Countering Militarised Masculinities: A Structural Approach to Mobilising Men for Feminist Peace - Dean Peacock

Stephen Burrell: 00:00:23

Hi there, and welcome to Now and Men, the podcast on changing masculinities and challenging norms.

Stephen Burrell: 00:00:28

My name's Dr. Steven Burrell, and I'd just like to begin by acknowledging that I'm coming to you from the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people here in Australia.

Stephen Burrell: 00:00:37

And as always, I'm here with Sandy Ruxton, who's over in Oxford in the UK.

Stephen Burrell: 00:00:41

How are you doing, Sandy?

Sandy Ruxton: 00:00:42

Hi, Stephen.

Sandy Ruxton: 00:00:43

I'm, Okay.

Sandy Ruxton: 00:00:45

after our, recent episode on Men's Health with Brendan Gough, I, did actually come out in a bit of a rash, which I, it's not his fault, but, probably more likely, you know, a high level of stress

Sandy Ruxton: 00:00:56

accompanied by trying to move house plus, existential angst about the state of the world and the.

Sandy Ruxton: 00:01:02

breakdown of the international order.

Sandy Ruxton: 00:01:04

But apart from that, I'm okay.

Sandy Ruxton: 00:01:05

how are you still?

Stephen Burrell: 00:01:07

Yes.

Stephen Burrell: 00:01:07

yes.

Stephen Burrell: 00:01:07

It's quite a worrying time for lots of reasons, isn't it?

Stephen Burrell: 00:01:09

And also a busy time.

Stephen Burrell: 00:01:11

yeah, I've actually had some minor surgery myself, linked to the Crohn's disease, which I also mentioned in the episode with Brendan.

Stephen Burrell: 00:01:17

So we're, certainly shining a spotlight on men's health issues at the moment.

Stephen Burrell: 00:01:21

but yeah, so it has taken us a bit longer than normal to, to produce episodes of the podcast.

Stephen Burrell: 00:01:25

But we'll keep doing that as regularly as we can, and we're very grateful to you all for the, support and positive feedback we get.

Stephen Burrell: 00:01:32

So please do contact us at nowandmen@gmail.com.

Stephen Burrell: 00:01:35

If you ever have any questions or comments you'd like us discuss on the podcast.

Stephen Burrell: 00:01:40

But yeah, as you say, Sandy, it's impossible to ignore the terrible violence which we're witnessing kind of in many parts of the world at the moment, not least in the Middle East.

Stephen Burrell: 00:01:49

so it seemed like a really important time to invite onto the podcast Dean Peacock, who's a renowned anti-violence activist and advocate, and who's been working in peace building for several decades now.

Sandy Ruxton: 00:02:02

Yes, Dean and I met over 20 years ago.

Sandy Ruxton: 00:02:05

We realised at first, virtually when you kindly authored a chapter for an Oxfam book I edited called Gender Equality and Men.

Sandy Ruxton: 00:02:11

Dean and then in person that the Commission on the Status of Women in, their meeting in New York in 2004.

Sandy Ruxton: 00:02:18

So that was around the time that the Global MenEngage Alliance was set up, which Dean, and I both played a role in.

Sandy Ruxton: 00:02:25

Dean was the co-chair of Menage from 2009 to 2015, and he also co-founded Sonke Gender Justice, a leading South African NGO, working across Africa to promote gender transformation, human rights, and social justice.

Sandy Ruxton: 00:02:39

Currently, Dean's working with the Global Coalition for WHO Action on firearm violence.

Sandy Ruxton: 00:02:45

And until recently, he was a consultant to the UN Family Planning Agency and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.

Sandy Ruxton: 00:02:51

So, hi Dean.

Sandy Ruxton: 00:02:52

It's such a joy to have you on the podcast.

Dean Peacock: 00:02:54

Thank you very much.

Dean Peacock: 00:02:55

And Sandy, really, great to reconnect.

Dean Peacock: 00:02:58

I remember, as we talked about the earlier that long walk at CSW, when we thought about, the establishment of men engage and the need for a broad international coalition of feminist organisations working with men.

Dean Peacock: 00:03:14

and so amazing to be talking, goodness, 22 years later, in the wake of all that has happened Yeah.

Dean Peacock: 00:03:23

In this broad movement, that we've been a part of.

Dean Peacock: 00:03:28

and as you say, to be talking about it at a time when it is more urgent than ever.

Dean Peacock: 00:03:34

you know, the conflicts that you mentioned, Stephen, and then of course the.

Dean Peacock: 00:03:40

You know, what feels like relentless news about sexual predation by men?

Dean Peacock: 00:03:48

the CNN Rape Academy, of course, the ongoing Epstein story.

Dean Peacock: 00:03:54

and you know, the astonishing bravery of Gisele Pelicot in, bringing to light, you know, these forms of violence, which feel new, partly because they're facilitated by new technology.

Dean Peacock: 00:04:10

But, bottom line, you know, the, landscape I think reminds us of the urgency of this work.

Dean Peacock: 00:04:19

so very glad to be, chatting with you and like you, Stephen also, joining from what are Unseeded Lands, although we don't talk about it very much in the context of South Africa, that, where I sit at the moment in Cape Town.

Dean Peacock: 00:04:37

Is of course originally indigenous land, various groups of Khoisan people.

Dean Peacock: 00:04:43

and that history isn't told very much, partly because it's a complicated story, right?

Dean Peacock: 00:04:49

But, colonial narratives about South Africa essentially continue to be, well, it was a largely empty land and we as in settlers, arrived at the same time as black South Africans were coming from further north, which is of course not true.

Dean Peacock: 00:05:07

It was an occupied land, just as Australia was.

Dean Peacock: 00:05:10

And so really important I think, to ground our discussion in the realities of the places in which we're based, and the importance for a decolonial understanding of that, including what it means for our work in very real ways.

Stephen Burrell: 00:05:29

Absolutely.

Stephen Burrell: 00:05:29

Yeah.

Stephen Burrell: 00:05:30

Just to begin with, Sandy mentioned that you've been, doing some work with the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom or WILPF, which is the longest standing women's peace building organisation in the world.

Stephen Burrell: 00:05:41

and so this has involved coordinating a multi-country initiative about mobilising men for feminist peace, which has included the development of a fantastic podcast series, which I would very much recommend our listeners to check out.

Stephen Burrell: 00:05:54

but at this, moment in time, of course, feminist peace does feel a quite a long way away, in many settings around the globe.

Stephen Burrell: 00:06:02

so I guess how would you make sense, Dean, of this kind of surge that we are seeing in war and militarism?

Stephen Burrell: 00:06:07

Like, why do you think this is happening and I guess, yeah.

Stephen Burrell: 00:06:09

Is it making you more concerned at this point in time, perhaps compared to other stages in your career?

Dean Peacock: 00:06:15

Yeah, I mean, without a doubt, I feel more concerned about.

Dean Peacock: 00:06:20

The state of the world, the kind of escalating conflict.

Dean Peacock: 00:06:25

You know, we sit at a particular moment where we don't know whether there is even a ceasefire.

Dean Peacock: 00:06:32

in Iran, certainly the ceasefires that have been claimed in Gaza have been routinely violated.

Dean Peacock: 00:06:40

and the brazen illegal attacks continue unabated, by the Israeli Defence Force, of course, aided and abated by the us.

Dean Peacock: 00:06:50

so we do live in a time of what feels like very dangerous conflict.

Dean Peacock: 00:06:58

you know, the threat of nuclear weapons being used, you know, there's all this language about the use of tactical nuclear weapons, even though we know these Tactical

Dean Peacock: 00:07:12

nuclear weapons are far more destructive than the ones that were dropped on Japan.

Dean Peacock: 00:07:17

so we, you know, I think when we had that walk Sandy in New York all those years ago, it was rather unimaginable to us that there would be the level of conflict that there is globally, across, you know, parts of Europe.

Dean Peacock: 00:07:36

the Sahel, the Middle East.

Dean Peacock: 00:07:39

there are conflicts that we, barely talk about, which are rarely dangerous conflicts, in Sudan, you know, as one of a number across the Sahel.

Dean Peacock: 00:07:51

So how do we understand, that level of conflict?

Dean Peacock: 00:07:57

And I think, you know, this is a moment to complicate the narrative because I think in the work that we've all been doing.

Dean Peacock: 00:08:06

and it's interesting, Sandy, to reflect back on the title of your book, men and Gender Equality.

Dean Peacock: 00:08:12

It wasn't Men Masculinities and mm-hmm.

Dean Peacock: 00:08:16

Transforming masculine norms.

Dean Peacock: 00:08:19

it was very much focused on men's work to address gender equality.

