Bob Pease

Factors Influencing Attitudes to Violence Against Women

Attitudes toward mens violence against women shape both the perpetration of violence against women and responses to this violence by the victim and others around her. For these reasons, attitudes are the target of violence-prevention campaigns. To improve understanding of the determinants of violence against women and to aid the development of violence-prevention efforts, this article reviews the factors that shape attitudes toward violence against women. It offers a framework with which to comprehend the complex array of influences on attitudes toward violent behavior perpetrated by men against women. Two clusters of factors, associated with gender and culture, have an influence at multiple levels of the social order on attitudes regarding violence. Further factors operate at individual, organizational, communal, or societal levels in particular, although their influence may overlap across multiple levels. This article concludes with recommendations regarding efforts to improve attitudes toward violence against women.

Transforming Social Work Practice: Postmodern Critical Perspectives

Transforming Social Work Practice shows that postmodern theory offers new strategies for social workers concerned with political action and social justice. It explores ways of developing practice frameworks, paradigms and principles which take advantage of the perspectives offered by postmodern theory without totally abandoning the values of modernity and the Enlightenment project of human emancipation. Case studies demonstrate how these perspectives can be applied to practice.

Neoliberalism and Australian social work: Accommodation or resistance?

• Summary: Since the mid-1970s the Australian welfare state has faced a continuing crisis of resourcing and legitimation. Social work as a central entity within the welfare state has been challenged in terms of to its value base and relevance. As with much of the Western world, this challenge has been heightened with the rise of neoliberalism, which has pervaded most aspects of Australian society. Neoliberalism has consequently had a profound effect upon Australian social workers. The challenges to the Australian welfare state and social work are from without and within, by neoliberal ideas and its practices. • Findings: While neoliberalism’s relationship to social work as a broad theme is explored in the literature, the complexity of marketization and inclusive aspects have not been considered in any detail in relation to social work. The evidence in the Australian context is even slimmer, and as a consequence the particularity of the Australian welfare state and its relationship to neoliberalism, and the consequences for Australian social work, remains largely untested. Furthermore, while there are some indications of the day to day impact on social work in the context of a post-welfare state regime, little work has been conducted on the capacity of neoliberalism to infiltrate social work through its new institutions of the social and thus become embedded in social work. • Application: This article lays the foundations for a research project to examine the extent to which neoliberalism has become embedded in Australian social work and how social workers and social work educators are responding to these hegemonic influences. What are the ways in which social workers have become complicit in neoliberalism? Is Australian social work part of the neoliberal project to the point where neoliberalism has become part of its understandings and everyday activity? It is hoped that through this research, a more sophisticated understanding of the impact of neoliberalism on social work will contribute to the revitalization of critical social work in Australia and forms of resistance to the neoliberal project.

Men in Social Work: Challenging or Reproducing an Unequal Gender Regime?

This article is concerned with the reproduction of gender inequality in social work and the extent to which the presence of men in the profession challenges discriminatory processes and occupational segregation. Although it is argued that men need to take more responsibility for caring roles in professions like social work, many of the rationales for encouraging more men to enter social work are unlikely to support alternative masculinities that will challenge gender inequalities. Only a profeminist commitment informing antisexist practices will enable men to address gender inequality in social work.

(Re)Constructing Men's Interests

Do men have too much to lose to be reliable allies with women in challenging patriarchy? This article addresses this question by exploring feminist views about the “man question” and reflecting on a dialogue in a pro-feminist electronic discussion group about whether it is mens interests to change. It challenges the view that men, as individuals, have objective interests that arise as a consequence of being men in a patriarchal society and argues that while men may construct interests toward their own material well being, they may also construct ideal interests that are formed by support for more abstract principles. It is thus suggested that men formulate a sense of having particular interests and that they behave on the basis of this formulation. The implications of this view for reconstructing mens interests toward support for feminism are discussed.

Domestic Violence in Refugee Families in Australia

Abstract It has been identified that immigrant and refugee women are particularly at risk in cases of domestic violence. This article reveals the qualitative research findings from a study into the significance of traumatic history, social and economic context, cultural differences and changed gender identities on the perceptions and experiences of domestic violence in refugee families. The study was undertaken with a sample of refugee men and women from Iraq, Ethiopia, Sudan, Serbia, Bosnia and Croatia. Compounding contextual factors concerning structurally based inequalities, culturally emerged challenges, social dissonance, psychological stress and patriarchal foundations are revealed. Informed by an intersectional framework that recognizes gender oppression as modified by intersections with other forms of inequality, the article argues the case for community-managed projects involving multi-level empowerment-based interventions to prevent domestic violence.

Undoing Men's Privilege and Advancing Gender Equality in Public Sector Institutions

Abstract Discrimination against women in public sector organisations has been the focus of considerable research in recent years. While much of this literature acknowledges the structural basis of gender inequality, strategies for change are often focused on anti-discrimination policies, equal employment opportunities and diversity management. Discriminatory behaviour is often individualised in these interventions and the larger systems of dominance and subordination are ignored. The flipside of gender discrimination, we argue, is the privileging of men. The lack of critical interrogation of mens privilege allows men to reinforce their dominance. In this paper we offer an account of gender inequalities and injustices in public sector institutions in terms of privilege. The paper draws on critical scholarship on men and masculinities and an emergent scholarship on mens involvement in the gender relations of workplaces and organisations, to offer both a general account of privilege and an application of this framework to the arena of public sector institutions and workplaces in general.

Reconstructing Masculinity or Ending Manhood? The Potential and Limitations of Transforming Masculine Subjectivities for Gender Equality

Some years ago, I researched the politics and practices of profeminist men (Pease, Recreating Men). I argued at the time that one of the most central issues for women’s prospects for gender equality is whether or not men can and will change. I put the view that changing the social relations of gender will involve changing men’s subjectivities, as well as their daily practices. This research was grounded in my own experiences as white heterosexual man who was committed to a profeminist position.

Governing Men’s Violence against Women in Australia

In this chapter I reflect upon the impact of men’s involvement in men’s violence against women prevention campaigns in Australia. Men’s involvement in antiviolence policy development and interventions has contributed to the marginalizing of feminist analyses of men’s violence. This has occurred through a range of discursive shifts in the naming, theorizing, and engagement with men’s violence. This includes framing “men’s violence” as “violence against women”; adopting public health approaches that treat violence as analogous to a disease; promoting ecological conceptual frameworks that criticize feminist analyses as linear single-cause theories; and elaborating models of risk assessment that target subgroups of men and disconnect “non-violent” men from their perpetuation of men’s violence. All of these developments are consistent with neoliberal forms of governing men’s violence against women rather than eliminating it.

Introduction: Transforming Men’s Practices Around the World

This book uses comparative perspectives to explore diverse educational and related approaches toward developing forms of masculinity that offer more to the lives of women, children, and men themselves. Such developments are sought in the context of global societies that, taken as a whole, are characterized by widespread gendered and other intersecting dimensions of oppression (Pease 2010). These developments are also occurring in response to contemporary gendered and other social challenges, many of which are related to the globalizing processes and include: developing formations of femininities and masculinities; changes in men’s attitudes and/or behaviors regarding work, including caring work, in the home and in the labor market; transformations in conceptualizations and practices of parenting, for instance, relating to “lone parenthood” and lesbian, gay, and trans-parenting; racializing practices in communities and societies; changing patterns and forms of men’s sexualities and violences.