By Gary Barker, President and CEO, Promundo-US
This blog is a part of the upcoming OECD High-Level Conference on Ending Violence Against Women, that will take place on 5-6 of February 2020
#MeToo has led to an unprecedented global calling out of men’s use of violence against women — whether harassment, sexual assault or intimate partner violence. In addition, the last 10 years have seen advances in legal protections for survivors of violence and a massive expansion of research on what works, and what does not, to prevent gender-based violence. With all of this, men’s voices and actions, as allies, actors, and as partners in preventing gender-based violence are often either missing or silent. First, we should start by saying what we mean by gender-based violence (GBV). The phrase, while useful and necessary, often leads us to overlook the fact that we are mostly talking about men’s violence against women – harassment, sexual assault, physical, sexual, economic intimate partner violence in the home by male partners against female partners, and sexual exploitation, among others.
We now have decades of research on what drives men’s use of violence against women. Cultural and social norms that permit and encourage violence (as part of men’s domination and control of women’s lives in some settings); childhood experiences of witnessing or experiencing violence and other adverse early childhood experiences; complicity of men in power (as police, judges, policymakers) when other men use violence against women; and men’s greater economic and social power over women in many settings, are all factors. Poverty, war, displacement and the weakness or unwillingness of governments in responding to human rights violations also contribute to violence against women. It is important to affirm that all of these drivers of gender-based violence are human-made. Men’s violence against women is not wired into our genes, nor is it inevitable. It is both preventable and unacceptable. Continue reading