I get depressed by what seems like an endless stream of news stories about men behaving violently. I become desensitized to hearing about mass murders, another woman killed by a partner, acts of war putting innocent people at risk and so on. Sometimes I barely register the scale and significance of these events, eating breakfast in a trance-like state of numbness, and spending the rest of the day in a similar condition,
This flood of negative information instinctively makes me want to take some sort of action, to try to make things better – and at the same time reminds me that I’m mostly powerless to do anything to change what I’m hearing. This has the effect of a slow but steady draining of the masculine self-respect which is linked to my felt capacity to protect my loved ones, my wider family, my community and my country.
I used to numb my pain of feeling unable to ‘do something’ about such violence with the help of drugs or alcohol, or via the screens of my many devices—substitutes for human contact which satisfied just enough of my need for connecting and belonging by giving a superficial sensation of being in a ‘community’; but it was a community that I switched off at the end of the day, and one I was not able to reach out to for practical support.
Is there, in fact, anything I can do as an individual man to help reduce the destructive patterns of male aggression in the world? On step is to try to understand violence better and particularly the behaviour of violent men. This isn’t something that many people seem interested in doing. Amidst all the understandable anger and pain being expressed in response to recent terrorist attacks, for example, hardly anyone seems to be talking about understanding the social/psychological factors that can lead anyone to commit these kinds of atrocities. But if we don’t learn from these terrible actions and try to find out as much as we can about how and why anyone can be drawn to carry them out, we won’t be able to do much in terms of being able to prevent a repeat of them.
I think a useful way of thinking about, and responding to violence is to treat it as if it were a disease or an epidemic. In the same way as we are trying to eradicate highly infectious illnesses like malaria, we need to understand the nature of violence and how people become ‘infected’ so that we know what effective action to take to ‘cure’ it. At the moment we seem to be at the same stage as physicians in the 1700’s, who had no understanding how diseases were transmitted, other than some vague or fanciful theories, and so were ineffectual in preventing them.
Maybe at an earlier stage in our evolution as a species, and as a society, violence was necessary to ensure our survival and is hard-wired into our reactions to each other as humans. In any case, our ‘inner chimp’, the violent primate in all of us, is obviously still alive and well judging from the amount of violence in the world, but it’s becoming clearer that it is no longer an effective way of addressing social and individual problems.
If we limit ourselves to ‘punishing’ violence, the evidence clearly shows that doesn’t lead to a reduction, and may actually appeal as a kind of perverse justification to the distorted mindset of the people who carry out violent acts. But if we begin to think of violence as an illness rather than just ‘bad behaviour’, we can try to create a ‘cure’ which combines helping people avoid catching it, with knowing how to cure them—or at least relieve the symptoms and help their recovery.
As a society, we condone the use of violence to achieve political ends when it serves our own priorities—at times of war for example. But we need to be unequivocal in our condemnation of all violence wherever and whenever it occurs. If at the same time we pursue serious research into what attracts people to violence—and come up with proposals for more effective ways of managing and resolving conflict, at all levels—we can begin to ‘inoculate’ the individuals most at risk of being infected by violent ideologies or attracted to the idea that violence will be the best way to serve their interests. Then we can begin to reduce the risk of others having to experience the devastation which is the inevitable and tragic result of this distorted mindset.
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