Dean Peacock: 00:08:23

And I think we have to understand that men's violence, whether in intimate partner relationships in local communities and gangs and other forms of, city-based, often violence or international conflict, is driven

Dean Peacock: 00:08:42

by a multiplicity of factors and gender norms, particularly patriarchal norms are certainly one of those.

Dean Peacock: 00:08:50

And we see that all the time, right, with the posturing of people like Trump.

Dean Peacock: 00:08:56

And, you know, until recently, all bans, certainly Netanyahu, Putin, the list is long.

Dean Peacock: 00:09:04

and so.

Dean Peacock: 00:09:05

You know, undeniably conflict is exacerbated by, patriarchal norms.

Dean Peacock: 00:09:12

Norms that valorize all the things we've often talked about, right?

Dean Peacock: 00:09:15

Power, domination, aggression.

Dean Peacock: 00:09:20

but I think we also have to keep track of the other factors that are at play.

Dean Peacock: 00:09:24

You know, the, economic issues which drive a lot of the conflict.

Dean Peacock: 00:09:30

the strength of the arms industry and its influence on national policy, like, you know, and, war and conflict.

Dean Peacock: 00:09:38

The arms industry has seldom had it as good as they have at the moment.

Dean Peacock: 00:09:44

you know, there is concern about whether there are enough arms.

Dean Peacock: 00:09:49

when for so long our conversation has been about disarmament and decreasing, nuclear stockpiles, where in a moment where, you know, across Europe, countries are rushing to divert their resources to.

Dean Peacock: 00:10:05

Arms development.

Dean Peacock: 00:10:06

and so I think we have to recognise the range of different economic interests that are also driving this conflict.

Dean Peacock: 00:10:16

and, you know, resource extraction is a big part of this, of course.

Dean Peacock: 00:10:23

and the multipolar world that we're in, I think means that countries are vying for influence in ways that, certainly the US didn't feel as obliged to do previously.

Dean Peacock: 00:10:38

So I think there is a big, you know, as I say, sort of multifaceted analysis that we have to, bring to bear here and that men masculinities ideas about what constitutes manhood are important.

Dean Peacock: 00:10:55

they're necessary but insufficient to understand the bigger picture of conflict.

Dean Peacock: 00:11:01

you know, all of these things come together.

Dean Peacock: 00:11:03

In a way that perhaps is useful to think about in the context of intersectionality, although that's usually applied at an interpersonal, level, more than a structural level to understand, you know, interstate conflict.

Dean Peacock: 00:11:18

and that's a lot of what we saw in the work with wil.

Dean Peacock: 00:11:22

So it was a 16 country, project, mostly conflict and post-conflict countries, mostly in Africa, but also Latin America, the Middle East, central Asia, little bit, in, Southeast Asia as well.

Dean Peacock: 00:11:40

And there what we saw was, you know, longstanding women's rights activists, peace activists in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Afghanistan and Cameroon saying we have to understand this in the long arc of history.

Dean Peacock: 00:11:54

so, you know, how has colonialism shaped, access to resources to economic opportunity?

Dean Peacock: 00:12:02

How does our current world, configuration of power mean that military aid foreign aid gets given to autocratic rulers who are deeply involved in multiple forms of corruption, and are providing, you know, access to vital resources.

Dean Peacock: 00:12:25

I worked a lot on that project with a Cameroonian researcher, Lotsmart Fonjong.

Dean Peacock: 00:12:30

and he's written a lot about women's resistance to land dispossession, and what that means for, or conflict where men are in supporting women's resistance to land possession.

Dean Peacock: 00:12:46

and how we understand that in relationship to resources.

Dean Peacock: 00:12:50

In the case of Cameroon oil timber, palm oil, and the ways in which those industries have really driven conflict.

Dean Peacock: 00:13:01

So, so, yeah.

Stephen Burrell: 00:13:05

Well, and I guess these factors are very much overlap, don't they?

Stephen Burrell: 00:13:08

So, like, for example, the arms industry is a very patriarchal, masculinized industry.

Stephen Burrell: 00:13:13

so I guess, a concept which has come up previously on the podcast is the idea of militarised masculinities.

Stephen Burrell: 00:13:19

That's right.

Stephen Burrell: 00:13:20

yeah.

Stephen Burrell: 00:13:20

Would you be willing just to say about how you understand that concept and perhaps how you would say that's playing out, for example, at the moment in terms of the

Stephen Burrell: 00:13:28

actions of the Trump and Netanyahu governments towards, you know, Lebanon, Iran, Gaza,

Stephen Burrell: 00:13:36

mm-hmm.

Dean Peacock: 00:13:37

Yeah.

Dean Peacock: 00:13:37

So I mean, I think, you know, if, we analyse that term and think about how it gets applied, it's about, you know, the values associated with military might, with, resources being.

Dean Peacock: 00:13:55

Primarily oriented towards the military, the armed apparatus of the state, the military, the police, border control,

Dean Peacock: 00:14:05

and, you know, a devaluing of care, in all its forms, right?

Dean Peacock: 00:14:11

Whether that's healthcare, the care that's provided in families, education, social security.

Dean Peacock: 00:14:19

so it's a diversion of resources in very particular ways, to support armed conflict, armed belligerent, and away from, you know, all of the things that we know sustain peace.

Dean Peacock: 00:14:37

but it's also, of course, supported by forced conscription.

Dean Peacock: 00:14:43

you know, and I think conscription takes a number of forms forced in many countries mandatory.

Dean Peacock: 00:14:50

but also in places like the US if you are a poor and working class person.

Dean Peacock: 00:14:55

The military is one of the few ways you have access to healthcare, to education, to a decent job.

Dean Peacock: 00:15:05

So it's the structuring of societies in ways that supports that level of militarization, and one that inevitably ends up reinforcing these hierarchies related to gender.

Dean Peacock: 00:15:19

so, you know, and we, see it in particularly pronounced ways at the moment with, Pete Hegseth in the US his relentless attacks on vocalism by which he means, anything other than militarised masculinities, right?

Dean Peacock: 00:15:37

so attacks on women on LGBTQI+ communities within the military and more broadly, diversity, equity, and inclusion, all those are out the window in a place where militarised masculinities have become the hegemonic forms.

Dean Peacock: 00:15:53

Of manhood.

Dean Peacock: 00:15:55

so, you know, and if I think about my own childhood, grew up here in South Africa in a very militarised country, it was kind of a soft militarism in a way for those of us who were beneficiaries of, apart.

Dean Peacock: 00:16:10

but every Friday I had to go to work dressed in military, not work, sorry, school, dressed in military gear.

Dean Peacock: 00:16:17

And we would spend Friday afternoons marching around, a field, you know, learning how to be apartheid infantry men, because of course, conscription into the white South African army was all men.

Dean Peacock: 00:16:34

And that was part of a process of indoctrination, which included all the usual misogyny, homophobia, et cetera, to establish, well not establish, but to.

Dean Peacock: 00:16:49

Socialise us into being willing to use violence.

Dean Peacock: 00:16:52

and in that case, you know, racist violence, so

Sandy Ruxton: 00:16:56

mm-hmm.

Dean Peacock: 00:16:58

You know, that in societies that are militarised, that's often a very common feature.

Dean Peacock: 00:17:06

And we, so, you know, Pete Muller, fantastic photographer who I work with, has documented that process in Ukraine of all of the training that happened to young men, particularly post 2014, and the Russian, invasion into Crimea.

Dean Peacock: 00:17:22

But, you know, this kind of building of a masculinized, military or paramilitary to advance particular aims.

Sandy Ruxton: 00:17:32

So it was funny to hear you talk then, Dean, about your getting in your, military gear on Fridays.

Sandy Ruxton: 00:17:38

I was actually doing the same on Wednesdays in the uk.

Sandy Ruxton: 00:17:41

You know, we have a long history of this as well, probably going back to the Russian revolution and fears about communism, you know, and, I always reflect that, I, learned

Sandy Ruxton: 00:17:51

how to, kill people at, at school, which seems rather unlikely a scenario really.

Sandy Ruxton: 00:17:56

But, but that's how it was, you know, we were firing, second world war rifles on rifle ranges and so on.

Sandy Ruxton: 00:18:03

So, so it's, it is very universal, this stuff.

Sandy Ruxton: 00:18:06

Yeah.

Sandy Ruxton: 00:18:07

You know, and it's still there.

Sandy Ruxton: 00:18:08

Cadet forces, as, we would call them, are still part of the experience for, many in many boys and young men in, British schools.

Sandy Ruxton: 00:18:17

but I wanted to ask you a bit more about, you know, the sort of drivers of men's involvement in, armed conflict.

Sandy Ruxton: 00:18:26

Mm-hmm.

Sandy Ruxton: 00:18:26

Because you, you know, you have, you've had quite a bit to, to say about that in the past.

Sandy Ruxton: 00:18:30

Mm-hmm.

