Violent Men Research Articles

From men's violence to an ethic of care: Ecofeminist contributions to green criminology

Green criminology has made important contributions to criminological inquiry by highlighting the destructive impact of humans on the more-than-human world. However, it often adopts a gender-neutral lens that overlooks the disproportionate role of men and masculinities in perpetrating green harms. This paper places green criminology into critical dialogue with ecofeminism, arguing that harms against the environment and nonhuman animals are inextricably gendered and should be understood as interconnected forms of men's violence. Ecofeminist insights reveal that violence against the more-than-human world is rooted in hierarchical dualisms, whereby humans are placed separate from and above nature, and the masculine is defined as superior to the feminine. This hierarchical logic enables men to view others in detached, instrumental ways and serves to legitimise acts of men's violence. But just as ecofeminism provides green criminologists with a productive framework for understanding men's violence against the environment and nonhuman animals, it also provides a means of moving beyond this violence. It does this by advocating for an ethic of care that unravels hierarchical modes of thinking and promotes more harmonious relationships between humans and the more-than-human world. By building caring, egalitarian relationships with other living beings (and with their own emotional selves), it is harder for men to act in violent, dominating ways towards others, providing the foundation for more sustainable, interdependent ways of being.

Hostile Masculinity, Male Peer Support for Violence, and Problematic Anger: Linking Childhood Abuse to Men's Partner Violence Perpetration.

Child abuse and masculinity have been linked to intimate partner violence (IPV) perpetration. However, there is a lack of work examining multiple aspects of masculinity as links between early abuse experiences and men's IPV perpetration. Grounded in notions of gendered power and patriarchy, this study aimed to examine hostile masculinity, male peer support for violence against women, and problematic anger as aspects of masculinity connecting childhood victimization and men's violence against women. Structural equation modeling results demonstrated that childhood adversity was indirectly related to IPV perpetration via the proposed factors. However, various patterns emerged based on the type of childhood abuse experienced. Practice-based implications are offered.

Differential Intervention Outcomes Among Fathers Who Commit Domestic and Family Violence: The Influence of Parental Relationship Status

Abstract Background In Western contexts, the behavior of domestically violent men is largely addressed through legal sanctions and standardised men’s behavior change programs. When domestically violent fathers remain together or in contact with their families, safety is an ongoing concern. However, program evaluations have failed to provide clear evidence for their effectiveness in addressing family violence in relation to parenting status. Part of the problem in developing efficacious programs has been the challenge of targeting them to typologies or socio-cultural needs of participants. Purpose The Caring Dads (CD) program supports father-change through leveraging men’s motivation to be positive parents, promoting child-centred fathering and cessation of family abuse. The aim of this study was to investigate whether participating fathers improved their co-parenting interactions, family functioning and wellbeing, and considered father characteristics and relationship statuses that coincided with positive outcomes. Methods This mixed method Australian study investigating a CD pilot incorporated psychological measures and semi-structured interviews at pre-, post- and 10 months post-intervention. Participants were fathers who attended CD in South-East Queensland, 2017–2019, and their co-parents. Results All fathers experienced improvements in parenting and family functioning by post-intervention, with greatest improvements for partnered fathers’ families. Partnered fathers also experienced improved parental alliance, unlike most separated fathers, although results must be viewed with caution due to small sample size and attrition across the study duration. Conclusion This study provides early support for improvements in CD participants’ fathering, parental alliance, and family functioning, most substantially for partnered fathers, though findings should be further investigated with larger cohorts.

Why Don’t Heterosexual New Alternative Masculinities Choose Enchained Women for Either Sporadic or Long-Term Relationships?

