‘Real men don't hit women’: Constructing masculinity in the prevention of violence against women
| Author | Michael Salter |
| DOI | 10.1177/0004865815587031 |
| Published date | 01 December 2016 |
| Date | 01 December 2016 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Australian & New Zealand
Journal of Criminology
2016, Vol. 49(4) 463–479
!The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/0004865815587031
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Article
‘Real men don’t hit women’:
Constructing masculinity in the
prevention of violence against
women
Michael Salter
University of Western Sydney, Australia
Abstract
The primary prevention of violence against women has become a national and international
priority for researchers and policy makers. While optimistic about the potential of the
prevention agenda, this paper advances two related critiques of the construction of mas-
culinities within violence against women primary prevention in high-income countries. The
first is that it affords gender norms an unjustified priority over gender inequality as deter-
minants of violence against women. The second critique is that the myopic focus of vio-
lence against women prevention efforts on gender norms results in a ‘one-dimensional’
view of masculinity. Nationally and internationally prominent violence against women pre-
vention activities are grounded in a view of masculinity as a normative phenomenon dis-
embedded from economic and political processes. As the paper argues, such a sanitised and
one-dimensional account of masculinity is unable to explicable the practical steps necessary
to achieve the aims of primary prevention. The paper argues that primary prevention
efforts should be reorientated away from decontextualised and quasi-transcendental
accounts of masculinity and towards non-violence as a suppressed possibility within the
existing social order, and one that requires economic and political as well as cultural change
if it is to be realised.
Keywords
Gender, masculinities, prevention, violence, women
Introduction
In 2014, the United Nations Development Program Goodwill Ambassador
Antonio Banderas recorded videos in English and Spanish that were distributed
online in support of the United Nations’ efforts to end violence against
Corresponding author:
Michael Salter, School of Social Sciences and Psychology, University of Western Sydney, Locked Bag 1797, Penrith
NSW 2751, Australia.
Email: Michael.salter@uws.edu.au
women (VAW) (UNDP, 2014). In an article headlined ‘Real men don’t hit women’,
Banderas stated:
As a male and as an artist I believe that women are a source of life -and poetry. Not even
with a rose petal should women be offended or abused ...Hitting or abusing a woman is an
act of cowardice. Real men don’t hit women.
The video was shot in Chile’s Atacama desert. The location dramatises the metaphorical
links Banderas makes between femininity and the nurturance of life. Presumably, then,
the desert represents a wasteland of masculinity in the absence of the supposedly life-
giving element of femininity. The reverence for women expressed by Banderas is not
premised on a shared humanity or equality but rather on essentialist differences between
men and women, and the value of femininity as synonymous with motherhood. The
invocation of the rose frames the protection of women in terms of romantic love and
heterosexual desire, both capitalising on but also advancing Banderas’ public image as
recently single movie star and heart throb. Banderas’ sentiment that ‘real men don’t hit
women’ has been imposed over his image on the www.heforshe.org website of UN
Women and serves as the message of a prevention campaign featuring Banderas circu-
lated on social media.
With the ascendency of VAW prevention as an international public health priority,
there are now a range of campaigns and programmes that aim to reduce VAW at the
population level by changing social norms and attitudes regarding gender and violence.
As Bandaras’ campaign illustrates, many of these activities foreground and endorse
rather than challenge existing norms about masculinity. This paper examines the
dependence of many VAW primary prevention campaigns and programmes on regres-
sive notions of ‘real masculinity’. It describes how the scope of VAW primary prevention
has narrowed over time from a dual focus on structural gender inequality and gender
norms to a largely normative approach that subsumes gender inequality to gender
norms. This has resulted in an abstract notion of gender norms decontextualised from
the social, economic and political contexts in which they take shape and meaning. This
inattention to the structural determinants of VAW has promoted a ‘one-dimensional’
(Marcuse, 1964) account of masculinity that, the paper argues, potentially reinforces
violence-supportive attitudes and obscures the social conditions and stressors associated
with VAW. The paper advocates for a critical rather than normative theory of mascu-
linity that directs equivalent attention to structural as well as normative interventions.
This would supplement prevention campaigns and direct participation programmes with
an agenda of mobilisation against those social, economic and political processes that
increase risk of VAW perpetration and victimisation.
The shift away from gender inequality in VAW prevention
The VAW primary prevention agenda emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s out of
an international confluence of feminist activism and public health efforts to reduce vio-
lence against women and children (Heise, Pitanguy, & Germain, 1994). Momentum grew
throughout the 1990s culminating in the 2002 publication of the World Report on
Violence and Health by the World Health Organisation (Krug, Dahlberg, Mercy,
464 Australian & New Zealand Journal of Criminology 49(4)
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