Sandy Ruxton: 00:18:30

And, you know, I think you've mentioned, conflicts in Africa in what you said to us just a minute ago.

Sandy Ruxton: 00:18:35

Mm-hmm.

Sandy Ruxton: 00:18:36

But, you know, it also applies elsewhere, doesn't it?

Dean Peacock: 00:18:39

mm-hmm.

Dean Peacock: 00:18:41

No, for sure.

Dean Peacock: 00:18:42

And, I mean, I, I hadn't imagined that in the uk, in what I'm assuming were the eighties, that young men,

Sandy Ruxton: 00:18:53

seventies

Dean Peacock: 00:18:53

Seventies and eighties Sure.

Dean Peacock: 00:18:56

Were, were times where there was, you know, military training at schools.

Dean Peacock: 00:19:02

that's remarkable.

Dean Peacock: 00:19:03

And, you know, I was, essentially challenged to a debate slash dual at dawn by one of the, arms industry folks here in South Africa.

Dean Peacock: 00:19:15

And, I was reminded that, you know, he was essentially alleging that I had no prior experience with guns.

Dean Peacock: 00:19:23

And I thought, I wish that were the case, but I too was trying to kill people, you know, on a shooting range in.

Dean Peacock: 00:19:34

The suburb in which my school was located.

Dean Peacock: 00:19:36

And so it is crazy to think about that socialisation and how many of us have had it right.

Dean Peacock: 00:19:43

and there's an interesting and funny way in which the world of men masculinities and violence prevention hasn't engaged very much with militarism and conflict.

Dean Peacock: 00:19:55

Right.

Dean Peacock: 00:19:55

We've mostly been quite focused on, more intimate forms of violence.

Dean Peacock: 00:20:02

But to your question of drivers, it was so interesting, at WIL where I'm not currently working because like so many other projects of its nature, we lost funding, at the beginning of the Trump administration.

Dean Peacock: 00:20:17

we had been funded by Global Affairs Canada, but they then had to move some of their funding to, to fill the huge holes in humanitarian assistance left by the, you know, decimation of USAID.

Dean Peacock: 00:20:32

But we grappled a lot with this question, right?

Dean Peacock: 00:20:34

Of like, what are we talking about when we talk about militarised masculinities and what is it in fact that drives men's involvement in armed conflict, not just in militaries.

Dean Peacock: 00:20:44

We've talked about militaries for many men, including in some of the countries we worked in.

Dean Peacock: 00:20:50

You know, that's not a choice they have to become involved or not, they're conscripted.

Dean Peacock: 00:20:55

And in Colombia we learned that, you know, even in places where the law has been changed, to restrict some of the recruitment and conscription practises, they continue,

Dean Peacock: 00:21:09

in Columbia to abduct young men off the street and force them into the military.

Dean Peacock: 00:21:14

despite the amazing work that a Colombian collective called ACOOC is doing, Colombian organisation against conscription, in is more or less what the acronym is.

Dean Peacock: 00:21:28

But we, thought a lot about, well, what drives men into non-state armed groups.

Dean Peacock: 00:21:35

and there was a way in which there was a sort of default assumption that the primary driver was notions of manhood and masculinities and Right.

Dean Peacock: 00:21:46

So in some ways what we did at WILPF, and I think in many organisations doing peace building work that had a focus on men and masculinities, was to map onto the work of conflict and

Dean Peacock: 00:21:58

post-conflict peacebuilding models that came from the world of gender-based violence.

Dean Peacock: 00:22:05

and so there was little attention to some of the other factors.

Dean Peacock: 00:22:11

and so if you look at the international literature and, embarrassingly, I have to say, it took me a year or two into the project before I began to really grapple

Dean Peacock: 00:22:21

with what the literature says about the drivers of men's involvement in, conflict.

Dean Peacock: 00:22:26

And norms around masculinity is certainly one of them.

Dean Peacock: 00:22:32

but there are a lot of other things going on.

Dean Peacock: 00:22:34

So the, if I can remember them correctly, the main predictors of men's involvement in armed conflict are experiencing repression at the hands of the state.

Dean Peacock: 00:22:45

So military, police, repression.

Dean Peacock: 00:22:49

the other was corruption.

Dean Peacock: 00:22:52

So the sense that the government was engaging in illicit activities to enrich themselves and that corruption had particular effects on discrete populations.

Dean Peacock: 00:23:07

Right.

Dean Peacock: 00:23:08

So it was sort of targeted at enriching a particular population over others.

Dean Peacock: 00:23:14

Mm-hmm.

Dean Peacock: 00:23:15

so those were really important.

Dean Peacock: 00:23:19

generalised inequality and poverty as well.

Dean Peacock: 00:23:23

It's, it was really interesting to then go into meetings with organisations doing peace building work that were interested in masculinities and say, well, hold on a sec.

Dean Peacock: 00:23:32

It's not just this desire amongst men to have power and control over others to be dominant.

Dean Peacock: 00:23:43

it's not just male socialisation.

Dean Peacock: 00:23:46

And in fact, for many men, there's tremendous risk involved in joining armed groups, right?

Dean Peacock: 00:23:52

So the vast majority of men in the places we were working in, you know, were doing everything they could to resist being in armed groups.

Dean Peacock: 00:24:01

and very often we're actually not getting the kind of support and assistance to stay out of armed groups that we might have hoped for.

Dean Peacock: 00:24:09

So, we worked with a fantastic researcher, Delphine Brun, who looked at the humanitarian response in Cameroon, and she really.

Dean Peacock: 00:24:21

Identified and explored the ways in which men, because of this implicit blaming of men that sometimes happens through our masculinities analysis, were not getting any of the psychosocial support they needed

Dean Peacock: 00:24:35

despite having experienced sexual violence in conflict, despite having been displaced and being on the run.

Dean Peacock: 00:24:43

and so I do think, the conversation around the drivers of men's involvement in armed conflict has to be complicated.

Dean Peacock: 00:24:53

and the work we did in Colombia, lot of attention was paid to the role of US military aid.

Dean Peacock: 00:25:01

so, you know, how does US military aid support precisely the sorts of practises that we know?

Dean Peacock: 00:25:10

Increase men's involvement in armed groups, right?

Dean Peacock: 00:25:14

So funding a repressive, autocratic government.

Dean Peacock: 00:25:18

That does exactly the kind of repression with its military and its police that drive men into armed conflict.

Dean Peacock: 00:25:26

and so that project, we did a lot of work to try and broaden our frame of analysis and to understand these more complex drivers.

Dean Peacock: 00:25:35

there's a fabulous piece of work that we drew on to understand some of the conflict in the Sahel.

Dean Peacock: 00:25:42

how have colonial boundaries, contributed to violence?

Dean Peacock: 00:25:48

how does Extractivism, in the form often of paramilitary groups in cahoots with industry, you know, taking land away from people in order to extract resources, and

Dean Peacock: 00:26:06

through that process guaranteeing the proliferation of arms into those communities.

Dean Peacock: 00:26:12

and of course engendering resistance to the loss of people's lands.

Dean Peacock: 00:26:17

So it's a messy,

Dean Peacock: 00:26:21

analysis that we really have to embrace, I think, and to say, yes, gender is a part of it, but it's implicated with all of these other things.

Dean Peacock: 00:26:32

which I think, you know, theorists have been saying for a long time.

Dean Peacock: 00:26:36

our work, it seems to me is to recognise some of those other forces and attempt to address them, restrict the harm that they do in the world and the pressures that they put on men to engage in militarised behaviour.

Dean Peacock: 00:26:56

so that was, our experience in that project and we saw that in every country.

Dean Peacock: 00:27:03

you know, and it was so interesting, we started working with.

Dean Peacock: 00:27:08

Our WILPF sections, as they're called, these are WILPF country, chapters.

Dean Peacock: 00:27:14

And there was a pretty deep seated assumption that, well, you know, men embrace war, and people like Delphine and others said, but hang on a second, if we look at what's happening

Dean Peacock: 00:27:25

in your country, in fact, we see the vast majority of men, as I said earlier, are doing everything they could to resist being involved in war because they cared about their own lives.

Dean Peacock: 00:27:37

They cared about the lives of their families, their communities.

Dean Peacock: 00:27:41

and so, you know, I find a lot of solace in recognising the resistance to violence that we see play itself out among so many men.

Dean Peacock: 00:27:58

it's a, more.

Dean Peacock: 00:28:00

It, it, opens up all sorts of additional possibilities, I think when we recognise

Sandy Ruxton: 00:28:05

Yeah.

Dean Peacock: 00:28:06

That most men are not embracing violence, they're resisting it, at least in terms of conflict.

Sandy Ruxton: 00:28:12

Yeah.