Research on the reproduction of disdainful and toxic models of heterosexual relationships shows their negative effects on people’s health status. Contrarily, the preventive socialization process illustrates the development of alternative relationships, which are directly related to egalitarian, passionate and non-violent values and have been demonstrated to produce positive effects on health. The present study focuses on the socialization process, analyzing how men choose their affective and sexual relationships and examining the influence of the new alternative masculinities (NAM) approach on these choices. The defining characteristics of these men are self-confidence, solidarity, and strength to face violence and any discrimination. The investigation has used a qualitative methodology with a communicative orientation. Firstly, seven semi-structured interviews with men who follow the NAM’s approach have been conducted. Secondly, a content analysis has been conducted focused on discourses and messages shaped on internet forums and songs about how men explain their choices and interests in their relationships. The results reveal the existence of men who prefer women that get excited with egalitarian men and not with chauvinist and violent men. These kinds of choices show an improvement in heterosexual men’s affective and sexual relations as well as in their health status.

Dare to Ask! A Model for Teaching Nursing Students about Identifying and Responding to Violence against Women and Domestic Violence.

The role of nurses in identifying and responding to family violence and violence against women has long been established. However, nurses' readiness to fully assume this role remains low due to various barriers and the sensitive nature of the subject. As part of capacity building to address this problem, an additional national qualitative learning target, i.e., to "show knowledge about men's violence against women and violence in close relationships", was introduced into the Swedish Higher Education Ordinance for nursing and seven other educational programs between 2017 and 2018. The aim of this paper is to describe how the national qualitative learning target is incorporated into the undergraduate nursing curriculum at the Swedish Red Cross University College. An overview of relevant teaching and learning activities and how they are organized is first presented, followed by the presentation of a proposed didactic model: Dare to Ask and Act! The model details a step-by-step progression from facts and figures, including the role of gender norms, to recognizing signs of abuse in complex clinical situations, as well as developing skills that enhance the courage to ask and act. Due to the sensitive nature of violence victimization, the proposed model reflects the importance of making the subject a reoccurring theme in undergraduate nursing education in order to boost nursing students' interests and confidence to "Dare to Ask and Act!". The model also shows that making the subject a recurring theme can be achieved with minimal disruptions to and without overcrowding an existing curriculum.

Femcel Discussions of Sex, Frustration, Power, and Revenge.

Although male incels have received a great deal of scholarly attention in recent years, there has been almost no research on femcels (involuntarily celibate women). After collecting data from more than 24,000 femcel posts, we drew from a recently developed sexual frustration theory and conducted qualitative analyses of approximately 1200. Overall, our findings suggest that (1) femcels struggled with multiple types of sexual frustration; (2) they frequently discussed the gender dynamics of both sex and power; (3) they were more interested in their own frustrations than men's frustrations; and (4) despite some notable exceptions, they exhibited less support for aggression, violence, and crime than what has been reported about male incels. Although some femcels referenced their anger, hatred, or desires for revenge, this antipathy may have been rooted in their concerns about how to find a suitable intimate partner while avoiding the threat women often face from violent men. Despite this challenge, most femcels who wanted to enhance their situation or increase their power sought to do so through legal means (e.g., self-improvement, group mobilization, or challenging the patriarchy) and did not express violent intent. Further research on femcels, and the evidence-based strategies that could help them, would be a significant contribution to society.

Managing the manosphere: The limits of responsibility for government social media adoption

The prevalence of hate, threats, gender trolling, and other problematic communication patterns in social media prompts concerns about the responsibility associated with government social media adoption. In addressing this issue, this paper adopts a feminist perspective to enrich our understanding of how governments assume responsibility for their adoption of social media. The study contains a sentiment and thematic analysis of responses to a government video campaign on Facebook, which seeks to heighten public awareness about men's violence against women by highlighting problems surrounding sexist jokes. The video targets two audiences in terms of gender, resulting in various outcomes in sentiments, trolling, and trolling management. Results show disparities in sentiments between males and females, the diverse strategies employed in trolling, and how both users and the local government manage trolling. The local government deploys different strategies for trolling management, encompassing both engaging and non-engaging approaches. Notably, engagement is constrained to the targeted male audience and male trollers. The primary responsibility for trolling management is delegated to users, predominantly women, who become proxies for the local government. This dual practice of ignoring women as relevant stakeholders and utilizing them as proxies is considered a failure of responsibility. The study contributes to the advancement of citizen engagement research by delving into the intricate dynamics of trolling and trolling management within the specific context of government social media. Moreover, it sheds light on issues of responsibility inherent in the adoption of social media by governmental entities.

