The Australian organisation ManCave released an open letter on May 14, titled “An open letter to the sector working with men and boys, in healthy masculinities, gender equity, and the prevention of violence”. Professsor Steven Roberts and colleagues responded to this in a Substack post.
Michael Flood
In the field of violence prevention work with men and boys, there is growing interest in engaging men as fathers. Fatherhood is identified as a key entry point that can be strategically leveraged to support male engagement, both during men’s transition to parenthood and throughout their involvements as parents and caregivers.
Four streams of work have converged to shape interest in engaging men as fathers in the prevention of domestic and sexual violence:
Male allies are men who act to challenge patriarchal inequalities. Male allies ideally take everyday action to challenge sexist behaviours and relations, act in solidarity with women, and hold themselves accountable for striving to meet a gender-equitable standard.
This article summarises some of the research on allies, covering:
In countries across the world, there are growing numbers of men taking action to help end violence against women.
And there are growing efforts to engage men and boys in prevention efforts: as participants in education programs, as targets of social marketing campaigns, as activists and advocates, and as leaders and policy makers.
The tension between attention to men’s privilege, on the one hand, and men’s disadvantage, on the other, is a fundamental one in efforts to understand and work with men and boys.
Debates over how to understand men’s and boys’ social positions have been part of self-conscious attention to men and masculinities since the beginnings of this work in the early 1970s. There have been competing understandings of men’s social situations in different strands of men’s organising (pro-feminist, men’s liberation, mythopoetic, and anti-feminist), and these disagreements persist today.
Abstract:
Exposure to and use of pornography is routine among young men. Males are more likely than females to intentionally use pornography, to do so regularly, and to first view it at a young age (Crabbe et al., 2024; eSafety Commissioner, 2023). In an Australian study of 15–29-year-olds, 100% of males and 82% of females reported ever viewing pornography (Lim et al., 2017). In another study among young people aged 15-20, over four-fifths (86%) of young men and over two-thirds (69%) of young women had seen pornography.
How can we engage male students and staff on campus in violence prevention?
I want you to think for a moment about the young men you see every day on your campus. The young men in your classrooms, in the cafetaria, in the college residences, and so on.
Citation: Flood, M. (2025). Online violence prevention education for students. Queensland University of Technology, unpublished.
Note that these notes also may be downloaded in PDF here.
This new book:
- Explores young men’s online lives in the context of growing concerns about gender-based digital harms
- Offers nuanced insight into the complexities and tensions of young men’s positive and negative experiences online
- Proposes a framework for developing young men’s critical digital dispositions for gender-just online engagement
By Professor Amanda Keddie and Professor Michael Flood