevention. Professor Flood explores the everyday steps that men can take to make a difference, the mistakes it’s easy to make, and the ways forward in building more respectful, inclusive workplaces for everyone.
Programs that engage men and boys in health promotion and violence prevention are proliferating. Many aim to foster “healthy masculinities”, using education and support to involve men and boys in adopting more positive or gender-equitable forms of selfhood and relating.
This paper offers a critical stocktake of 15 'healthy masculinities' programs in one state in Australia, assessing them against common standards for gender-transformative programming among men and boys.