Maybe counselling is not the right thing to do, but I still think that we
need some kind of "personal work". Maybe something like "self-help groups"
could be more effective. My name is Ruben Reyes, Im a member of the group
"Men against violence", this is a group that works both as a self-help
group and as an activists' collective against gender-based violence. We
still dont have any experience on cousellinng for men with violent
bahavior, but we're trying to develop a program of this kind.
We're trying to develop a program of violence control for men that we can
hooked into a largest strategy of cultural change. I agree that doing the
counselling kind of work by itself will not contribute much to social
change. I agree that we need to change the culture, and that we need to
deconstruct patriarchy and machismo, but this doesnt mean that we have to
give up on "personal work". Personal change and social change are
interconnected, but we need to work on both of those spheres if we want to
make real social change. Changing only cultural discourses will not
automatically transalate into individuals'life changes. It is easy to say
the politically correct things, but its not as easy to live after these
new discourses ("Doing the talk is easier that doing the walk").
We all do need to work on ourselves as part of our work on changing
culture. How can we make an effective connection beween personal change
and social change? For this purpose we have used popular education, and
even though we havent done much work on measuring the outcomes, we still
think that it is the best that we have. Whether what we do is really
succesful or not, this is a question yet to be responded through research.
Best Wishes,
Rube Reyes Jiron
Nicaragua
On 3 January, John Glass <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>Second comment is that I think the entire approach to "counseling" men is
>mis-directed. Good intentions, but it is like the band aid vs the cure
>analogy. What needs "counseling" are not individual men, but the entire
>culture. Male perpetration has been around for millennia -- for anything
>to last that long, it must have institutional support. In short, our
>social institutions create and maintain a culture of violence against
>women -- not a new thought, I know, but one that speaks to an entirely
>different solution than that of counseling a few men. The question that I
>have been asking for some time and not come up with an actionable
>intervention is, "How to change culture?" Institutions create culture and
>maintain culture and these institutions are controlled by the group that
>is benefiting from this arrangement. For every batterer that is counseled,
>there are X number of new ones being raised in a culture that sanctions
>violence against women -- even if counseling was effective, there would
>still be new batterers cranked out day after day -- historically, the
>"source" of battering (i.e., institutional arrangement and control) has
>never been effectively intervened upon. In my opinion, till that changes,
>there will continue to be minimal progress.
>
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