Fathers with a history of child sexual abuse: New findings for policy and practice - Child Family Community Australia

The trauma of child sexual abuse can manifest in many areas of victim/survivors' lives, including their attitudes towards parenting and their relationships with their children. This paper outlines the key findings of the limited research that has investigated how a history of child sexual abuse can influence men's perceptions and experience of fatherhood, and also discusses some of the reasons why this important topic remains largely excluded from public, academic and policy discourses. This paper will be most useful to practitioners and policy-makers who work to support men, parents and/or families.

This is an abridged version of "Child Sexual Abuse, Masculinity and Fatherhood" (Price-Robertson, in press), accepted for publication in the Journal of Family Studies Volume 18/2-3 (December 2012) special issue on Fatherhood in the Early 21st Century (ISBN 978-1-921980-02-2).

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New campaign to help abused men launched on International Men's Day

As part of the 2009 International Men’s Day celebrations, a new campaign for male victims of family violence is being launched. The One in Three Campaign is named after the little known fact that up to one in three victims of sexual assault and at least one in three victims of family violence is male (perhaps as many as one in two). The campaign aims to raise public awareness of the existence and needs of male victims of family violence and abuse; to work with government and non-government services alike to provide assistance to male victims; and to reduce the incidence and impacts of family violence on Australian men, women and children.

The One in Three website can be found at oneinthree.com.au.

Recognizing Gender-Based Violence Against Civilian Men and Boys in Conflict Situations

While gender-based violence has recently emerged as a salient topic in the human security community, it has been framed principally with respect to violence against women and girls, particularly sexual violence. In this article, I argue that gender-based violence against men (including sexual violence, forced conscription, and sex-selective massacre) must be recognized as such, condemned, and addressed by civilian protection agencies and proponents of a ‘human security’ agenda in international relations. Men deserve protection against these abuses in their own right; moreover, addressing gender-based violence against women and girls in conflict situations is inseparable from addressing the forms of violence to which civilian men are specifically vulnerable.

Dishonesty in the Domestic Violence Industry by Micheal Woods, 2006

The White Ribbon campaign relies on research that is either inept or just plain dishonest. There have been similar criticisms of the White Ribbon campaign in New Zealand.

Why I Won't Wear A White Ribbon, by Adam Jones, 1992

An oldie, but unfortunately still very relevant, as the White Ribbon Campaign is still very much alive. Jones argues that the White Ribbon Campaign seems to be based on a notion of universal male guilt.

Why I Won't Wear A White Ribbon

by Adam Jones (1992)

[Published in the MERGE Journal, 5: 5 (1992.)]

On a frigid December day three years ago, while Marc Lépine was roaming the classrooms and hallways of l'École Polytechnique in Montreal, I was a couple of kilometres down the road, laughing and sharing a few drinks with friends.

We heard the first reports on the evening news. But the real horror sank in only the next day, as the dimensions of the slaughter became clear, and the analyses - and recriminations - began.

Several days later, I joined tens of thousands of Montrealers who queued, some for hours, in subzero temperatures to file past the caskets of the victims. The crowd was a cross-section of Quebec society: male and female, young and old, anglophone and francophone. For a day, Quebeckers were united in grief.

The dignity of those proceedings stood in stark contrast to TV images of demonstrations across the country: the megaphones, the slogans, the wild assignations of blame. I was struck by many protesters' readiness to exploit the trauma of victims' families and friends for their own narrow, exclusionary political ends.

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