Sandy Ruxton: 00:28:13

I mean, given the, the huge range of factors you've laid out The structural factors, you know, and the difficulty of tackling all of those.

Sandy Ruxton: 00:28:21

I'm just wondering where that leaves working with men, you know?

Sandy Ruxton: 00:28:26

Yeah.

Sandy Ruxton: 00:28:26

and obviously there's, a lot of work goes on at more individual level, group work, individual psychotherapeutic work, whatever.

Sandy Ruxton: 00:28:34

Mm-hmm.

Sandy Ruxton: 00:28:35

which is about, which comes under perhaps the label that you would use transforming masculinities, but, how does that sit?

Sandy Ruxton: 00:28:41

Yeah.

Sandy Ruxton: 00:28:41

Given the huge range of factors, you, are, Suggesting need to be addressed.

Dean Peacock: 00:28:46

Yeah, no, it's a very important, and in some ways, vexing question, right?

Dean Peacock: 00:28:52

Like how do you do work that effectively addresses the multiple forms of violence men engage in?

Dean Peacock: 00:29:02

and does one always need to do that with a masculinities lens?

Dean Peacock: 00:29:05

And David Duriesmith and I convened a meeting in London a few years ago where that was one of the, kind of, one of the questions that was percolating the whole time is if our intention

Dean Peacock: 00:29:19

is to end men's involvement in violence in intimate partner relations and conflict and gangs,

Dean Peacock: 00:29:28

can you do that work in ways that doesn't necessarily foreground masculinities?

Dean Peacock: 00:29:33

I think you can.

Dean Peacock: 00:29:35

and I'll give you a very local example of work that we did at SONKE Gender Justice, which was.

Dean Peacock: 00:29:44

Really illuminating for us as an organisation.

Dean Peacock: 00:29:47

So we were part of the UK government funded What Works to End Violence Against Women Initiative.

Dean Peacock: 00:29:53

and we implemented a project in a large informal settlement, you know, sort of very poor community on the outskirts of Johannesburg called Diepsloot.

Dean Peacock: 00:30:05

We interviewed two and a half thousand men about their life experiences and, about their

Dean Peacock: 00:30:14

endorsement of an investment in particular ideas of manhood and masculinities.

Dean Peacock: 00:30:19

And I was working with two researchers at the time at the University of Varant, who rarely pushed us to include questions I would never have included.

Dean Peacock: 00:30:29

I would've focused very much on the usual masculinities indicators, the gender equitable male scale.

Dean Peacock: 00:30:36

men's endorsement of a particular set of norms, and they said, yeah, we're gonna include those.

Dean Peacock: 00:30:42

But we also want to understand men's experiences of hunger, men's experiences of trauma, men's experiences of unemployment, household, the built environment,

Dean Peacock: 00:30:55

alcohol outlet density questions that we at soke, were really not dealing with.

Dean Peacock: 00:31:02

And that in some ways we saw as a distraction.

Dean Peacock: 00:31:06

and when we analysed the data, what was so interesting was, yes, of course, the men who endorsed ideas about control entitlement to women's bodies, dominance, those men did use violence more than those who didn't.

Dean Peacock: 00:31:23

but they were about twice as likely, but the men who had experienced trauma in two forms, violence against themselves as children, and witnessing violence against their mothers.

Dean Peacock: 00:31:36

Were five times more likely to use violence.

Dean Peacock: 00:31:40

Men who had problematic drinking histories were two and a half times more vi likely to be violent.

Dean Peacock: 00:31:48

Men who experienced chronic food scarcity, who had, you know, sustained issues with hunger, also very likely to, use violence.

Dean Peacock: 00:32:00

Now, those are overlapping categories, of course, but what that pushed us to do is to say, okay, well what do we do about alcohol outlet density?

Dean Peacock: 00:32:10

Is the government, the, you know, local government in that place paying attention to alcohol regulations?

Dean Peacock: 00:32:18

No, they weren't.

Dean Peacock: 00:32:19

That's a national problem.

Dean Peacock: 00:32:20

In South Africa, we have a broadly speaking, unregulated alcohol environment.

Dean Peacock: 00:32:25

In some of the poorer communities in South Africa, you'll find multiple unlicensed outlets in the same.

Dean Peacock: 00:32:33

they're open all hours and there's little attempt to ensure any kind of safety in those places.

Dean Peacock: 00:32:41

And in fact, research shows that from those places you can kind of identify a straight red line of increased violence of all sorts.

Dean Peacock: 00:32:52

so we began to really pay attention to alcohol as an accelerant enabler.

Dean Peacock: 00:32:58

and that debate, Steven, I know has just happened quite fiercely in Australia, related to Michael Salter and Jess Hill's work pushing for stronger inclusion of alcohol and other commercial

Dean Peacock: 00:33:10

determinants of violence in Australia's national action plan to address violence against women.

Dean Peacock: 00:33:16

so I think, Sandy, in answer to your question, if our goal is to decrease men's use of violence, we have to pay attention to this.

Dean Peacock: 00:33:28

We, we have to bring a multifactorial analysis.

Dean Peacock: 00:33:30

We have to understand that.

Dean Peacock: 00:33:34

It's complicated to try and change ideas about manhood, masculinities, and to go into a community like Deep Slur and exalt the most socially excluded men.

Dean Peacock: 00:33:47

unemployed, migrant, experiencing xenophobia, chronic food insecurity, no recreational outlets, no green space.

Dean Peacock: 00:33:58

Living in an environment that repeatedly says to them and everyone in that community, you are unimportant.

Dean Peacock: 00:34:06

You are relatively inconsequential to expect those men to buy into an intervention that says the problem here is ideas of manhood, and we're going to shift those.

Dean Peacock: 00:34:19

and that very often situates those new norms as being Western derived.

Dean Peacock: 00:34:26

even though they're not, it's a rarely hard ask.

Dean Peacock: 00:34:30

And I'll just give you one other example where this came up.

Dean Peacock: 00:34:33

So right after October 7th, when was that?

Dean Peacock: 00:34:38

2023. Right.

Dean Peacock: 00:34:40

when the Hamas attack occurred, I was on a panel, a side event at the un.

Dean Peacock: 00:34:49

and I said, well, we're talking about Palestine and I, and talking about engaging men.

Dean Peacock: 00:34:57

and I said it, it feels like a really hard ask at the moment to say to Palestinian men, the problem here is your ideas and kind of embodiment of a, of manhood and masculinities.

Dean Peacock: 00:35:11

and we want to change that.

Dean Peacock: 00:35:12

And I was so reminded of a amazing young man who came to a meeting we convened in Tbilisi from Palestine, and he said, you know, it's just so hard for me to do masculinity's work in occupied Palestinian Territories when.

Dean Peacock: 00:35:30

The cause of the violence is so clear.

Dean Peacock: 00:35:32

It's colonialism, it's the Nakba, it's the Israeli defence force.

Dean Peacock: 00:35:38

And he said like, this work will be so much more successful if we are seen to be challenging multiple forms of violence and not just focusing on the most socially excluded.

Dean Peacock: 00:35:50

and in fact drawing attention to the relations of power that drive genocidal violence and interpersonal violence.

Dean Peacock: 00:36:00

Right?

Dean Peacock: 00:36:01

and so I think we have to do all of that.

Dean Peacock: 00:36:04

And it is daunting.

Dean Peacock: 00:36:05

It means thinking about how we provide psychosocial support at scale.

Dean Peacock: 00:36:11

It means thinking about workforce development among social workers, auxiliary social workers.

Dean Peacock: 00:36:18

it requires doing things that happened in the HIV response actually.

Dean Peacock: 00:36:23

we didn't have enough people to do HIV testing, so.

Dean Peacock: 00:36:26

We did task shifting.

Dean Peacock: 00:36:28

We made sure that community members got the basic skills needed to do HIV testing and then nurses and others could move on and do other things.

Dean Peacock: 00:36:37

and there are lots of models of effective peer-based, psychosocial support to address trauma.

Dean Peacock: 00:36:44

Similarly, there is no shortage of evidence about what works to decrease alcohol related violence.

Dean Peacock: 00:36:52

And it's not the stuff that is about exalting people to drink less.

Dean Peacock: 00:36:56

It's about changing the broader alcohol environment.

Dean Peacock: 00:36:59

It's about restricting access.

Dean Peacock: 00:37:01

It's about closing places earlier, decreasing alcohol content in, in, in beverages.

Dean Peacock: 00:37:09

It's banning alcohol advertising.

Dean Peacock: 00:37:11

So in many countries it's also thinking about, well, and this is something I'm thinking about a lot at the moment.

Dean Peacock: 00:37:19

Gun violence and access to guns and its intersection with masculinities, right?

Dean Peacock: 00:37:26

We, in the literature and in the work on men and guns and firearm violence, there's kind of a default assumption that somehow or another men are invested in gun ownership and gun use.

