As part of the WA government’s Family and Domestic Violence Primary Prevention Grants Program, Innovation Unit ran an exciting co-design project that takes a flexible and creative youth-led and focused approach to the primary prevention of family and domestic violence.
THE PROJECT
Primary prevention is about creating positive cultures where the risk of gendered violence doesn’t arise in the first place.
Primary prevention means addressing the underlying drivers of family and domestic violence by promoting gender equality. Moving even further upstream than early intervention work which might focus on recognising warning signs or ‘red flags’, primary prevention initiatives work with the whole population
- not just those who are at greater risk of experiencing or perpetrating violence. Primary prevention is long-term, complex work, and has the potential to make a huge impact toward ending men’s violence against women.
Working in the primary prevention space is difficult but necessary work. Violence is preventable.
PROJECT STAGES
Our project followed four key stages:
We spent the beginning of the project digging deep into the research and interviewing experts in the field.
The project is centred around addressing the drivers of violence identified in Our Watch's report, Change the story: A shared framework for the primary prevention of violence against women in Australia. Gendered drivers of violence against women are the factors that most consistently predict this violence at a population level, and explain its gendered patterns. They arise from gender-discriminatory institutional, social, and economic structures, social and cultural norms, and organisational, community, family, and relationship practices that together create environments in which women and men are not considered equal and violence against women is both more likely, and more likely to be tolerated and even condoned.
Understanding these gendered drivers is critical to understanding men’s violence against women, because they explain the prevalence and persistence of gendered violence across the population.
Research
and discovery
Why young people?
Young people’s attitudes were identified as an area of concern in the research. Young people had somewhat more violence-supportive attitudes than others, especially compared with their parent’s generation, and young men in particular were more likely to have poor knowledge about violence and were less likely to support gender equality. Young people are also highly susceptible to ‘influencers’
- that is, the adults and authority figures in young peoples’ lives who can intervene early on attitudes and provide role modelling towards more respectful attitudes in the future.
We were also lucky enough to interview experts in the field who have undertaken previous research and practice work in this area, and were generous with their time and advice. We heard that programs targeted at adolescent demographics have saturated school-based settings and have historically not been very engaging or effective - this provided us with the creative licence to do something completely different.
We also heard that while issues of masculinity and rigid gender stereotypes are the biggest factor in driving FDV, conventional approaches that focus on telling young men what not to and be and do, leave them at a loss for what to be and do instead. This ends up sparking resistance and pushing them towards radical conservative messaging coming from figures like Andrew Tate. There is a need to shift from call-outs to providing alternative ways to express masculinity and promoting safe ways to challenge dominant messaging about what it means to ‘be a man.’
Co-design
workshops
Our early workshops were centred around exploring the evidence, learning about young people’s attitudes to violence and masculinity, and mapping the influences in their life.
The primary output from these workshops was our influence map. Designed by our youth design team, this map outlines the people, places and processes that are most - or least - influencial on young people's attitudes to gender and violence. It's broken into five 'areas of influence' where young people spend time, with specific 'influences' noted inside each of those areas.
What are the strongest influences on young people's attitudes towards gender and violence?
In the third workshop we took what we’d learned, recruited a larger group of young people and began ideation, coming up with hundreds of possible ideas
- the big, small, and everything in between.
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The 'role model' effect
Our strongest learning from this project was about the huge influence of role models on young people's, particularly young men’s, attitudes about gender and violence; especially male role models, such as dads, coaches, teachers, and online influencers. When these role models act as mentors, they can empower young people to develop a strong sense of identity and purpose, and build healthy relationships and communication skills. However, we found that some of those role models are instead promoting rigid gender stereotypes, dominant forms of masculinity, and male peer relations that emphasise aggression, dominance, and control.
The first messages young people receive about gender often come from inside the home. For young men, their fathers are often their first role model - teaching them how to ‘be a man’, how to build and maintain relationships, and deal with life's challenges. But, dads are finding it hard to keep up - they are parenting in a world that is constantly changing, feeling like they are poorly equipped to navigate new social norms while still feeling like they need to have the right answer to every question.
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It's not only about role models, it's about the different ways young people are exposed to messaging, the interactions they occur during, the moments that click, and the points of time and place our intervention could make the biggest impact.
To make sense of this, we summarised the mechanisms by which young people see, hear, and are influenced by messaging and attitudes towards gender and violence into four main patterns:
Working it out together
In this pattern, young people are influenced by conversations with their peers about gender and/or violence-related topics, with or without an adult around. When nobody feels blamed or demonised, and there’s an opportunity to be curious and ask questions without fear of ridicule, these conversations can have a strong influence on the attitudes that stick.
Reading the room
In this pattern, young people’s attitudes are shaped by looking around and interpreting what seem to be the accepted norms around them when it comes to gender and/or violence, whether in private or public, in real life or online. Young people are always noticing and taking cues from the messages and behaviours they see, and even if it doesn’t feel safe to respond or join in a conversation, ideas get internalised about what kinds of messages and behaviours are likely to result in ‘fitting in’ or other positive social outcomes.
Real talk
In this pattern, young people are influenced by serious conversations with trusted adults about values, attitudes and behaviours, even if they're not directly about gender and/or violence. Trusted adults can have a powerful influence on young people’s attitudes, especially when these conversations are well-timed or entered into voluntarily, and when care is taken to make sure young people don’t feel blamed or judged.
Taking inspiration
In this pattern, young people are influenced by the attitudes to gender and/or violence of people they look up to, whether peers or adults, in real life or online. Inspiration is often taken from people who seem cool or successful, but it’s also important for these role models to be authentic and relatable in some way.
Development
and deployment
After narrowing down our ideas, workshopping them together, breaking them down - and building them back up - we landed on our final intervention. Drawing on everything we learned, we knew our intervention had to harness the potential for male role models to be positive influences on young men’s lives while creating new norms about what men are, could be, and should be in our society.
This is Manly is the culmination of a year of work, collaboration, deep thinking, youth leadership, and imagining of a better and more equal future.
That’s why we’d love your support in helping to bring our youth-led work to life, by sharing these images and videos far and wide. By being an advocate for the ‘This is Manly’ campaign, you’re helping to contribute to important changes in our community, and creating positive family environments that help all of us gain a deeper understanding of what ‘manly’ looks like in our homes and our culture.
If you have a personal anecdote around yourself, a father figure or positive ‘manly’ influence on your life, you can post about it under the hashtag #thisismanly, tag our Instagram page @this.is.manly or TikTok @thisismanly and link to the URL at thisismanly.com. This story is youth-led, open and inclusive, and about the real life positive perceptions of masculinity. So if you have something to say, now’s your chance to be part of the change.
We look forward to your support, and being part of the journey to help us redefine what ‘This is Manly’ is.