Causality of mental health and child marriage

The goal and problem of this research is the impact of minor (child) marriages on the mental health of minors in Montenegro. Child marriages are especially present in Roma and Egyptian communities in these and wider areas. After extensive research on a representative sample of both sexes, the assumptions that domestic violence still dominates in these ethnic communities have been confirmed. The average age of girls at the time of marriage is 16.47, and for men 18.39. According to this research, the youngest married couples are 12-year-old girls and 13-year-old boys. In addition to arranged minor marriages, which are a kind of violence against violence, other forms of violence (physical, sexual, emotional, economic, social, racial, child theft and child trafficking) have also been established. In some form, men's violence against women is present without exception. The causes of violence against women are numerous, starting with alcohol, drugs, gambling, poverty, jealousy, lack of education, and tradition. According to the respondents, poverty is not the main reason for violence against women, but the analysis of the results of the regression and correlation analysis show that poverty is highly correlated with alcohol, drugs and gambling. Jealousy as a reason for physical violence is very little represented. Women's attitudes towards violence particularly interesting and unexpected. As many as 26.3% of women support violence in all circumstances and violence in certain circumstances. Men were even more passionate, 40.9% of men believe that violence is acceptable in all circumstances and in certain circumstances. It is indicative and important to point out that 22.3% of women and 36.6% of men did not express their opinion on this issue. Women did not declare that they suffer violence because of fear of new violence, and men did not declare because of sanctions by the competent institutions. The main cause of poor mental health among minors, especially among girls, is early marriage, which interrupts natural biological growth and development. Numerous disruptive endogenous and exogenous factors generate violence up to murder, and the ultimate outcome of violence is chronically disturbed mental health.

“Of Monsters and Men: A Feminist Political Theological Approach to Male Perpetrator Shame Over Patriarchal Violence”

ABSTRACT Political theology is a male-dominated area that has devoted little attention to the political dimensions of emotion, which has historically been feminized. This lacuna matters given that men’s patriarchal violence is intimately connected to emotion, particularly shame. As an alternative to popular mainstream accounts of shame today that say that patriarchally violent men need to expunge their shame in order to heal and become accountable, this article offers a feminist political theological perspective. In this alternative view, shame can be understood as a fruitful emotion that prompts men both to avoid subscribing to the myth of shame-free image-rehabilitation and to envision themselves as agents capable of unlearning habits of patriarchal violence. However, this approach will work only if our culture rejects the falsehood that patriarchal violence is committed by deviant monsters and not by “regular” human men.

Latent class analysis of the heterogeneity of intimate partner violent men: Implications for research and practice.

Latent class analysis of the heterogeneity of intimate partner violent men: Implications for research and practice.

Molding the Fear: Representations of Fatherhood in Clay by Violent Men

This article presents an artistic inquiry among three students during an art-based research course in the art therapy master’s program at Ono Academy, Israel. Their collaboration focused on composing inquiry modes that could explore paternal representations of violent men that arise in artmaking with clay. Three fathers who took part in an abuse-prevention art therapy group, their group facilitator as a witness, and the three student-researchers participated in the project. The paper focuses on the research method that comprised artmaking with clay, a questionnaire, observations, and discussions. Two main themes arose within the study: coexisting contrasts and false perfection as well as a gained sense of success and assurance that could project onto their perceptions of parenting. The project highlights the significance of artmaking with clay as a research tool and as a potential prophylactic treatment for preventing domestic violence.

