Descrição

Despite advances in gender equality, women and girls still face disadvantages and limits on theiragency. Men and women are both subject to gender norms that influence their behaviors and thesenorms can constrain women’s agency and can encourage men to adopt behaviors, includingsometimes violent behaviors, which further constrain women’s agency. Men and boys can be keystakeholders and allies to increase women’s agency and this paper focuses on examining men’s attitudes and behaviors related to gender equality and violence perpetration to better understandhow to engage men and boys as. To do so, we use data that were collected from men and womenfrom eight countries (Bosnia, Brazil, Chile, Croatia, Democratic Republic of Congo, India, Mexico,and Rwanda) as part of the International Men and Gender Equality Survey (IMAGES). We foundthat there is wide variation across countries in men's support for gender equality, equal roles formen and women, and acceptability of violence against women. In multivariate analysis examiningpredictors of men ever perpetrating physical violence against a partner, we found that older age,witnessing partner violence against one’s mother, permissive attitudes towards violence againstwomen, having inequitable attitudes, and having been involved in fights generally were allassociated with a higher likelihood of perpetrating violence. A majority of men is willing tointervene if they witness violence against a woman, and men who do not support violence againstwomen, are not violent generally, and are aware of laws prohibiting violence against women aremore likely to intervene. We interpret these findings and identify key knowledge gaps anddirections for future research, public policies, evaluation, and programming.