Authors’ Response to Commentaries on “Trouble in Paradigm”

The best part of writing a symposium piece for Violence Against Women is being able to engage with knowledgeable, passionate commentators. We thank Claire Renzetti for convincing Shari Dworkin and Gary Barker, Lindsay Orchowski, and Jocelyn Hollander and C. J. Pascoe to dialogue with us as we grapple with theoretical and empirical challenges in the field of violence prevention. As each commentary approaches engaging boys and men in primary prevention of violence against women from different points of origin, we respond by putting the commentators into even more explicit dialogue. We conclude by taking advantage of the opportunity to think further about strengthening prevention programming by going beyond “the utilization of personal-, group- or community-level data to correct a misperception of a norm by an individual, group, or sub-population within a community” (Orchowski, p. 1674, emphasis in original) to “actually transform the meaning and practice of gender” (Hollander & Pascoe, p. 1686). Specifically, drawing insights from these commentaries, we conclude on an optimistic note. Prevention programs that encourage youth to enact new community norms while learning to identify and resist sanctions that erase “social legibility” may begin to create new “nets of accountability” that promote safe, nurturing environments for youth of all genders.

Dworkin and Barker highlight the diversity of gender-transformative violence prevention programs and the theoretical, empirical, and political commitments that guide them. We recognize and applaud this diversity, especially in the face of the politics of designing, funding, evaluating, and disseminating the results from “gold standard” demonstration projects that “become far too ‘light’ on transformation” in the process (Dworkin & Barker, p. 1664). We whole-heartedly agree that “gender-transformative interventions represent a tremendous advance over the previous ‘risk group-focused’, single-topic approaches that have been implemented in public and global health interventions” (Dworkin & Barker, p. 1669). We share Dworkin and Barker’s judgment that it is important to have a gender-transformative approach that may focus separately and simultaneously on both women and men, and we join them in arguing that “transformative, relational, sustained, and structural” are all critical characteristics of effective primary violence prevention programs. We certainly want to (and must) keep “the promising aspirational baby!” We referred to several recent reviews of the effectiveness of such programs (by Dworkin, Casey, and others) to highlight these promising aspirations and practices specifically from grass roots programs that link gender transformation to violence prevention.

Above all, we agree with Dworkin and Barker that there are many complex reasons for variation in the form, content, approach, findings, domains of success, and lessons learned from the growing number of gender-based violence prevention programs around the world. That is why we bracketed the challenges both with measurement (especially of “gender equitable attitudes,” which are at the heart of many prevention programs oriented toward changing social norms, in the global South in particular; see, for example, Jewkes, Dunkle, Morrell, & Sikweyiya, 2011; Jewkes, Flood, & Lang, 2015; Pulerwitz & Barker, 2008; Vu et al., 2017) and with implementation fidelity. We focus on the problems arising when—in what we agree with Dworkin and Barker is a reductionist model of both violence and social change—“gender transformative” programs emphasize changing social norms as a modifiable risk factor for violence perpetration.

To be specific, in strong agreement with Dworkin and Barker, we do not consider most U.S.-based “bystander” programs to be gender transformative and purposefully did not engage with these programs in our original essay. We explore and problematize the implications of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) and related health organizations’ public health framework for primary prevention through gender transformation. This framework relies heavily on a version of social norms theory that connects attitudes to behavior change. In fact, the global public health model of violence prevention by transforming social norms is hegemonic. That is, the framework renders researchers’ and activists’ access to political, economic, and symbolic resources for violence prevention contingent on a commonsense consensus that now organizes theory and practice in mainstream institutions. For instance, the recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention technical packages on sexual (Basile et al., 2016), youth (David-Ferdon et al., 2016), and intimate partner (Niolon et al., 2017) violence prevention reference a “social norms approach” (SNA). A recent call for proposals from the U.S. National Institutes of Health on HIV and violence (RFA-MH-20-200) includes testing interventions that “target modifiable cultural factors (e.g., gender norms, violence norms).” A similar call for proposals from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office on Women’s Health (WH-AST-19-001) underscores “identifying and addressing harmful gender and social norms that contribute to intimate partner violence” as a core prevention activity.

