Tackling Violence against Women: From Knowledge to Practical

these data show that men are put in contact with violence in various settings,
often as deliberately by way of hierarchical power relations in society that
define male domination over women. To put it another way, the same power
system that authorizes men to behave in an aggressive fashion and to ‘uphold
their rights in the name of honor’ is the same system of power that places them
in a situation of vulnerability (Medrado, 2003, p. 4; Bourgois, 1996).
Barker’s (2005) comparative study of young men in low-income urban settings
reaches a similar conclusion. Many young men, in trying to live up to rigid
standards of what it means to be a man, become locked into spirals of violence
in which they hurt others or are hurt or killed themselves. Not surprisingly,
programmes sometimes also target men and boys, and deal with questions
of masculinity (Barker, Ricardo, and Nascimento, 2007). Different forms of
violence—including armed violence and VAw—are linked to each other. This
results in an apparent paradox that promising efforts to prevent and reduce
VAw often depend not only on improving resiliencies and protective factors
for women, but also on diminishing their risk of experiencing violence by
working with males.
Further innovative research is needed to understand the scope and scale of
VAw, enhance costing tools to estimate the negative impact of VAw on
development, and support the development and evaluation of programming
efforts to prevent and reduce VAw. As this Working Paper points out, research
initiatives need to acknowledge the complexity and sometimes the apparent
paradox of the VAw phenomenon.
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