In 2006, the Rogers Park Young Womens Action Team (YWAT) launched a campaign to engage young men as allies in addressing violence against girls. The YWAT, a youth-led and adult-supported social change project, conducted a participatory action research project that included the creation of a film called Real Talk (in collaboration with Beyondmedia Education), survey research, and a set of popular education workshops. In addition, the YWAT organized and implemented a two-day train the trainer workshop for fifteen young men ages 14-22 in November 2007.
Working with Boys and Men
Eleven male business leaders from a group called the Male Champions of Change have devised this best practice guide of strategies to assist large organisations to increase the number of women in leadership roles.
The Male Champions of Change, convened by Sex Discrimination Commissioner Elizabeth Broderick, are committed to discussing and promoting strategies and actions that elevate women’s representation in leadership.
'Because I am a Girl: The State of the World’s Girls 2011 - So, what about boys?' is the fifth in a series of annual reports published by Plan examining the rights of girls throughout their childhood, adolescence and as young women.
The report shows that far from being an issue just for women and girls, gender is also about boys and men, and that this needs to be better understood if we are going to have a positive impact on societies and economies.
When men participate as students in Women’s and Gender Studies (WGS) classrooms, they undergo feminist change. They adopt more progressive understandings of gender, show greater support for feminism, and increase their involvement in antisexist activism. Male students in WGS classrooms benefit to the same degree as female students, showing similar levels of change, although they start with poorer attitudes and thus the gap between them and their female peers persists. At the same time, male students’ presence highlights critical challenges to feminist pedagogy: gendered patterns of interaction, resistance to feminist teaching, and limitations on women’s critical reflections on personal experience. When men teach WGS, typically they are ‘‘graded up’’—evaluated by students as less biased and more competent than female professors. Male professors face distinct dilemmas in teaching about gender inequality from a position of privilege. Yet, like male students, they can adopt traitorous and antipatriarchal social locations and standpoints, developing pedagogies for and by the privileged.
Sexual and reproductive health and rights and HIV programmes are likely to have greater impact on communities if they address constructively the actual and potential role of men in society. At present, however, many such programmes often fail to target men, to address their specific needs and understand the wider influence of male and female gender norms.
How can we prevent violence against women? And how can we make progress by engaging men? This one-day workshop provides a comprehensive introduction to frameworks and strategies for primary prevention, with a focus on engaging and mobilising men.
Engaging boys and men to stop violence, especially gender-based violence, is recognised as an important approach by international and national institutions and organisations as well as by individuals. Although some boys have been working for many years along with girls and women to combat violence, their systematic participation is now being acknowledged as important and necessary if we are to change the cycle of violence that exists within the communities and societies. The fact that not all boys are socialised to be violent and the fact that not all definitions of being men imply violence gives hope for changing the world we live in.
Save the Children has therefore developed, along with its history of major publications in the past documenting good practices and challenges of working with boys and men as partners for change, this step-by-step guide to provide practical steps explaining how to go about engaging boys and men as partners to stop the violence against boys and girls, women and other men.
Students in the third-year Sociology course Men and Masculinities at the University of Wollongong have the option of writing a piece of critical autobiography – what I’ve termed a ‘Reflective Journal’ – rather than a conventional essay, for their final written assessment. This document provides guidelines for the Reflective Journal, and further resources on critical autobiography.
Around the world, there are growing efforts to involve boys and men in the prevention of violence against women: as participants in education programs, as targets of social marketing campaigns, as policy makers and gatekeepers, and as activists and advocates. Efforts to prevent violence against girls and women now increasingly take as given that they must engage men. While there are dangers in doing so, there also is a powerful feminist rationale for such work. This article provides a review of the variety of initiatives which engage or address men in order to prevent violence against women. It maps such efforts, locating them within a spectrum of prevention activities. Furthermore, the article identifies or advocates effective strategies in work with men to end violence against women.
The report, Where Men Stand: Men' s roles in ending violence against women was launched in Australia on November 25th, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women and the focus of the White Ribbon Campaign. The report is a stocktake, a reckoning, of where men are at when it comes to violence against women. The report focuses on four key dimensions of men’s relations to violence against women. (See below for the full report, in PDF.)