What makes possible the systematic violence against girls and women is the harmful socialisation of boys, says Crispin Hemson.
Recently I was with a small group of men in tertiary education, in a workshop addressing violence. I was struck in particular by the accounts of two young men.
As a boy, one had been deeply hurt by hearing his mother’s screams. Her piercing cries had disturbed and troubled him, but nobody spoke to him, and nobody asked him what he felt about it. Eventually he found out that she had been mugged and nearly raped by some young thugs.
The sense of trauma did not leave him. Without talking to others in his family, he became obsessed with revenge. He had to make a man’s response to that hurt. As he came into his teen years, he found a way of punishing those who had so hurt his mother.
He became a thug, mugging women whose sons he thought could have been responsible. The cycle of violence thus came full circle, reproducing itself. The one victim of the trauma had become the perpetrator.
A second man spoke of his father’s contemptuous rage against him. He lived in fear of his father, was criticised and humiliated, and beaten for getting things wrong. His attempts to comply never succeeded in placating the father.
As he grew older, he sought a context where he could feel free and found it, in a group of teenage boys who drank. Alcohol became associated with warmth and acceptance. He did not speak of having used violence against girls and women, but we know well of the ways in which alcohol fuels gender-based violence.
These were failed responses to unbearable conditions, both driven by a combination of positive desires – to protest against violence, to find self-acceptance, to assert yourself – and the damaging messages directed against boys – don’t show emotion, don’t cry, hide and numb your feelings, be a man, show that you are tough, show that you can hold your drink, assert yourself, fight.
Fortunately, they were not the only responses they were capable of, as they were able to turn their lives towards higher education. Both accounts though raise the question of the responses that men make, and why they make such limited and harmful responses.
When we come to 16 Days of Activism for No Violence Against Women and Children, from November 25, there is a torrent of condemnation against men who abuse.
There is a sense that this becomes a ritual event that does not bring change. This is because we do not address the roots of the problem. In my view, “gender-based violence” is not only the violence that crosses genders. What makes possible the systematic violence against girls and women is the harmful socialisation of boys.
There is a saying that it takes a village to raise a child. Sometimes I think that it takes a village to harm a child, when social norms are unrelenting, when messages of masculinity are all-pervasive and alienating. We so easily forget that the models of masculinity that surround us were developed in conditions of subordination that made men into “boys”, the absence of fathers through labour migrancy, violent political conflicts.
When we see it as appropriate for boys to wash cars and to work in gardens, to fight, but not to cook or clean, and not to help care for the old and very young, we communicate a sense of limitation that damages boys’ sense of who they are. Boys may want to play roughly and create a fair bit of chaos (and girls too), but they are also caring and vulnerable.
Not allowing for this, not responding to this, damages them. It stops them exploring the range of responses that humans are capable of. And when those messages come from both women and men, boys feel they have no sense of alternative responses.
I hear from the accounts of young men the hostility and derision that was directed against them when they cried, when they did not take revenge, when they walked away from a pointless fight. When something bad happened, girls were allowed to cry and mourn, but boys were meant to “take it”. That becomes the burden of women when men “give it”.
All of us want to have a sense of our power, an ability to change situations. When boys experience humiliation and confusion, the danger is that this desire becomes channelled into a desire for domination, to prove yourself by exercising power over those you see as weaker.
If boys are vulnerable and insecure, we adults need to create spaces in which they can speak about these issues and explore more creative and confident responses to life.
* Crispin Hemson is the director of the International Centre of Nonviolence at the Durban University of Technology.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
The Mercury