How can the Australian Government strengthen efforts to engage men and boys in the primary prevention of domestic, family and sexual violence? This submission to the Consultation on the Second Action Plan (National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children 2022–2032) provides guidance on effective ways forward. See the short summary below, and the full submission here.
Executive summary
This submission addresses Priority Area 2: Prevention and Early Intervention of the Second Action Plan and focuses on strengthening Australia’s efforts to engage men and boys in the primary prevention of domestic, family and sexual violence.
Australia has seen substantial growth in violence prevention initiatives involving men and boys. The quality and effectiveness of existing initiatives vary considerably. Many programs remain short-term, small-scale, or insufficiently informed by evidence regarding the drivers of violence and the characteristics of effective prevention.
The international evidence shows that well-designed interventions can produce meaningful and lasting change in violence-supportive attitudes and behaviours, although the Australian evidence base is limited. There is an urgent need to strengthen standards for practice, broaden prevention strategies, and scale up approaches capable of producing population-level change.
The submission argues that violence prevention work with men and boys should continue to be guided by a gender-transformative framework that addresses gender inequality and other factors. Emerging interest in men’s health approaches presents valuable opportunities to reach new audiences, address relevant risk factors, and reduce resistance to prevention messages. However, improving men’s health alone will not prevent violence unless interventions also address gendered power relations, entitlement, and the structural drivers of domestic, family and sexual violence. Men’s health approaches should therefore complement, not replace, existing gender-transformative approaches.
The submission makes four recommendations.
Recommendation 1: Strengthen the quality of violence prevention programming aimed at men and boys. Government should embed evidence-informed standards for effective practice into funding and commissioning processes, support workforce development and professional learning, promote knowledge exchange, and build the capacity of practitioners and organisations to deliver high-quality prevention initiatives.
Recommendation 2: Expand the range of prevention strategies used with men and boys. Investment should extend beyond school-based education to include workplaces, sporting organisations, online environments, faith and community settings, social marketing, community leadership, and initiatives addressing online misogyny and the manosphere. Prevention should also strengthen protective factors that foster non-violent and gender-equitable identities, relationships, and communities.
Recommendation 3: Scale up prevention efforts to achieve population-level impact. The Australian Government should invest in comprehensive, community-wide and structural prevention strategies, including social norms campaigns, community mobilisation, regulatory responses to harmful online content and violent pornography, and policy measures that address the broader institutional and structural conditions contributing to violence against women and children.
Recommendation 4: Maintain a gender-transformative framework while integrating appropriate insights from men’s health and other fields. Collaboration across sectors should be encouraged, but government-funded initiatives should remain grounded in gender equality, victim-survivor safety, perpetrator accountability, and evidence-based primary prevention. Men’s health approaches should be incorporated where they strengthen prevention, without displacing the central goal of ending violence against women and children.
A more detailed version of each recommendation, with supporting discussion, can be found here.
Taken together, these recommendations seek to strengthen Australia’s capacity to engage men and boys in effective, evidence-informed primary prevention while ensuring that this work remains firmly focused on preventing violence.
Submission
For the full submission, please click here.