In the wake of the killing of Sarah Everard, and the wider concerns about gender-based violence, women have shared their stories of abuse, harassment and assault. And the myriad ways they have tried to protect themselves from this. Men have, for the most part, listened. Now – given that violence against women and girls is primarily a male-perpetrated crime – is it time more men actively joined the fight against it? The Guardian convened a round table of experts to ask what men can do to help effect change among their friends and family, and in their workplaces.
Luke Hart of CoCo Awareness. In 2017, Hart’s father murdered his wife, Claire, and their daughter, Charlotte. Days earlier, Claire and Charlotte had left the family home after a lifetime of coercive control and abuse. Luke and his brother Ryan are now anti-abuse activists: This week, and Everard’s death, really took me back to what happened to my family. I feel deeply sorry for Everard’s family; it’s hard when things take on a life of their own and you just want to grieve. Events become something that other people feel they have ownership of. I remember, after my mother and sister died, some of the media reporting made me and my brother angry, to the point where we had to shut ourselves away. I remember one report saying that what my dad did was “understandable”. We started to despair. So I think this has to be a moment to remember Everard’s family because it’s so difficult when something you’re going through becomes public property.
Dr Jackson Katz, educator and author of The Macho Paradox: Why Some Men Hurt Women and How All Men Can Help: Despite this tragic situation, there is some reason for optimism because young women in particular are using their voices to speak out about their own experiences of being survivors of violence. But, for decades, there has been a lack of male voices speaking up about violence against women.
Christopher Muwanguzi, former CEO of Future Men, a charity for men and boys: What really got me was Jess Phillips on International Women’s Day last week reading out the names of all the women killed in Britain by men in the past year. So many names. And what’s happening now? What’s going to be happening tomorrow?
Nazir Afzal, solicitor and former chief crown prosecutor for north-west England. Afzal helped bring the Rotherham grooming gang to justice: Five years ago, I tried to organise a “million man march” on the subject of violence against women and girls. I got 52 signups.
Jackson Katz: Oh, man. Listening to some of the male voices on social media this week, I keep hearing people saying: “Not all men!” To which I would say: if you have the impulse to say “not all men”, don’t. It’s silly, and it’s not a good look. Because, yes, although men are more likely to die violently than women, and, yes, not all men are violent, there’s no doubt that the overwhelming majority of violence that happens between the genders happens by men against women. And the vast majority of violence that men suffer is at the hands of other men. So men and women have a common enemy, which is male violence.
If men would realise that the same system that produces men who murder and assault women also produces men who murder and assault men, maybe they would think about working together, rather than being defensive and assuming that women are bashing them or that they’re “anti-men” when they are really speaking up for their own dignity and basic right to walk free from the fear of sexual violence.
Luke Hart: I guess I’m the perfect example of that male ignorance. I grew up pretty ignorant about my father’s behaviour. He wasn’t beating us regularly, so I thought: he’s not dangerous. But that wasn’t the case. It was extreme coercive control. Ryan and I have spent a long time trying to answer why my father did what he did. I mean, people always ask us that question. And I think there are two reasons. First: incredible entitlement. He saw himself as the patriarchal peak of the home, and my mother was basically his slave. So there’s that framing women as lesser. But the bit that makes men do the horrible things, I think, is just sheer resentment. The resentment fuels the action. Everything wrong in my father’s life was down to my mother and sister. He wrote it in his murder note. So you have to understand that entitlement and resentment because it underpins everything: the harassment of women, the catcalling, everything you see in the streets. It’s endemic.
Nazir Afzal: I’ve prosecuted hundreds of rapes, hundreds of femicides. And in all the rapes I’ve prosecuted – from looking at the evidence – not one of the men was motivated by sex. They were motivated by being able to control the woman.
People think we need to identify those men who are sex maniacs if we want to catch rapists. But rapists were motivated by that need to control and coerce. Sometimes it leads to rape, sometimes it leads to voyeurism, sexual assault, femicide or just controlling a women’s choices so she can’t go where she wants and see who she chooses. And you know what? Men can spot when it’s happening.
I can’t tell you the amount of friendships I’ve lost – deliberately. They make jokes and it’s abundantly clear. You ask them what their wife is up to that evening, and they say: “She’s not allowed to go out.” One man I knew told me that he installed tracking apps on his wife’s and daughter’s phones. I sussed him out, and he knew. I’ve not seen him since. And I reported him to the authorities.
Christopher Muwanguzi: You know, we’re all going to lose friends. Because sometimes you have to say: I’m sorry, but that’s not acceptable. There is a teachable moment in every opportunity with a young person.
Nazir Afzal: Right! In order to change the culture, we need to hold everyone to account. Don’t we? We can’t say: “Oh, he’s just like that.” Because we don’t educate people about this stuff. Hate is a learned behaviour; you don’t learn things until people teach you. Misogyny is the earliest prejudice – it started in the Garden of Eden. We need to be teaching children from the age of five about gender equality, about good and bad relationships.
Christopher Muwanguzi: Let me jump on that train. You’re right: this behaviour doesn’t happen in a vacuum. These toxic behaviours are learned. There’s this idea that manliness is about violence, aggression, power and holding people down, rather than supporting and being part of a community.