In short, public health practitioners and funders are increasingly “woke” to social determinants of health, including gender inequity, racism, and other systemic oppression. However, along with Dworkin and Barker, we also observe that programs that “at their inception . . . were framed by feminist concepts and content on gendered power . . . later become stripped of much of this content due to the politics of funding or due to reviewers” (Dworkin & Barker, p. 1664). Our agreement about these dynamics increases the urgency of our call for scholars deeply engaged in addressing gender-based violence to think critically about the hegemony of health behavior change theories that elevate an SNA.

To be clear, we do not consider mixed findings of research we reviewed on the relationship between gender-inequitable attitudes and violent behavior to be evidence “that gender-transformative programs don’t work.” We interpret the mixed findings from research on public health-driven violence prevention programs not as an indictment of gender transformation as a motivation, goal, theory, or even paradigm. Rather, Dworkin and Barker prompt us to address even more directly what we consider paradigmatic about Orchowski’s presentation of the SNA: “common utilization of personal, group-based, or community-based data on the actual positive norms in a community to dispel myths regarding community support for violence” (Orchowski, p. 1675, emphasis in original).

Orchowski (2019) presents the strongest possible argument and evidence for applying the SNA to primary violence prevention. As described by Orchowski, the SNA focuses on using local empirical data to rebut perceived descriptive norms about violence prevalence, perpetration, and acceptability among salient peers. Orchowski masterfully summarizes evidence supporting the SNA’s three theoretical components and the application of the public health behavioral change program model (be it through data-driven social marketing, small-group, or real-time feedback on attitudes and perceptions of group norms) from the case of alcohol abuse to the case of violence. As Banyard and colleagues (2004) note, norms-based programs to prevent violence specifically bridge studies of helping behavior and health behavior. These public health and social psychological approaches are based in turn on theories and evidence (ably summarized by Orchowski, 2019) that link changing individual perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors to local community, salient peer, and respected role model standards or social norms. The mixed findings we (and Dworkin and Barker) review drive us to question the paradigmatic status of this hypothesized causal mechanism of prevention via behavioral change through perceptions of peer acceptance of sexism and violence—not the notion that gender transformation is necessary although perhaps not sufficient for primary prevention of violence.

The combination of commentaries by Dworkin and Barker, on one hand, and Orchowski, on the other, leads us to elaborate the problems we perceive in the application of an information-based descriptive norms approach to violence prevention—the paradigm we seek to trouble in our essay. Our qualms have several sources; constrained by limits of time and space, we note just three. First, the SNA Orchowski presents emphasizes descriptive norms at the cost of injunctive norms. The literatures on victimization, perpetration, homophobia, and masculinities all suggest that injunctive norms—that is, perceptions of sanctions that important peers, group gate-keepers, and leaders impose to enforce conformity and complicity, to compel or stymie change—are powerful structures and practices organizing violence. Injunctive norms are in fact central to versions of social norms theory that link perceptions of others’ attitudes and behaviors to one’s own behavior. We take Orchowski at her word when she highlights how the paradigmatic SNA theoretically and empirically targets descriptive norms to the exclusion of injunctive norms. We also thank Hollander and Pascoe (2019) for highlighting the explanatory and programmatic significance of

the grave social consequences of violating gender expectations[, . . .] the compelling individual and collective rewards of patriarchy[, . . . and the ways that] peer behaviors and beliefs do not exist in a vacuum, but are situated within, and intricately connected to, a larger culture and structure.