Dean Peacock: 00:37:39

But we often don't think about the decades of work that the arms industry and the gun industry has done to create weapons as kind of totems of masculinities.

Dean Peacock: 00:37:53

Right.

Dean Peacock: 00:37:54

and the National Rifle Association, the Pentagon has worked super closely with film, television, video games to make sure that, men and gun ownership have become, you know, utterly intertwined.

Dean Peacock: 00:38:12

so we have to challenge that marketing.

Dean Peacock: 00:38:14

That's clear.

Dean Peacock: 00:38:15

And there are places where that's happening, and places where it's not happening at all.

Dean Peacock: 00:38:21

we have to make sure that, you know, we recognise the commercial determinants of violence.

Dean Peacock: 00:38:26

I think we neglect that at our peril.

Dean Peacock: 00:38:28

Mm-hmm.

Stephen Burrell: 00:38:34

Yeah, I mean it's, we wanted to ask you about that because you are a commissioner on the Lancet Commission on Gun Violence and Health, and also a

Stephen Burrell: 00:38:42

co-leader of the newly launched, global Coalition for WHO Action on firearm violence.

Stephen Burrell: 00:38:49

do you wanna tell us a bit more about the work you're doing there?

Stephen Burrell: 00:38:51

Like why is it that you are focusing on the World Health Organisation, for example, and, yeah, any more you wanna say about those specific links in terms of masculinity and, the

Dean Peacock: 00:39:01

firearms

Stephen Burrell: 00:39:02

industry?

Stephen Burrell: 00:39:03

Yeah,

Dean Peacock: 00:39:03

No, sure.

Dean Peacock: 00:39:04

Sure.

Dean Peacock: 00:39:04

Thank you.

Dean Peacock: 00:39:05

yeah, it's fascinating work and it's all at the moment.

Dean Peacock: 00:39:09

It.

Dean Peacock: 00:39:10

A labour of love.

Dean Peacock: 00:39:11

We have a secretariat of five people, all of whom are volunteering their time.

Dean Peacock: 00:39:16

And in some ways it's quite nice to be sort of back in unpaid activism without any of the strings that come attached to more professionalised work.

Dean Peacock: 00:39:28

but yeah, this is linked to a meeting.

Dean Peacock: 00:39:32

I coved at WILPF in 2024 in Geneva.

Dean Peacock: 00:39:35

We brought 40 people from around the world together to have a conversation about the marketing of weapons and war, and the gender exploited of ways in which that happens.

Dean Peacock: 00:39:46

Now, a lot of the marketing is directed at men.

Dean Peacock: 00:39:50

but you know, a growing amount of it is also directed at women either to encourage gun ownership as a form of empowerment for women or using women's bodies to market guns to men.

Dean Peacock: 00:40:06

and so we looked at.

Dean Peacock: 00:40:08

Kind of a broad set of forces that are normalising the marketing of weapons and war.

Dean Peacock: 00:40:14

and you know, most people don't know it, and it sounds slightly conspiratorial to say it, but it is nonetheless true that the Pentagon has been collaborating in a

Dean Peacock: 00:40:25

formal, organised way with Hollywood, since the beginning of the film industry.

Dean Peacock: 00:40:32

and so for the big blockbuster films like Top Gun, classic Example, or really any of the films that include, military equipment, the Pentagon says, fine, we'll

Dean Peacock: 00:40:46

provide you with that equipment, but in an in return we will line edit your script.

Dean Peacock: 00:40:55

now there is an archive in at Georgetown University where all of the scripts were located, and initially people like Roger Sta, who's done a lot of writing on this.

Dean Peacock: 00:41:07

Tana Meli, thought that, you know, it was a few dozen films.

Dean Peacock: 00:41:12

It's thousands of films, and they were able to see the scripts where, you know, the, redlining happened.

Dean Peacock: 00:41:20

and so it's both kind of what ideas about militaries conflict the enemy.

Dean Peacock: 00:41:30

men as protectors are put out into the world and what stories are never put out into the world because they don't get the funding.

Dean Peacock: 00:41:38

so we were looking at those dynamics.

Dean Peacock: 00:41:40

Also the placement of guns and, military equipment and video games played by billions of people around the world.

Dean Peacock: 00:41:48

Now, I think it's three and a half billion people play video games, and many of the blockbuster video games were developed, by the US Department of Defence, the UK Department of Defence as recruitment tools and as.

Dean Peacock: 00:42:07

you know, kind of practise tools.

Dean Peacock: 00:42:09

so point is the media landscape is inundated with marketing, you know, tactics, and strategies of the gun industry.

Dean Peacock: 00:42:22

Militaries in ways that link manhood to warn conflict and weapons, and normalise the use of weapons.

Dean Peacock: 00:42:33

So that was a, fabulous meeting.

Dean Peacock: 00:42:35

And,

Dean Peacock: 00:42:38

out of that, people sort of on the last day really began to ask these questions about, well, who's regulating the marketing?

Dean Peacock: 00:42:46

and we all said, well, the WHO, they're up the hill from us.

Dean Peacock: 00:42:49

Surely they have done similar work to limit the harm of marketing as a health issue in the way that they have around alcohol or tobacco, or baby formula or pesticides.

Dean Peacock: 00:43:04

And so we expected that we would find a robust body of work around the restriction of harmful marketing.

Dean Peacock: 00:43:12

and we began to dig, we looked initially at their violence prevention documents and we couldn't find anything.

Dean Peacock: 00:43:19

We then analysed all three and a half thousand of the World Health Assembly resolutions passed since 1948.

Dean Peacock: 00:43:27

Not a single one.

Dean Peacock: 00:43:30

includes the words firearms or guns, not one.

Dean Peacock: 00:43:34

by comparison, and this is not to suggest this is an unimportant issue, it isn't.

Dean Peacock: 00:43:40

baby formula regulation has about 20 resolutions.

Dean Peacock: 00:43:44

but gun violence, which kills 450,000 people a year worldwide, not a single mention.

Dean Peacock: 00:43:51

Why?

Dean Peacock: 00:43:51

Because of the political economy, shaping how WHO functions, right?

Dean Peacock: 00:43:56

So the US repeatedly blocked it and heard on a phone call with someone quite senior recently.

Dean Peacock: 00:44:03

That any time their team attempted to address gun violence onto the WHO agenda, they would get a call from the US saying, it's not your mandate.

Dean Peacock: 00:44:13

Don't do it.

Dean Peacock: 00:44:14

We, will mm-hmm.

Dean Peacock: 00:44:16

You know, reduce or withdraw funding.

Dean Peacock: 00:44:19

So what we discovered, bottom line is that the WHO has done very little on gun violence in the last 15 years.

Dean Peacock: 00:44:26

despite doing great work in other areas, the inspire framework to address violence against children, the respect framework to address violence against women have been rolled out all over the world.

Dean Peacock: 00:44:38

and that happens a lot with the WHO, right?

Dean Peacock: 00:44:40

They provide guidance to member states, to departments of health women's ministries and their frameworks get used.

Dean Peacock: 00:44:50

but the RESPECT framework, the Inspire framework, barely mentioned gun violence at all.

Dean Peacock: 00:44:56

Even though gun violence is increasingly the leading instrument used in Femicide.

Dean Peacock: 00:45:02

And the main driver of mortality amongst children in Mexico, Brazil, the US, South Africa.

Dean Peacock: 00:45:11

That's true.

Dean Peacock: 00:45:13

and yet the Inspire framework barely mentions it.

Dean Peacock: 00:45:17

respect framework, femicide is the leading cause of death.

Dean Peacock: 00:45:21

Well, gun related Femicide, same issue.

Dean Peacock: 00:45:24

Right.

Dean Peacock: 00:45:24

Guns are neglected in our discussions about domestic violence, both in terms of femicide and in terms of what the presence of a gun means in the context of an abusive relationship.

Dean Peacock: 00:45:38

If I know my partner has a weapon and all them more so if they threaten me with it, what that means for my ability to leave, what it means for the kind of trauma I, my kids experience.

Dean Peacock: 00:45:51

it just, it's a, it completely changes the nature of coercive control when fatality is a very likely outcome.

Dean Peacock: 00:46:02

in the presence of a gun in the home.

Dean Peacock: 00:46:04

So I think we've neglected that at our peril.

Dean Peacock: 00:46:07

And, interestingly, when it comes to men's health, WHO has done little generally, but very little on this question of gun violence and men's health, despite the fact that men, as I'm sure you know, constitute

Dean Peacock: 00:46:22

nearly 90% of gunshot victims, fatalities studies that has major implications for suicide prevention.

Dean Peacock: 00:46:34

you know, the majority of gun deaths in the US are suicides.