Jackson Katz: Yes! But the thing is, learned behaviour is passive. These attitudes and beliefs about manhood, they’re actively taught. It’s media culture, sports culture, peer culture and porn culture. All these influences teach men certain lessons about manhood and social norms that are produced and reproduced at every level. The reason it’s so hard to deal with these issues is because we can’t just isolate individual perpetrators as pathological monsters. Because it is our society that’s producing these abusive men on a regular basis, generation after generation, across class, race and ethnicity.
There’s always this tendency when a tragic killing happens to think about the individual as crazy, sick, diabolical – as opposed to thinking: he’s a product of society that has a group of norms along a spectrum. And when you start thinking of those norms on a spectrum, it implicates all of us. That makes a lot of guys get really defensive because they know they’re part of the problem in a larger sense. And that means they have to be introspective and self-critical. They have to move past this idea that because they don’t go out and murder women or beat their girlfriends, they’re not part of the problem. Because they may still be perpetrating the norms of masculinity that contribute to this situation.
Christopher Muwanguzi: I think role modelling is the best solution. It can be as simple as not talking over women – recognising that’s not acceptable and picking up on it when it happens. I was talking to a friend recently who works at a school. She was physically intimidated by a large group of boys. A male teacher said: “You know boys!” But that’s him agreeing that intimidating behaviour is acceptable, and refusing to challenge it. He is all the men who turn a blind eye, who think things are OK, who say: “This is normal. It happens every day.” We need to show young people better role models.
Nazir Afzal: We also need to look at our institutions. As men, we want to excuse male behaviour. That comes across in the media. How many times have you seen the headline along the lines of “Man with drink problem kills wife”, or “Man kills wife because she had an affair”? It is a problem in our legal institutions, too. You know, the prosecution rate for rape in this country is about 1% [of rapes recorded by the police in England and Wales]. There’s a feeling, quite rightly, that rape has been decriminalised. There’s also a big systemic issue about how we treat sexual violence victims full stop.
There are many women who’ll never again report a crime because of the way they were treated. The Norwegian model, where each victim gets their own paid-for lawyer, would be a good option, I think. It costs money. But we’ve got to start giving the victim more power than she has; that’s the only way we’re going to change things.
Jackson Katz: Earlier Christopher talked about teachable moments. Right now, in the UK, there’s this huge explosion of outrage. Talk about a teachable moment! The time for men to step up is right now. How are we going to start holding men accountable in a positive way? The rehabilitation of individual men – everyone needs to be involved in it. It’s not about pointing to individual men and saying: “He needs to go to therapy, the wiring in his brain needs to be fixed.” If everyone is part of the change, it makes it easier for each individual. I believe in redemption. I believe you don’t just toss people away. People can learn and be taught new ways of being. But it’s not easy.
Christopher Muwanguzi: I also believe in redemption. But there needs to be consequences for actions, too, whether intended or unintended. And we have to think about how we tell the survivors’ stories to men so that they can understand the impact.
I also want to talk about emotional literacy, mental wellbeing and health. It cannot be separated from this discussion. Because it is what’s creating a system that allows individuals to go out and do harm. We need to create environments for men and women to tell their stories. Like Luke’s story – my God, that’s powerful. I listen to it and think about what sort of father I am to my son.
We need to be thinking: a woman has been killed. Am I checking my unconscious bias? Am I asking my sister, my mother, my wife, my friend, how they have felt? Am I listening?
Jackson Katz: I’m one of the architects of the “bystander approach” [which emphasises the roles witnesses can play in challenging behaviour]. This can be something as simple as intervening when someone tells a rape joke to stopping a rape in progress in front of you. It’s not about being a superhero or rescuing the damsel in distress. It’s about as a man, making it clear you don’t tolerate sexism or misogyny – and if you hear that from your friend, you’re going to make it clear that you’re not cool with it, and he’s violating the norms and values of you and the group he is a part of. That’s peer culture policing – rather than looking for an external authority to police your peer’s behaviour. If we can build that into schools, at the youngest age possible, you’ll see a significant change.
Luke Hart: Part of being a bloke is putting up a facade sometimes. But men need to talk about how they’re feeling and figure that out with other people. My brother and I were very stoical. We used to put a lot of our aggression into sport. One of the real challenges we faced in dealing with our dad was: what do we do with all our anger? Because you don’t want to be like your father, right? Anger is bad. Aggression is bad. And that sort of tore us apart, internally.
Then we realised that you can use aggression to give you confidence and courage to tackle bad behaviour around you, and challenge the darkness in ourselves. For those who are in a dark place it can be useful to try to accept those parts of ourselves, and put them in their rightful place. Confront all of that difficulty. Only when you take responsibility for it can you do something about it.
That’s something that was totally lacking in my father. He had no responsibility or control over himself. My father was not a happy man. You don’t blow your head off if you’ve reached the pinnacle of achievement. So you have to realise: abusers are miserable too. They’re making everyone around them miserable. So I would say: have the conversation. If there was ever a time to start talking about being a bloke, and doing it better, it’s now.
The conversation in this panel has been edited for length.