The Unmanliness of Ostracism: The Role of Masculine Gender Role Stress and Intimate Partner Violence in Men’s Mental Health

The Unmanliness of Ostracism: The Role of Masculine Gender Role Stress and Intimate Partner Violence in Men’s Mental Health

“You think that, again, that’s the medication”: reflecting on qualitative methods for interviewing family members of violent and impulsive men in an intervention trial

ABSTRACT Qualitative research in psychology can often maintain standards and assumptions from positivistic and experimental methodologies. Sometimes these issues are well argued against or around logically in literature, often abstractly, but cases of methodological consideration with real cases are rarer. This discussion aims to help methodological reflection and learning by presenting a case of multiple intersecting methodological considerations. The methods included a content analysis completed on interviews with women related to men participating in a violence and intervention trial. This paper presents the limitations and methodological considerations during analysis as a detailed discussion. Considerations arose from assumptions in the research design, interpreter use and leading questions. The discussion describes considerations and solutions depending on the scope required – here working with women in or near contexts of violence. Hopefully, a demonstration of full considerations within such a project encourages similar case-based examinations of research.

The rise of carceral feminism in Sweden: Analysing political debate and policy on men's violence against women

Drawing on recent parliamentary debates and policy proposals, this article illustrates how penal policies and punitive agendas to combat gendered violence are on the rise in Sweden. While right-wing parties have long deployed a rhetoric of crime and punishment, today the Social Democrats and Left Party (labelling themselves feminist), as well as parts of the women's shelter movement, are deploying a similar discourse. This article shows how men's violence against women suddenly became a highly prioritised political issue within a discursive framework of ‘crime and punishment’, thereby asking whether carceral feminism is emerging in Sweden. Firstly, we analyse the logic of this approach, after which we discuss associated risks, such as how carceral feminism (re)shapes the understanding of gendered violence, that it is neither effective nor demanded by victims and has stratifying and stigmatising effects on racialised communities. Furthermore, it silences material welfare solutions and ultimately legitimates the expansion of penal policies, thereby providing a foundation for a carceral state in which repression becomes the standard response to social problems.

Oxytocin normalizes the implicit processing of fearful faces in psychopathy: a randomized crossover study using fMRI

Adults with antisocial personality disorder with (ASPD + P) and without (ASPD – P) psychopathy commit the majority of violent crimes. Empathic processing abnormalities are particularly prominent in psychopathy, but effective pharmacological interventions have yet to be identified. Oxytocin modulates neural responses to fearful expressions in healthy populations. The current study investigates its effects in violent antisocial men. In a placebo-controlled, randomized crossover design, 34 violent offenders (19 ASPD + P; 15 ASPD – P) and 24 healthy non-offenders received 40 IU intranasal oxytocin or placebo and then completed an fMRI morphed faces task examining the implicit processing of fearful facial expressions. Increasing intensity of fearful facial expressions failed to appropriately modulate activity in the bilateral mid-cingulate cortex in violent offenders with ASPD + P, compared with those with ASPD – P. Oxytocin abolished these group differences. This represents evidence of neurochemical modulation of the empathic processing of others’ distress in psychopathy.

Determinants of intimate partner controlling behavior targeting women in Türkiye.

Intimate partner controlling behavior toward women is an important form of intimate partner violence (IPV), both in terms of limiting women's daily lives and in terms of reproducing patriarchal culture and male dominance in societies at the micro level. A limited number of studies in the literature have identified the male intimate partner's controlling behavior as a dependent variable, which is important for understanding the determinants of this type of IPV. There is also a significant gap in the literature in terms of studies focusing on the case of Türkiye. Thus, the main aim of this study was to determine the socio-demographic, economic and violence-related factors that have an effect on women's status in terms of exposure to control behavior in Türkiye. These factors were examined by using binary logistic regression analysis, based on the micro data set collected by the Hacettepe University's Institute of Population Studies in the 2014-dated National Research on Domestic Violence against Women in Türkiye. A total of 7,462 women between the ages of 15 and 59 were interviewed face-to-face. The findings of the study revealed that women are more likely to be exposed to controlling behavior if they live in rural areas, are unmarried, speak Turkish as their mother tongue, have bad or very bad health conditions, justify men's violence and are afraid of their intimate partners. As women's age, level of education and income contribution increase, their likelihood of exposure to controlling behavior decreases. However, women's exposure to economic, physical and emotional violence also increases their likelihood of exposure to controlling behavior. The findings highlighted the importance of creating public policies that make women less vulnerable to men's controlling behavior, providing women with methods and mechanisms of resistance and raising public awareness of the exacerbating effects of controlling behavior on social inequalities.