Dean Peacock: 00:46:38

and men are vastly, overly represented in, in those data.

Dean Peacock: 00:46:45

So we are making progress.

Dean Peacock: 00:46:48

it's a difficult time because the WHO is very stretched, for resources in the wake of the shift that we were talking about earlier.

Dean Peacock: 00:46:58

To amongst many member states to fund their militaries, rather than, you know, respect their commitments to, global health governance.

Dean Peacock: 00:47:08

'cause they all are supposed to pay the WHO money and many are in arrears, terribly.

Dean Peacock: 00:47:13

So, it links us back to the conversation around militarism.

Stephen Burrell: 00:47:18

Mm-hmm.

Stephen Burrell: 00:47:19

Yeah, absolutely.

Sandy Ruxton: 00:47:21

Thanks, Dean.

Sandy Ruxton: 00:47:21

I could listen to you for hours talking, but, I realise that we've almost come to, we have been talking for hours at the end of our time, but before we, before, before we finish, I wanted to ask you more about the

Sandy Ruxton: 00:47:33

sort of personal side of, the work and, you know, your personal journey, if you like, through this work.

Sandy Ruxton: 00:47:40

You know, I mean, as I understand it, you, you first got involved in activism for peace and equality through campaigning against apartheid in South Africa and, you know, 1985 sometime around then.

Sandy Ruxton: 00:47:51

But why, do you think you started engaging with, feminism and, anti-violence work in the first place?

Sandy Ruxton: 00:47:58

What was it that motivated you?

Dean Peacock: 00:48:00

You know, I, was fortunate in some ways.

Dean Peacock: 00:48:04

I ended up going to a very ac activist university at UC Berkeley, and my partner at the time who was Nicaragua, was volunteering at a battered women's shelter in San Francisco, Casa Belas Madres.

Dean Peacock: 00:48:19

And, we had both been involved in lots of different activism against the Gulf War, against US intervention in Central America.

Dean Peacock: 00:48:28

I had always had this question though of like, well, what's my place in this work as a white South African living in the US as a man?

Dean Peacock: 00:48:36

So she came home one day after having attended a training, by the then Director of Men Overcoming Violence in San, Francisco.

Dean Peacock: 00:48:44

And she said like, here's the answer to your question of what you should be doing that,

Dean Peacock: 00:48:51

isn't about doing work in solidarity with, but is actually in very real ways about working with, you know, yourself, your own issues and other men.

Dean Peacock: 00:49:01

and she said, go volunteer at Men Overcoming Violence.

Dean Peacock: 00:49:05

And, you know, I placed a call to them, didn't hear back for months.

Dean Peacock: 00:49:10

They were small, like so many initiatives.

Dean Peacock: 00:49:13

But then I was invited in for an interview and I remember, Jim Meyers, this lovely guy,

Dean Peacock: 00:49:21

saying, well, why are you here?

Dean Peacock: 00:49:23

And I said, well, I would like to learn some skills that I can take back to South Africa.

Dean Peacock: 00:49:27

It was always my dream to go back to South Africa.

Dean Peacock: 00:49:30

And so I was invited to observe groups to, initially do phone interviews with people who wanted to come in and then ultimately ended up running groups for adult men

Dean Peacock: 00:49:43

who had been mandated by the courts to attend a battery intervention programme.

Dean Peacock: 00:49:48

And it was remarkable work.

Dean Peacock: 00:49:50

I was simultaneously working with homeless and runaway youth, many of whom were on the streets because their fathers were some version of the men I was working with.

Dean Peacock: 00:50:00

They had to run away from homes, where they experienced violence or they witnessed their mother's experience violence.

Dean Peacock: 00:50:07

And so.

Dean Peacock: 00:50:08

It felt like a way of doing upstream work to address youth violence or violence perpetrated against youth and to address youth homelessness.

Dean Peacock: 00:50:18

and so, you know, that was motivation.

Dean Peacock: 00:50:22

at the same time,

Dean Peacock: 00:50:26

in my family, domestic violence and, you know, teen dating violence had manifested itself, with my sisters.

Dean Peacock: 00:50:37

And, so there was also that powerful personal connection.

Dean Peacock: 00:50:41

But being in those rooms with, men who had come to move and there were some men who'd come voluntarily, usually mandated by their partners.

Dean Peacock: 00:50:52

and, you know, the conversations that were happening around their lives, around male socialisation, the pressures that they felt as men, the inability to talk about their feelings, Resonated so powerfully for me as a young man.

Dean Peacock: 00:51:10

I was at that point, I think 22, having grown up in very patriarchal, very militarised apartheid, South Africa.

Dean Peacock: 00:51:17

So I felt like I had free therapy every time I sat around one of those groups.

Dean Peacock: 00:51:22

And I was constantly amazed by the insight.

Dean Peacock: 00:51:25

I remember one of the men, being asked, well, how do you feel about that?

Dean Peacock: 00:51:29

And he said, well, I feel like that.

Dean Peacock: 00:51:31

And the facilitator stopped him and he said, no, that's a thought.

Dean Peacock: 00:51:35

I'm asking about your feeling.

Dean Peacock: 00:51:37

And I realised I'd never made that distinction previously.

Dean Peacock: 00:51:42

It was like a revelation.

Dean Peacock: 00:51:45

and so being involved in those groups as a facilitator allowed me into conversations that were so important for me, myself.

Dean Peacock: 00:51:56

and that I think also generated real change.

Dean Peacock: 00:51:58

And as a result of that, did a lot of work in the jails.

Dean Peacock: 00:52:02

in San Francisco, worked with youth involved in gang violence, started a peer education programme in the San Francisco School District.

Dean Peacock: 00:52:12

and you know, I often left those places just feeling like, wow, how did I get to be so lucky to be doing work that feels so meaningful to me and to the communities in which I was working?

Dean Peacock: 00:52:26

so that was, you know, this kind of convergence of needing to understand myself, needing to understand the violence that was, putting kids in the streets in San Francisco and Nicaragua where I also did some work.

Dean Peacock: 00:52:42

and feeling a very urgent need to also address the violence that I had learned was affecting people I cared about very deeply in my own family.

Dean Peacock: 00:52:52

and so it was kind of that convergence of political, personal,

Dean Peacock: 00:52:59

That you know, feminists have been saying is at the core of our work, the personal and the political.

Dean Peacock: 00:53:04

So yeah, I've been very lucky.

Dean Peacock: 00:53:06

I've got to do that work for the last 30 odd years, and have always found it riveting and meaningful.

Dean Peacock: 00:53:17

I've got to have conversations like this, meet people like you both.

Dean Peacock: 00:53:21

so yeah, it's been an incredible journey and I got to come back to South Africa.

Dean Peacock: 00:53:27

I came back on holiday the first time after, doing some work that was policy work and therefore a little bit better paid.

Dean Peacock: 00:53:35

I was a member of the team that wrote the first agenda for the nation on violence against women in the us in the Clinton administration, in 99, 2000.

Dean Peacock: 00:53:47

So I came back to South Africa and met with lots of organisations working with men or working on.

Dean Peacock: 00:53:52

addressing gender-based violence and wrote a small piece that got published and got picked up by Jackson Katz, who, I had met through my work in DC and he put me in touch with Engender Health.

Dean Peacock: 00:54:05

They hired me.

Dean Peacock: 00:54:06

I came back to South Africa to coordinate the work of the Men's Partners Network and you know, working with lots of amazing people here in South Africa, very rooted in our activist and human rights traditions in South Africa.

Dean Peacock: 00:54:24

and a group of I said, well, we want more of that activist sensibility, more of that human rights focus in our work.

Dean Peacock: 00:54:31

And so we started an organisation, Sonke Gender Justice 20 years ago that is now working in 25 countries across the continent.

Dean Peacock: 00:54:42

so it's been an amazing journey and.

Dean Peacock: 00:54:44

Our offices for a long time.

Dean Peacock: 00:54:45

Were on the main stretch in Cape Town, Adley Street, looking out over Parliament, over the, slavery museum, in fact, and onto Table Mountain.

Dean Peacock: 00:54:57

And I often looked out of that window and I was like, how did I get to be so lucky?

Dean Peacock: 00:55:03

and so it's been an incredible journey and I'm now doing more work in academia, which gives me a lot more time to read and to think and to try and make sense of the work, and to write.

Dean Peacock: 00:55:14

So, it's been, you know, this, very powerful, journey that I feel very fortunate for.

Sandy Ruxton: 00:55:22

Yeah.

Sandy Ruxton: 00:55:23

Well, we've been incredibly fortunate to be able to, listen to you talking today, Dean, and, yeah, I mean, your work has been incredible inspiration to a lot of people as well.

Sandy Ruxton: 00:55:34

I think.

Sandy Ruxton: 00:55:34

So thank you so much for that.

