Vidhya Ramalingam pointed to an alarming discrepancy when it comes to perpetrators of violence: They are overwhelmingly men, while women seem to be the only ones trying to address the problem.
“People [are] searching for ‘I think my son might be an incel,’ or searching for ‘What to do when a child threatens violence at school,’ or ‘My roommate watches gore and hates women,’” said Ramalingam at the sixth annual Eradicate Hate Global Summit in Pittsburgh.“These are real searches by people around the world who are actively seeking help online and turning to the internet for help.”
Eradicate Hate formed after the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shootings, in which 11 people were killed in the deadliest attack on Jewish people in U.S. history. This year’s summit drew experts and leaders from across the globe to Downtown’s David L. Lawrence Convention Center.
Data collected over the past two years by Moonshot, a global violence prevention initiative headed by Ramalingam, suggests that women in Canada, New Zealand and the United States make up the majority of those seeking help for their loved ones online, and are significantly more likely to take up offers of support.
Even on social platforms like Reddit — which has a 60% male user base — women submitted up to four times as many bystander reports, according to Ramalingam. Bystanders who went on to engage with a clinician regarding their concerns were overwhelmingly women.
A bystander is anyone who notices signs of potential harm in someone they know, and is positioned to take action. Often they are directly impacted, such as a parent, sibling, educator or caregiver.
The way to start engaging more men? Panellists urged conversation.
Centering gender, not shying away
Humberto Carolo, CEO of White Ribbon, said part of the blame lies with a culture that discourages boys from reaching out.
“A real man doesn’t look for help,” Carolo said. “A real man solves their own problems by themselves. A real man doesn’t talk about emotions, and talk about feelings. A real man bottles it up.”
To counteract these harmful norms, Carolo suggests bystanders begin engaging in conversations that “redefine” what vulnerability looks like in male circles.
“As practitioners, as policymakers, as governments, as educators — we need to keep gender at the center as part of a solution to deal with this problem. We can’t address this in superficial, gender-neutral ways,” he said. “Once we raise a new generation of young people with a different understanding of healthy masculinity, then we’re going to start seeing these statistics change.”
Panelist David O’Brien, director of mental health at Yorktown Family Services, a nonprofit community service agency in Toronto, pointed to a peer support model that has been a “huge success” among men charged for domestic violence.
These men join the program believing that talking about their emotions is intrinsically unmasculine, O’Brien said. But when facilitators begin framing these conversations within activity-based programming, they begin to open up.
“The topic is not ‘let’s talk about your feelings’ — it’s, ‘let’s play a game,’” O’Brien said. “For some reason, [with] mainstream male culture, this contagion effect can work in a very negative way, but also can work in a very positive way. It’s almost like this team sport.”
Starting early
Families and educators must begin to engage in conversations about masculinity as early as grade school, panelists said.
The rise of technology and social media is exposing young boys to misogynistic content at alarming rates, said Carolo, who suggests teaching concepts such as consent, sharing and communication early on as a preventative measure against gender-based violence.
“It’s too late to wait until grade eight … to have these conversations about masculinity,” he said.
Opening the door
Gender-based violence intervention programs are largely focused on supporting survivors, Carolo said. Often, resources needed to address perpetrators’ harmful behaviors are overlooked.
“Sometimes they reach out for help, but there’s nobody there to help them, especially when it comes to intimate partner violence,” Carolo said. “The interventions that are available for them at that point are not effective or often non-existent. They’re often very superficial.”
Helping perpetrators see themselves as part of the solution, Carolo said, can play a transformative role in quelling gender-based violence.
“See every door as a potential entering point to have good conversations,” he said. “Men will talk. Men will appreciate it. Men will open up. We just need those kinds of opportunities to present ourselves sometimes to make a difference.”
Octavia Liku is an editorial intern at Pittsburgh’s Public Source and can be reached at octavia@publicsource.org.
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