Religious Horror and Holy War in Viking Age Francia, by Matthew Bryan Gillis

The analysis of both religious and political rhetoric has long been a staple of Carolingian studies, often with the salutary benefit of revealing the underlying intentions of major secular and ecclesiastical figures, as well as their conceptions of their audiences. The fortuitously increasing scholarly attention to military matters in the Carolingian era in recent decades has opened up new areas for this type of rhetorical analysis, with concomitant benefits for our understanding of contemporary thinking about warfare and its role in shaping many different aspects of society. Matthew Gillis’s study is a valuable new addition to the rhetorical analysis of later ninth- and early tenth-century Carolingian texts, which shed light on contemporary attitudes and concerns about politics, religion and, above all, warfare against the Northmen. Rather than a traditional monograph, Gillis has organised his study into four distinct essays that nevertheless overlap both in subject matter and in the source materials. Part I considers in detail the language of horror employed by the West Frankish ruler Carloman II (879–884) in a capitulary that he issued at the royal palace of Ver in March 884. The focus of the capitulary, like many of the royal edicts issued by Carolingian kings in West Francia, was the danger posed to the realm by marauding bands of violent men, as well as by magnates, who were driven by lust for power rather than for the good of the res publica. As Gillis makes clear, however, Carloman’s capitulary differs from earlier texts in its use of the rhetoric of horror. Particularly striking is the king’s use of the imagery of Christian soldiers eating the flesh and drinking the blood of the people whom they were supposed to protect. Gillis argues that this imagery was chosen in order to shock Carloman’s audience into an understanding of just how great their sins were, and to make clear that victory against the Northmen, who were a constant danger in this period, was impossible so long as Christians were guilty of the same kinds of atrocities against their own people as were these marauders.