Sandy Ruxton: 00:55:36

And

Dean Peacock: 00:55:36

well, that's very kind of you and yeah, thank you.

Dean Peacock: 00:55:38

And thanks for the opportunity.

Stephen Burrell: 00:55:41

yeah, it's, been such a pleasure, Dean.

Stephen Burrell: 00:55:42

Thank you so much for sharing some of your great work.

Dean Peacock: 00:55:45

Just one thing before we, before we stop, if I may, if I can just Of course, but I know one of your recent guests was Finn Mackay.

Stephen Burrell: 00:55:54

Yes.

Stephen Burrell: 00:55:55

And

Dean Peacock: 00:55:56

I think the work that Finn and others, Ray Acheson at WILPF, there are a number of people who have been questioning kind of where we go with the masculinities analysis.

Dean Peacock: 00:56:10

Right.

Dean Peacock: 00:56:10

And I think, I wanted to just connect with that because it's part of, for me, this broader question of.

Dean Peacock: 00:56:22

In as much as our work is very focused on transforming masculinities or analysing masculinities, what is the vision we have for where that goes?

Dean Peacock: 00:56:33

Right?

Dean Peacock: 00:56:33

And I think people like Finn and others are saying it's a very useful lens onto the problem.

Dean Peacock: 00:56:39

It's a very useful framework for analysing multiple issues related to men's lives, including men's violence.

Dean Peacock: 00:56:52

but they have asked this question of, well, what are we ultimately saying then about masculinities?

Dean Peacock: 00:56:57

Is our end goal a different kind of masculinities and manhood, or are we saying that in fact we should free ourselves from the strictures of these gender binaries?

Dean Peacock: 00:57:09

And these, I think implicitly essentialist understandings of gender, that.

Dean Peacock: 00:57:17

We convey when we talk about the need to transform masculinities as though the end goal is still a version of masculinities, that I'm not sure that's the case.

Dean Peacock: 00:57:28

Nathan Robinson wrote this fabulous piece in, I think it was current affairs a while ago, and said like, well, what qualities would we want men to have that people of other genders don't have?

Dean Peacock: 00:57:42

and surely what we should aspire to is people who are compassionate, committed to equality, et cetera, and that those need not be coded as positive masculinities.

Dean Peacock: 00:57:56

They can just be human aspirations.

Dean Peacock: 00:57:59

and in that piece, he says, why should young men need a male role model?

Dean Peacock: 00:58:04

Why can't, or any other number of women leaders be someone who we hold up as role models to men, to women, to people of all gender identities?

Dean Peacock: 00:58:14

And to me that's a much more exciting vision than transforming masculinities.

Dean Peacock: 00:58:20

I've also, in this discussion, kind of raised my uncertainties about where masculinities and gender norms fit into this broader mm-hmm.

Dean Peacock: 00:58:34

Spectrum of approaches to dealing with men's violence.

Dean Peacock: 00:58:39

but I think a lot of my career, especially since we established men, engage, has been saying, let's bring the structural into our work more.

Dean Peacock: 00:58:49

Let's bring a political economy into our work more.

Dean Peacock: 00:58:52

One of the main reasons I was interested in, an entity like MenEngage was to say, here's a place where we can diffuse some ideas that make our work more overtly political again,

Dean Peacock: 00:59:04

and that draw attention to these broader structural inequalities related to colonialism.

Dean Peacock: 00:59:09

Class inequalities, industrialization, extractivism, all of that.

Dean Peacock: 00:59:14

And we haven't talked much about, you know, technology as a part of that big tech and, the issues that we discussed when we talked about the rape academy that CNN has profiled.

Dean Peacock: 00:59:26

But I think the conversation has to go there.

Dean Peacock: 00:59:30

so for whatever it's worth, that's, the piece that I'm struggling with at the moment.

Dean Peacock: 00:59:36

Yeah,

Sandy Ruxton: 00:59:36

no, thanks for raising that, Dean.

Sandy Ruxton: 00:59:38

'cause I mean, as you say, you know, it's been, raised by Finn and actually others on the podcast.

Sandy Ruxton: 00:59:45

It's something we've returned to Absolutely.

Sandy Ruxton: 00:59:47

Yeah.

Sandy Ruxton: 00:59:48

Yeah.

Sandy Ruxton: 00:59:48

Several times.

Sandy Ruxton: 00:59:49

Yeah.

Sandy Ruxton: 00:59:49

And it is, it feels to me an increasingly powerful, you know, description of Yeah.

Sandy Ruxton: 00:59:55

The issues, the problem, the, direction we should be travelling in.

Sandy Ruxton: 00:59:59

So, so yeah.

Sandy Ruxton: 01:00:00

Thanks for raising that.

Sandy Ruxton: 01:00:01

Yeah.

Stephen Burrell: 01:00:01

Thank you.

Stephen Burrell: 01:00:02

Great.

Stephen Burrell: 01:00:02

Absolutely.

Dean Peacock: 01:00:03

Thank you.

Sandy Ruxton: 01:00:04

Thanks.

Stephen Burrell: 01:00:12

Well, so that was a very riveting conversation with Dean.

Stephen Burrell: 01:00:15

It went, felt like it went by very quickly.

Stephen Burrell: 01:00:18

yeah.

Stephen Burrell: 01:00:18

What, force do you have from what he said?

Stephen Burrell: 01:00:20

I'm sure you must have lots.

Sandy Ruxton: 01:00:21

Yeah.

Sandy Ruxton: 01:00:22

Yeah.

Sandy Ruxton: 01:00:23

It was, great to talk to Dean and, well.

Sandy Ruxton: 01:00:26

to see him after such a long time as well.

Sandy Ruxton: 01:00:28

Mm-hmm.

Sandy Ruxton: 01:00:29

but, well one thing that, occurred to me, which I thought was interesting amongst many by the way, was, the notion of men resisting involvement in militaries and, you know, combat and so on.

Sandy Ruxton: 01:00:43

And, you know, you don't often hear that said, but actually you need to be reminded of that, that most men don't want to get involved in this stuff.

Stephen Burrell: 01:00:51

Mm-hmm.

Sandy Ruxton: 01:00:53

I was thinking about my own background actually.

Sandy Ruxton: 01:00:55

and I said I was, you know, I learned how to kill people, kill men at school.

Sandy Ruxton: 01:01:01

But, you know, in year two of the cadet force, I went into what was called first aid and light rescue.

Sandy Ruxton: 01:01:08

'cause I didn't really want to be involved in any of the violence stuff.

Sandy Ruxton: 01:01:12

And, I thought at the time, this is the only part of it that really seems of any use to me at all.

Sandy Ruxton: 01:01:17

Mm-hmm.

Sandy Ruxton: 01:01:18

so in a minor way, I was actually resisting, you know, at that time.

Sandy Ruxton: 01:01:23

Yeah.

Sandy Ruxton: 01:01:23

And, yeah, I feel some sort of, affinity with that approach.

Stephen Burrell: 01:01:29

Well, it's funny.

Stephen Burrell: 01:01:29

Yeah.

Stephen Burrell: 01:01:30

It's funny you should say that because, I was pondering when you were.

Stephen Burrell: 01:01:33

You were both talking because you know, I'm very lucky, obviously I am a fair bit younger and I didn't, have any kind of militaryesque training when I was at school, but I did, and I think this is still a thing now.

Stephen Burrell: 01:01:43

I did go to, I wanted to go to Beavers, you know, when I was very young.

Stephen Burrell: 01:01:47

And, people outside of the UK probably won't know what beavers is, but it's, you know, an early stage along the trajectory I think of like the, kind of the scouts, you

Stephen Burrell: 01:01:55

know, which is ultimately quite a militaristic youth organisation really, isn't it?

Stephen Burrell: 01:02:00

Yeah.

Stephen Burrell: 01:02:00

And almost proto-fascist.

Stephen Burrell: 01:02:02

Maybe some people say

Sandy Ruxton: 01:02:04

Proto-fascist, you should have gone to the Woodcraft.

Stephen Burrell: 01:02:07

Well, I did.

Stephen Burrell: 01:02:07

That's

Sandy Ruxton: 01:02:08

a left,

Stephen Burrell: 01:02:08

well,

Sandy Ruxton: 01:02:08

lefty Scouts.

Sandy Ruxton: 01:02:09

Yeah,

Stephen Burrell: 01:02:09

well, lefty Scouts.

Stephen Burrell: 01:02:10

Well, that's it, that, that's the next step in the story because I only lasted about two weeks in the Beavers before I dropped out.

Stephen Burrell: 01:02:16

And I think after that I was al, my mom was actually involved in organising our local Woodcraft folk group, so I was very involved in that.

Stephen Burrell: 01:02:22

But also, at school, I didn't.

