Male Peer Support and Violence Against Women: The History and Verification of a Theory

7 | Policy and Practice: Where Do We Go from Here?

7 Policy and Practice: Where Do We Go from Here? I’d love to change the world. But I don’t know what to do. So I’ll leave it up to you. —Alvin Lee, “I’d Love to Change the World”1 What is to be done about male peer support for violence against women? Progressive answers to this question have been repeatedly provided since Walter DeKeseredy first started work in this area in the late 1980s. Unfortunately, though, while many positive changes, such as the passing of the 1994 Violence Against Women Act (vawa), occurred over the past twenty-five years, every effort to advance women’s rights is routinely “met with a counterattack seeking to undermine and reverse feminist gains” (Dragiewicz, 2011, p. 2). Furthermore, many different types of violence against women continue to devastate thousands of North American women and millions of their sisters around the world on a daily basis. Also, even in prosperous countries, economic equality is a long way off for women across the globe. In fact, as described in box 7.1, economic equality for women may be “centuries off.” This has serious implications for the health and well-being of abused women and their children because they always have financial decisions to make and many who flee a “house of horrors” or who plan escaping worry about how to pay for rent, groceries, and heating bills (Davies, 2011; Sev’er, 2002). Note, too, that racial discrimination in the job market only makes matters worse for ethnic/minority women who contemplate making or who have made dangerous exits from violent households (Renzetti, 2011). Without a doubt, things are not looking up. Added to the above problems are rabid right-wing attempts to eliminate batterers programs guided by feminism and to replace them with psychotherapy and couples counseling, approaches that degender woman abuse and portray it as a property of the individual (Gondolf, 2012). For example, the University of Montana has been rocked by 137 138 | Male Peer Support and Violence against Women 7.1 Economic Equality for Women Is Still Centuries Off It is a common belief today that the days of economic inequality for women are the proper subject for a history lesson. What with the occasional woman showing up as a corporate CEO or a national- or regionallevel politician, and constant stories about women breaking into the ranks of formerly all-male occupations, many people think that at least this one battle is over. Unfortunately, this is not the case, as women still make significantly less than men, even in the same occupations. What is worse, according to those tracking the changes, is that in Western countries often considered by experts as models of women’s economic equality, progress has been stagnant or deteriorating since the mid-1990s. Canadian law professor Kathleen Lahey is one of those experts, analyzing the gender implications of an economy held up worldwide as a model of progressive change for women (McQuigge, 2012). Lahey received a blitz of publicity when she tracked the rate of change toward complete equality for men and women in the Canadian economy and found that such equivalence was still 581 years away. Although Canada had spent large sums transforming many government services and instituting tax and budget cuts, Lahey argued, such changes will mostly benefit men who make substantially more than women for the same work, while service cuts to programs that support women will continue to set them back. In fact, she said, there has been no progress on achieving economic parity in Canada in many years, while in recent years the gap has been increasing (Brennan 2012c). Such stagnation is not solely a Canadian phenomenon, Lahey has argued. Despite decades of advocacy, topped by un action and governments approving international conventions calling for changes in fiscal policy, there has been little action on this front worldwide, and in many countries current policy is undermining gains that have been made. Lahey has called for a gender-based examination and implementation of taxes, benefits, and budgets, which might sound radical if it were not for the fact that Canada has publicly agreed in international arenas to exactly such actions (Lahey 2010). Policy and Practice | 139 allegations and a federal investigation that the university, local police, and local prosecutors have all seemingly collaborated to refuse to investigate or prosecute as many as eighty sexual assaults in the recent past...