The Birthday Party by Laurent Mauvignier

Reviewed by: The Birthday Party by Laurent Mauvignier Thomas Nolden LAURENT MAUVIGNIER The Birthday Party Trans. Daniel Levin Becker. Oakland, California. Transit Books. 2023. 444 pages. LAURENT MAUVIGNIER'S 444-pagelong novel is a painfully slow burn, and yet it provides for a most compulsive read. Mauvignier, the prolific French author of a dozen novels, has chosen a remote hamlet in the French provinces for the setting of his thriller, revisiting a setting of which French writers are quite fond. While Mathias Énard introduced the readers of his novel The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers' Guild to the quaint sides of country life, largely from the perspective of a young Parisian anthropologist striving to translate the mores of the provinces into a dissertation, Mauvignier's humorous depiction of life in the French boonies does so entirely without the wink of the eye. Instead, he pulls out the gun of psychological scrutiny and puts four inhabitants of a small hamlet into the crosshairs of a relentless tour de force of narrative reckoning. Mauvignier finds them in the geographical isolation of a few houses ominously called "Three Lone Girls"—a setting that slowly but surely will be revealed as a trap. Patrice Bergogne, an overweight and underappreciated farmer, tries to make a living off the little land he has inherited, lovingly devoted to his young daughter, Ida, and to his mystifyingly indifferent wife, Marion. With her fortieth birthday advancing, Marion for her part had never succeeded in reciprocating her husband's patient advances and innumerable attempts at creating a marital life that may meet even the lowest of expectations. The reader learns that Patrice's sexual and emotional frustration are hardly a recent twist in the story of their marriage. From the beginning of their relationship, Patrice was painfully yet acceptingly aware of the mismatch between him, the bumbling peasant, and his much more mundane wife who returns from her office jobs late in the evening. In contrast to her meek husband, Marion is not one to accept any crap from her male colleagues and supervisors at work. Instead, she calls them out for their misogynist attitudes and pursues them with an unrelenting drive, to the admiration of her female colleagues with whom she likes to party after work. Initially, the couple's neighbor, an older painter who had left Paris to resettle in the quietude of the Three Lone Girls, appears to be the narrative's target: Christine has been receiving threatening letters, which she reports, to little avail, to the police. The [End Page 73] artist is close to the young child of their busy neighbors, friendly with Patrice, and heedful of withdrawn and inaccessible Marion, who remains a mystery to her just as much as to the readers. With the pace, the persistence, and the sheer power of a cutterhead drilling a tunnel through the darkness of a mountain, Mauvignier penetrates the past and the present of his characters' private lives and feelings. The slow motion of his narrative may at first annoy his readers who, several chapters into the novel, have become most intimately acquainted with a set of characters without being afforded even a hunch of what this all will lead up to. Only when the preparations for Marion's fortieth birthday slowly but finally come into focus do they get a grasp of what's to come. Without increasing what students of cinema call the frames-per-second technique, Mauvignier has a new set of characters join the preparation for the celebration of Marion's birthday. With the unexpected arrival of three violent young men, the readers feel almost relieved as the portentous mood that has been evoked in an almost suffocating manner gets lifted at last. Of course, when the heavy clouds that have been hovering so low over the hamlet lift, it is not for the better. On the contrary. Following the meticulously prepared introduction of the setting and the characters, Mauvignier redirects the drill head of the novel to take aim at Marion's life before entering this marriage of unequals. Her past catches up with her in the form of three violent brothers who are out to get her, to get even...

Femininity work: The gendered politics of women managing violence in bar work

AbstractThis paper explores how women bar workers manage violence at work. Women bar workers in our study described that the capacity to recognize, intervene, and defuse potentially violent situations was a pragmatic response to the problem of men's violence in the night‐time economy. We analyze the gendered norms and expectations at play in how violence in bar work is managed by staff and locate this as a form of “femininity work” extending from the modes of attentive, emotionally‐attuned femininity that labor feminist labor studies theorists have described. In a context where hospitality labor already makes complex and often unexamined demands on young workers, the positioning of women bar staff as being more adept at managing violent situations suggests a particularly important demand made of women bar workers, central for understanding the enduring gendered power relations in contemporary interactive service labor.

“There Was No Other Option”: Femicide Perpetrators' Sensemaking on Gender and Violence in Buenos Aires, Argentina

Femicide has received growing attention as an important social issue in Argentina and other Latin American countries. Currently, most of the sociological, psychological, criminological, and public health research available on the topic focuses on victims rather than perpetrators and has tended to be quantitative or from an etic perspective. Understanding how perpetrators make sense of violence and the femicide to contextualize, justify, or legitimize their crimes is crucial in preventing future crimes. A secondary analysis of thirty-three narrative interviews of convicted femicide perpetrators in the Metropolitan Area of Buenos Aires was conducted. Interviews were coded in MAXQDA20 and analyzed thematically using deductive and inductive codes surrounding gender and violence. Three themes were salient in the analysis: violence as a resource triggered by abandonment; violence as denied harm-doing, justified contextually; and violence as the emotional transfer of pain. Threat of abandonment and necessity to physically communicate emotional turmoil emerged as themes where adherence to traditional gender norms was mechanized into violence. Few participants characterized themselves as violent men although they were all serving sentences for violent crimes. Violence was normalized and frequently justified by perpetrators. Participants viewed themselves exceptionally and contested the meaning of femicide and gender-based violence (GBV). This analysis offers recommendations for primary violence prevention and GBV interventions to center young men and potential perpetrators of intimate partner violence and femicide. In doing this, the burden of femicide prevention shifts from victims to perpetrators and the society at large.