Stephen Burrell: 01:02:25

Enjoy doing PE or physical education and sport.

Stephen Burrell: 01:02:29

so when I actually had the choice, I immediately chose to do first aid like you, Sandy, instead of choosing to do a sport.

Stephen Burrell: 01:02:35

So

Sandy Ruxton: 01:02:36

yeah, we're clearly doing the wrong podcast, Stephen.

Stephen Burrell: 01:02:38

Unfortunately, I can't remember any of my first aid skills, but, I think,

Sandy Ruxton: 01:02:42

no,

Stephen Burrell: 01:02:43

but I think you're absolutely right as well that like, you know, men have to be kind of pressured and forced and trained to use violence and to kill other people, don't they?

Stephen Burrell: 01:02:52

And that's actually a big part of militaries, isn't it?

Stephen Burrell: 01:02:54

Is that there's all that training and brutalization of soldiers to get to the point that they're even willing or able to, kill other people.

Stephen Burrell: 01:03:02

and I think if you look at what's been going on in Russia and Ukraine, for example, lots and lots of men have been desperately trying to avoid fighting, haven't they?

Stephen Burrell: 01:03:09

Mm-hmm.

Stephen Burrell: 01:03:09

Yeah.

Sandy Ruxton: 01:03:11

I must just put in a plug for a film called If.... by Lindsay Anderson, which, was partly shot at my school, which is a sort of, late sixties take on

Sandy Ruxton: 01:03:23

militarism and that sort of muscular Christianity, in the, British Public School.

Sandy Ruxton: 01:03:30

I think it's absolutely fantastic film and it is really got quite a lot to say about the military.

Sandy Ruxton: 01:03:34

Excellent.

Sandy Ruxton: 01:03:35

So, worth, looking at that if you never have.

Stephen Burrell: 01:03:38

Thank you.

Sandy Ruxton: 01:03:39

But yeah, I was, very interested by Dean's argument about the importance of structural factors and violence both.

Sandy Ruxton: 01:03:48

you know, in relation to combat, but also, at the sort of interpersonal level.

Sandy Ruxton: 01:03:54

and again, I'm, wondering where that leaves practitioners on the ground.

Sandy Ruxton: 01:03:59

Mm-hmm.

Sandy Ruxton: 01:03:59

Many of whom, who, who may, listen to a podcast like this.

Sandy Ruxton: 01:04:03

Mm-hmm.

Sandy Ruxton: 01:04:04

and my understanding for some of, from some of that work, particularly on, on interpersonal events, is, that some programmes, focus on getting men to take responsibility for what

Sandy Ruxton: 01:04:16

they've done, you know, and not, be able to slip away from responsibility by using excuses.

Sandy Ruxton: 01:04:24

Like, well, I was drunk, or, you know, I'd taken drugs.

Sandy Ruxton: 01:04:29

Or,

Stephen Burrell: 01:04:29

or,

Stephen Burrell: 01:04:30

you've

Sandy Ruxton: 01:04:30

had trauma in

Stephen Burrell: 01:04:31

your life and

Sandy Ruxton: 01:04:32

you've had trauma in your background.

Sandy Ruxton: 01:04:34

So I, think that's quite interesting how you deal with that sort of.

Sandy Ruxton: 01:04:38

Tension.

Sandy Ruxton: 01:04:38

Yeah.

Sandy Ruxton: 01:04:38

Between taking responsibility, but acknowledging,

Stephen Burrell: 01:04:41

yeah.

Stephen Burrell: 01:04:41

Yeah.

Sandy Ruxton: 01:04:42

Broader factors.

Sandy Ruxton: 01:04:43

it's something that occurred to me anyway,

Stephen Burrell: 01:04:45

so, yeah.

Sandy Ruxton: 01:04:45

What do you  think, Stephen?

Stephen Burrell: 01:04:47

No, I agree.

Stephen Burrell: 01:04:47

It's a, tension, isn't it?

Stephen Burrell: 01:04:48

And I think you can do both.

Stephen Burrell: 01:04:50

But, but I guess we also need to figure out those complexities of like, well, lots of men do experience trauma.

Stephen Burrell: 01:04:56

They do experience abuse in childhood, but don't go on to perpetrate violence.

Stephen Burrell: 01:05:00

In fact, they may speak out passionately about that violence, for example.

Stephen Burrell: 01:05:03

And of course, lots of men who use abuse are middle class or upper class men, you know, who haven't experienced poverty or, hunger that Dean was describing.

Stephen Burrell: 01:05:12

And actually maybe even more skilled in, in exerting coercive control, you know, in a more subtle, hidden way.

Stephen Burrell: 01:05:18

So, there are those complicating factors aren't there, but, nonetheless, I, do think that his points were absolutely right.

Stephen Burrell: 01:05:25

I mean, like what he was saying about, you know, the computer games industry, for example, like I actually heard on his podcast them talking about how, weapons companies have product placement in, computer games,

Stephen Burrell: 01:05:39

you know, so when you're choosing your weapon, that's actually product placement for these companies.

Stephen Burrell: 01:05:44

So they know, you know, that these, computer games, which many, people, you know, many boys for example, are playing are, an opportunity to sell their wares kind of thing.

Stephen Burrell: 01:05:53

And that's just one small example, isn't it?

Stephen Burrell: 01:05:55

so there's a lot.

Stephen Burrell: 01:05:56

A lot that we need to reckon with.

Stephen Burrell: 01:05:57

And I think actually if we can address those structural and social factors more, I think that actually that's potentially helps us to engage with men, doesn't it?

Stephen Burrell: 01:06:05

Because then it maybe doesn't come across like we're blaming men for actually what is a systemic societal problem, but actually this is something which is damaging and affecting all of us.

Stephen Burrell: 01:06:15

And I guess it shows as well, doesn't it?

Stephen Burrell: 01:06:17

That maybe in the kind of engaging men field, maybe we do need to be doing more of that kind of advocacy and social movement building to push for the kind of systemic change that Dean is talking about.

Stephen Burrell: 01:06:29

Although I would just say as well that I think for me sometimes, and I'm not saying Dean was doing this, but I think one problem with the argument can be that if we talk about those structural factors as if

Stephen Burrell: 01:06:38

they're somehow separate from gender or from patriarchy, when actually they themselves are often very gendered and are actually part of the kind of system and structures of, patriarchy themselves, aren't they?

Stephen Burrell: 01:06:48

If we're talking about the alcohol industry?

Stephen Burrell: 01:06:50

Yep.

Stephen Burrell: 01:06:50

Or the weapons industry or computer games, tech industry and so on.

Stephen Burrell: 01:06:54

These are very patriarchal institutions, aren't they?

Sandy Ruxton: 01:06:57

Yep.

Sandy Ruxton: 01:06:57

Yep.

Sandy Ruxton: 01:06:58

And I, think his, his final point about not just transforming masculinities, but thinking about how we need to free everyone from the constraints of, rigid gender norms.

Sandy Ruxton: 01:07:11

You know, that's come up on our podcast, on several occasions now.

Sandy Ruxton: 01:07:16

Mm-hmm.

Sandy Ruxton: 01:07:16

and, you know, I find it quite, I find it increasingly convincing.

Sandy Ruxton: 01:07:19

Yeah.

Sandy Ruxton: 01:07:20

you know, and, you know, it's a way of thinking about this work, which, which opens up new, territory, new possibilities, I guess.

Sandy Ruxton: 01:07:28

But it's, about the future for, all of us.

Sandy Ruxton: 01:07:30

Absolutely.

Sandy Ruxton: 01:07:30

It's not just about, you know, sorting, men or sorting masculinities.

Sandy Ruxton: 01:07:35

So, so yeah.

Sandy Ruxton: 01:07:36

I think this is, important.

Stephen Burrell: 01:07:38

Absolutely.

Stephen Burrell: 01:07:38

Absolutely.

Stephen Burrell: 01:07:40

Perhaps we need a new tagline for the podcast.

Stephen Burrell: 01:07:42

In that case, Sandy, we've just come up with one new one.

Sandy Ruxton: 01:07:48

Yeah.

Stephen Burrell: 01:07:49

Anyway, that's probably enough for us for one, one week.

Stephen Burrell: 01:07:52

But yes, thank you so much.

Stephen Burrell: 01:07:53

As always, everybody for listening.

Stephen Burrell: 01:07:54

As I mentioned at the beginning, don't be afraid to contact us at nowandmen@gmail.com.

Stephen Burrell: 01:07:58

If you ever have questions or comments and, take care of yourselves, do subscribe to the podcast if you haven't already, and we shall speak to you again soon.

Sandy Ruxton: 01:08:07

Bye for now.

Stephen Burrell: 01:08:07

Thank you.

Stephen Burrell: 01:08:08

Bye.