Fazendo as conexões: normas masculinas prejudiciais e homicídio e crime violento

Este blog faz parte da série "Fazendo as Conexões". Cada blog se concentra em uma forma específica de violência.

Este ano, a Equimundo e a Oak Foundation lançaram Normas Masculinas e Violência: Fazendo as Conexões, um novo relatório que examina as ligações entre normas masculinas prejudiciais e oito formas de comportamento violento.

Embora não haja nada inerente à masculinidade que impulsione a violência, a forma como socializamos meninos em suas identidades como homens e o que esperamos deles – ou seja, as normas masculinas da sociedade – estão inegavelmente ligados à violência. De fato, meninos e homens são frequentemente criados, socializados e incentivados a usar a violência de alguma forma; em geral, homens e meninos têm uma probabilidade desproporcional de perpetrar a maioria das formas de violência e morrer por homicídio e suicídio. No entanto, a pesquisa afirma que essa violência é evitável, a igualdade de gênero é alcançável e as normas e ideias não violentas sobre masculinidade são predominantes e poderosas.

This fifth blog in the Fazendo as conexões series focuses on homicide and violent crime. It breaks down the facts on the issue, its linkages to other forms of violence, and recommendations for action.

Homicide and Violent Crime 

Os fatos

Globally, homicide is predominantly a male phenomenon. Men are more likely both to commit and to die by homicide than women are, by significant proportions and across all age ranges and geographic regions. Additionally, mass killings – previously an occurrence that took place a few times every decade – have been increasing in the United States since the 1970s.

With regard to other violent crime (apart from forms of violence addressed elsewhere in the report), decades of research demonstrate that men and boys are more likely to be perpetrators and victims than women and girls. Public violence is a common occurrence for men: Dados de IMAGENS from six countries show that 3 to 36 percent of men reported participating in a robbery and 5 to 22 percent of men reported participating in fights.

Os Links

Men and boys often use crime in various ways to demonstrate or prove their achievement of a certain form of masculinity. There has been a growing evidence base for understanding many forms of violent criminal behavior as innately linked with performances of hegemonic masculinity, alongside calls for increasing complexity in this analysis.

Men’s disproportionate likelihood to perpetrate homicide and violent crime is not biologically driven. Rather, these patterns are much more complex, including a significant influence of masculine norms, social dynamics, and life conditions.

As Interseções

The research overwhelmingly and consistently shows that it takes a preponderance of factors – if not an involved, intentional effort – to turn individual men into those who have killed. Researchers have studied how extreme trauma, humiliation, and shaming are nearly always part of the making of men who kill. Other studies have shown how the effects of particularly difficult childhoods and damaging relationships distort a human propensity not to kill others.

Research on men who have carried out mass killings in the United States varies but tends to point to a cluster of causes. Factors such as ubiquitous access to guns, undetected mental illness, social isolation, having experienced homophobic bullying, economic stress or grievance about losing something to which they feel entitled – such as jobs, prestige, privilege, or access to female partners – all combine with harmful masculine norms to increase the likelihood of pursuing this form of extreme violence.

Da Teoria à Prática

Efforts to prevent homicide and other violent crime with an explicit masculinities lens are rare around the world. Initiatives aiming to prevent homicide and violent crime should focus on the following transformations of harmful masculine norms:

• Engage men and boys in discussions about the connections between tradition- al masculinities, violence, and negative consequences.
• Use nonviolent male role models in programming who are similar to participants in age and other demographic factors, in order to provide participants with an approachable, positive peer leader.
• Provide a safe space for men and boys to practice nonviolent forms of masculinity and to encourage male bonding and community building.

Leia o resto do Fazendo as conexões blog series to learn more about intimate partner violence; physical violence against children; child sexual abuse and exploitation; bullying; non-partner sexual violence; suicide; and conflict and war.