Anthony Ellis' Men, Masculinities and Violence (original) (raw)
Related papers
Violence Against Women, 2006
The director of the Economic and Social Research Council Violence Research Program (VRP) in the United Kingdom discusses and debates the impacts of the program in the context of contemporary ideas about violence and current U.K. policy and practice in the field. The projects in the program included 2 historical studies and 18 contemporary studies of violence in the home, schools, prisons, neighborhoods, leisure establishments, massage parlors, and on the street. For example, studies focusing on the nighttime economy in U.K. cities, on paramilitary punishment beatings in Northern Ireland, and on violence experienced and perpetrated by girls are discussed here. Five projects addressed gendered violence, and three addressed domestic violence specifically. Lessons from the VRP are drawn out in this article in a personal account. These lessons include the fact that violence is not hidden, that the meanings of violence are gendered, and that people's accounts of violence matter.
Criminal Violence in Modern Britain
History Compass 4.1 (2006): 77-90, 2006
Although studying the history of violence invites a broad methodological and topical diversity, three issues have predominated: the relationship between quantitative and qualitative methods, the notion of a “civilizing process,” and the topic of gender. As “violence” refers to physical acts as well as to cultural understandings of those acts, coming to terms with its history has meant fusing quantitative, social-history emphases on social structure and behavior with qualitative, cultural approaches to understanding narrative and discourse. There is now a consensus that, over the long term, rates of interpersonal violence declined between the late Middle Ages and the middle of the twentieth century; nonetheless, over the same period violence played an ever more prominent role among people's social fears. Building upon these findings, some historians of violence assert that a “civilizing process”– involving new patterns of social interaction and psychological restraint – has affected both the social reality and cultural construction of violence. In these and other approaches, gender has emerged as the most prominent of a variety of central concerns, although its specific role in shaping the cultures and patterns of violence remains unclear and debated.
This article presents original qualitative data gathered during prolonged ethnographic fieldwork with violent men in deindustrialised communities in the north of England. The data are used as an empirical platform for a theoretical exploration of the symbolism and subjectivising influences of traumatic life experiences in these men's biographies. The article concludes by making the tentative suggestion that there is a complex and mediated causal link between traumatic experience and a deep subjective commitment to aggression and violence in adulthood.
Interconnecting the Violences of Men: Continuities and Intersections in Research, Policy and Activism, 2025
This book aims to expand and enrich understandings of violences by focusing on gendered continuities, interconnections and intersections across multiple forms and manifestations of men’s violence. In actively countering, both, the compartmentalisation of studies of violence by ‘type’ and form, and the tendency to conceptualise violence narrowly, it aims to flesh out – not delimit – understandings of violence. Bringing together cross-disciplinary, indeed transdisciplinary, perspectives, this book addresses how –what are often seen as – specific and separate violences connect closely and intricately with wider understandings of violence, how there are gendered continuities between violences and how gendered violences take many forms and manifestations and are themselves intersectional. Grounded by the recognition that violence is, itself, a form of inequality, the contributors to this volume traverse the intersectional complexities across, both, experiences of violent inequality, and what is seen to ‘count’ as violence. The international scope of this book will be of interest to students and academics across many fields, including sociology, criminology, psychology, social work, politics, gender studies, child and youth studies, military and peace studies, environmental studies and colonial studies, as well as practitioners, activists and policymakers engaged in violence prevention.
With well over 90 ‘one punch’ fatalities in the past decade, Australia likely holds the dubious honour of being at the epicentre of such incidents. In this article, we argue that political and legal responses to one punch violence have been based on fairly cursory understandings of why these events occur. By way of contrast, we suggest that one punch fatalities (and non fatalities) are emblematic of deeper undercurrents of anti-social conduct and dispositions in late modern Australian life. In an effort to ‘break open’ the discursive limits of one punch violence, we briefly engage with perpetrator narratives – the missing voice in these debates. Such engagement, we argue, is key to developing a more nuanced understanding of why male on male violence continues to be a major issue of socio-cultural concern.