Growing violence: the image of the boy in Australian domestic violence prevention campaigns

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper explores the discursive construction of boys in two Australia domestic violence primary prevention advertisement campaigns. The first, ‘Stop it at the Start’, is an Australian government initiative which launched in 2016 and includes five different video shorts. The second is the Victorian Government’s 2016 ‘Respect Women. For Our Children’s Future’ campaign, which includes two video advertisements: ‘Nothing Good about Dads Who Abuse Women’ and ‘Family Violence Has No Good Days’. We explore the tendency of these campaigns to construct boys as future perpetrators; their representation of boys’ unambiguous and painless inculcation into masculine violence; their lack of attention to the psychological effects of boys’ experiences of witnessing domestic violence; how the ‘future’ framing of the advertisement diverts attention away from violence done to women in the present; and, their failure to represent feminist education for boys. By examining these limitations, we draw attention to the places where an affirmative feminist studies of boys is needed in order to address the realities and needs of boys in the present.