Second, as Orchowski (2019) starkly shows, the perception-and-attitude-data-driven version of social norms that underwrites the U.S. violence prevention programming agenda is not even remotely gender transformative. At least in part because of its roots in the gender-neutral public health effort to stop under-age and binge drinking and other substance abuse on college campuses (see, for example, Fabiano, Perkins, Berkowitz, Linkenbach, & Stark, 2003; Perkins, 2003), the SNA, as Orchowski presents it, does not consider social norms about gender to be among the modifiable risk factors for violence perpetration or victimization. We did not review that body of evidence because, as Dworkin and Barker point out, the SNA research and prevention agenda has no pretenses to gender transformation. Orchowski and the version of SNA that is hegemonic in the global public health agenda promote primary prevention through changing social norms about violence but deny that social norms about violence have anything to do with gender, and likewise deny that social norms about gender have anything to do with violence. In sharp contrast, the commentaries by both Dworkin and Barker and Hollander and Pascoe put gender relations—masculinities in particular—at the center of primary violence prevention efforts.

Third, Hollander and Pascoe’s commentary reinforces Dworkin and Barker’s points about boys’ and men’s experiences of and with violence and insights from feminist self-defense. We agree completely with Dworkin and Barker that anti-racist, intersectional, community-level transformational efforts are stymied by program content and forms that target individual gender attitudes but obscure the “nets of accountability” that Hollander and Pascoe underscore. Hollander and Pascoe emphasize the stakes and mechanisms that Orchowski documents as central to the public health version of SNAs. We are not saying simply (as Dworkin and Barker infer) that researchers and activists need to acknowledge men’s victimization. Rather, in concert with Dworkin and Barker, we underscore Hollander and Pascoe’s points about nets of accountability as deeply harmful, traumatic, and violent for boys and men. We are responding to public health prevention frameworks that offer strategies for “primary prevention”—that is, before the bad outcome happens—that mistakenly assume that youth are “violence virgins” and thus obscure the everyday violence of establishing and policing masculinity. In addition to highlighting the extensive trauma literature within which gender-based violence is nested, in our essay, we are also resisting (as do Dworkin and Barker) any facile “girls are just as aggressive as boys” or “boys are victims too” narratives that reinforce gender-neutral prevention programs.

Hollander and Pascoe offer a way forward in rethinking prevention programming by drawing attention to what is at stake: the compelling “individual and collective rewards of patriarchy” and the profound risks of “social illegibility.” They suggest that men’s fears of gender policing are often quite accurate. That is, fears are not “misperceptions” but rational awareness of profoundly consequential injunctive norms. The version of SNA Orchowski vividly presents as a prevention paradigm is flawed not only by its gender neutrality but also to the extent that it ignores injunctive norms and the enforcement mechanisms that reproduce incentives to establish gender credibility and evade social sanctions by tolerating and even perpetrating violence. Rather than simply challenging perceived descriptive norms, Hollander and Pascoe posit, effective prevention programs have to acknowledge “interactional accountability”—processes that motivate and enforce gender conformity. Hollander and Pascoe focus on interactional accountability, injunctive norms, and the “larger-scale cultural and structural change” needed if social norms interventions are to be transformative.

We redouble Hollander and Pascoe’s call and close by highlighting the commentators’ practical guidance for violence prevention. All three commentators suggest potential ways forward in theory, research, and practice about programming. Orchowski points to the multiple examples of “cultural activism,” including visual arts and hashtag movements, that cultivate resistance to invisibility and complicity. Dworkin and Barker highlight successful approaches that combine structural interventions with individual and community gender transformation. Notably, Dworkin and Barker also point to the role of community campaigns created by participants in prevention programs as a key component of gender-transformative programs that are cut or curtailed in the course of implementing youth-focused prevention programs. Hollander and Pascoe encourage us to ponder what it would mean to disrupt “interactional accountability.” What might happen as we engage young people in creating new accounts, telling different stories that demonstrate that one does not have to become “socially illegible” in the process of challenging gender inequity and violence perpetration? All across the United States, young people are pressing for progressive and inclusive policies—from bathrooms and gun laws to reproductive health and campus sexual assault. They are pointing to relational and structural changes that, in turn, can enact different kinds of “social legibility” and reweave innovative nets of mutual respect and accountability. We emerge from this dialogue underscoring the urgent need for prevention programs that, one, specify the stakes in dismantling structures of oppression, and two, create concrete opportunities for youth and adult allies to transform practice, policy, and structure to counter normative “social illegibility” as cause and consequence of gendered violence.