‘For Too Long, Men Have Been Invisible in a Media Conversation Focusing on “Violence Against Women”, Not “Male Violence”

Reporters suffer no shortage of stories about gender-based violence, wherever in the world they are. But this week, one story drew the entire global media glare to France.

In the southern city of Avignon, 71-year-old Dominique Pélicot stands accused of drugging and raping his now ex-wife Gisèle and recruiting 72 strangers to rape her while unconscious.

Most news stories about gender-based violence present one frenzied ‘crime of passion’, one freak occurrence, one perpetrator. They do not declare how they slot into a social puzzle in which 1 in 20 people will perpetrate violence against women and girls. They do not nod to their worldwide context, in which one in three women have been subjected to this violence. But these are key ingredients to the story that any journalist should include, if the aim is for people to fully understand.

That’s why the Avignon trial read so differently.

The hard truth was embedded in the headline: 72 men, aged 26 to 74, firefighters, journalists, soldiers.

Often, when single stories lead to sweeping conversations about sexism, or patriarchy, or toxic masculinity, it puts many men on the defensive. Even if they don’t come right out and hashtag it, it crosses their mind: ‘not all men’. This story tells us: okay, not all men, but a hell of a lot of them.

“I think one of the saddest, most frustrating things about this story is the men that turned away and didn’t blow the whistle,” Nathaniel Cole, a social entrepreneur and educator, told the latest episode of the Media Storm podcast. For every man who raped, how many knew it was happening?

For too long, men have been invisible in a conversation titled ‘violence against women’, not ‘male violence’. Correction: they’ve been granted immunity – by an ancient culture that protects the powerful, blames victims, and clings nostalgically to privileges of the penis.

See this headline from the Telegraph: “Wife takes public revenge on men who ‘raped her every night on husband’s orders’”. Somehow, Gisèle has been framed as the aggressor and the men who raped her as the ones who lacked agency. Gisèle’s act of seeking justice is ‘revenge’ – vindictive, unforgiving. She is not the one who has been robbed of choice (repeatedly and violently); that sympathy is afforded to those ‘ordered’ to rape her.

“No,” Daniel Guinness, managing director of charity Beyond Equality, which runs anti-sexism workshops with men and boys, told the podcast. “They got in their cars, they made a plan, they followed through with it, they walked away, they hid the evidence.”

This pattern of downplaying male culpability tinged another case that also made global news.

Last Thursday, Rebecca Cheptegei, a Ugandan Olympian who lived in Kenya, died after her former partner, Dickson Ndiema, doused her in petrol and set her alight. 

Here’s what we learned: “Ugandan athlete in hospital after Kenya petrol attack,” (BBC News); “An Olympic Runner Is Dead After Brutal Attack,” (The Cut); “Olympic marathoner set on fire during attack in Kenya,” (The Washington Post). What’s so clearly missing from the headlines, as Nathaniel Cole pointed out, is “who has the lighter in their hands”. 

We talk about how many women have been raped, not about how many men rape women. As girls, we were lectured about covering our bodies, but our brothers and male cousins were never lectured to not objectify them. Why do we tell this story of ‘violence against women’ as if it all comes down to one abstract villain and not many human ones?

“It’s that fear of really looking at the bigger problem that actually implicates many of us, if not all of us,” according to Guinness. “And so we end up with this idea that we’ve got evil people who do these horrible acts of violence, and that everyone else is just a good guy.

“We need to be brave enough to say: this is men’s violence, it’s not just a couple of men, and there’s this broader group of men around them who knew about it and didn’t do anything.”

If you’re a man and you’re still reading, how many times has this article made you bristle? Those are probably the places where we lost the others. In a world in which Gen Z boys and men are more likely than Baby Boomers to believe feminism is harmful, we have to look for ways to bring boys and men into the conversation with us.

Daniel Guinness, who himself admits to experiencing defensiveness during these conversations, told the podcast: “Sadly, what we’re getting now is a lot of people in the media and on social media tapping into that defensiveness, and feeding harmful narratives that are taking the boys off in a different direction.” Narratives like: “You should be in control, and also there’s a conspiracy against you called feminism and that’s actually what’s holding you back.”

Which brings us onto Andrew Tate.

A British-American social media personality with 10 million followers on X (formerly Twitter) alone, he is facing charges in Romania of human trafficking, rape, and forming a criminal gang to sexually exploit women. He denies these charges but brags about hitting and choking women, and self-describes as “absolutely a misogynist”. Some 20% of 16 to 29-year-old-men who have heard of him say they view him positively.

It is easy to blame despicable men for the growing epidemic of male misogynistic violence. But do not give them the credit they want. They are a symptom, not a cause.

“Take the misogynistic influencers away, the insecurities are still there, whether it’s about body image, money,” Nathaniel Cole told the podcast. “Unless we deal with what creates those insecurities, there will always be someone or something to prey on them.”

If all of us put aside our defensiveness, if we take ownership of systemic culpability, if we turn our gaze to these root causes, then suddenly, solutions become available. There are men, like Nathaniel Cole and Daniel Guinness, who reflect and educate. Admittedly, it was hard to find them for this episode. But in our hunt, we found many, many, many women also pioneering solutions.

Meggan Baker co-founded SLEEC, a survivor-led organisation founded to dismantle the roots of male violence. “For a long time, we focused on survivor support,” she said, “which is a necessary part when we’re talking about male violence.

“But what we realised was that there is a need to break the cycle of violence. And how do we do that? It’s by working directly with those that are most likely to perpetrate it or to uphold it.”

Men, we’re looking at you.

Media Storm’s latest episode, ‘Violence against women is a man’s problem’, is out now