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Can we be humanists and be aware of gender?

Can we be humanists and be aware of gender?

Two letters in the pages of The Guardian recently addressing gender and intimate violence and abuse and sexual abuse reveal an interesting dynamic.

The first letter from a number of agencies representing male victims and titled “Anorexia and rape are men’s problems too” addressed that the Crime Prosecution Services report Violence Against Women and Girls actually included “more than 13,00 male victims of crimes including rape, sexual assault, child abuse and domestic violence”.

The letter goes to say that designating such crimes as being apparently gender-specific against ‘women and girls’ “misleads about the complex dynamics” of abuse as well as marginalising and concealing the experiences of male survivors. 

The writers state that “We fully support drives to eliminate intimate and sexual violence and understand that focusing on female victims is central to this. But also call for all public bodies to affirm a commitment to eliminating intimate violence against “human beings of any gender”.

The second letter a few days later was from various agencies representing women’s equality projects or campaigning against violence against women and entitled “Gender all too relevant in violence statistics”. These writers argue that it is “critical” to retain gender in naming and analysing these crimes “because of the gender of the perpetrators” and because women are disproportionately affected by these crimes (rape and sexual abuse).

They add that “We need to understand who these men are, [and] why they choose to do what they do”. The writers conclude that it would be a “grave mistake” to suggest taking gender out of the naming and analysis, and to do so would contribute to a justice inequality experienced by women and girls, and evidenced by the Rotherham child sexual exploitation case.

There is much to agree with in both letters, and the confounding factor seems to be what we understand by the role of gender. I hesitate to ascribe the label ‘feminist’ to the second writers, not because it is a label to be ashamed of, but because to do so risks immediately falling into an often polarised and perhaps falsely oppositional ‘debate’, where issues of this kind are discussed.

Nonetheless, it has felt to me that some feminist outlooks (and I fully appreciate the multiplicity and complexity of perspectives under that one tag) can drift to being not just pro-women, but end up in a gendered position that by its nature actually feels anti-humanist.

Hence, it does seem important to take a position which is gender-inclusive in being for the elimination of intimate violence and abuse against human beings of any gender. This is not gender neutral, a position where gender is seen as having no role at all, and which the second letter from the ‘women’s organisations’ seems to imply is the position of the first group of writers from the ‘men’s organisations’.

For me, the point that to lump male victimisation into 'violence against women and girls’ can disrespect male victims seems fair, and does not invalidate the point that women and girls ‘disproportionately’ are victims of sexual crime. This fact is an example of where gender plays a crucial role.

The second, ’feminist’ letter suggests that the claim of the male writers that ‘one in six’ of all victims of some type of intimate partner violence and abuse are male is ‘disputed’. Well yes, but if we look at intimate partner violence and abuse specifically, research found at the Partner Abuse State of Knowledge project  suggests that in terms of prevalence just over 19% of men may experience victimisation (just less than one in five).

This is unlikely to be sexual violence, but it seems to show that with such statistics we are into the difficulties of definition, since there do seem to be gendered differences in perpetration of types of behaviour (for instance actual physical violence versus non physical forms of abuse). It is certainly the case that where physical violence is involved in a male-female confrontation, the woman is far likelier to be harmed.

The letter from the women’s organisations also points out that the ‘one in six’ figure does not apply equally to all forms of violence covered in the report. This is true, but the CPS report also does not cover that proportionately men are far more likely to be victims of violence per se. Outside of the home, men are far more likely than women to become victims of violence – two thirds of murder victims are male .To report this does not deny that more women than men are killed by their (ex) intimate partners.

As a chartered forensic psychologist I am interested in evidence based practice and practice based on research rather than based on politics: I fully support the aim of the second letter to understand better the dynamics of perpetration of abuse in order that we can better contribute to stopping it.  In the Rotherham case cited, and in others, there seems to be a dynamic involving race or ethnicity as well as gender, but which the writers do not mention.

Equally I fully support the notion that gender in the sense of the construction of masculinity, patriarchy and misogyny is deeply involved in the harms committed against women and girls, sexual or otherwise, and that these relate to broader questions of women’s inequality with men.

No one can doubt that without feminist activism, domestic violence and abuse would not be treated as a real concern but as a psychotherapist and a proponent of therapeutically informed working that is effective practice, I worry about positions which feel ‘too gendered’.

I am aware of practice in some domestic violence prevention programmes for example, where a perspective that is overly-focussed on gender leads to a ‘one size fits all’ analysis which is actually ineffective and counterproductive.

My concern is that whenever the notion of a gender inclusive perspective wishing to work for the betterment of humanity (and yes, I am aware of the structural sexism in that word) as a whole is put forward, it is somehow seen as taking sides to diminish an ‘other’ rather than working for integration.