Evidence of Gender Violence Negative Impact on Health as a Lever to Change Adolescents’ Attitudes and Preferences towards Dominant Traditional Masculinities

Abstract

Women and girls experience gender violence from a young age. Scientific research has presented evidence of the negative impact of toxic relationships and toxic stress on physical and psychological health. However, less is known on how this evidence can have a preventive effect. Knowing these impacts can be important for women and girls to decide the type of affective-sexual relationships they want to have, and even transform their attraction towards different types of masculinity. This study presents results from the MEMO4LOVE project. Researchers use mixed-methods approaches, including a questionnaire (n = 141) to study adolescents’ peer groups’ interactions that promoted healthy or toxic affective-sexual relationships, and five communicative focus groups with boys and girls to analyze how these interactions can be transformed by sharing scientific knowledge on the effects of violent relationships with adolescents. The results showed the impact of sharing with adolescents the evidence of the adverse effects of toxic relationships with violent masculinities on health. The peer group’s transformation occurred: non-violent boys gained self-confidence, and girls redirected or reinforced their attraction to non-violent boys. These results suggest the potential positive effects of knowing the impacts of toxic relationships on girls’ health.

Young People’s Voices and Science for Overcoming Toxic Relationships Represented in Sex Education

“…This dialogue based on scientific evidence has provided tools to analyse and identify this problem that appears both in the series and in real life. This corroborates that dialogue about healthy and toxic relationships can promote change and improvement in young people towards healthy relationships [ 35 , 54 ].…”

“…Domination and discrimination are two components that indicate the poor quality of a relationship, which is called a toxic relationship [ 30 ] and produced in heterosexual and/or homosexual relationships [ 31 , 32 , 33 ]. These elements of power and dominance appear in Dominant Traditional Masculinity (DTM) [ 34 , 35 ], masculinity that can be socialised to suppress emotions in order to maintain dominance of women [ 36 ]. Likewise, Connell [ 37 ] notes that these types of masculinity are always violent.…”

“You Enjoy Talking about It More than Doing It”: Fake Narratives in Disdainful Relationships

“…Peer interactions during adolescence are therefore essential when shaping girls' sexual-affective preferences and relationships, either influenced by the CDD or free from it (Padrós Cuxart et al, 2021;Racionero-Plaza, Piñero León, et al, 2020;Ruiz-Eugenio et al, 2020). Some studies have shown that when women talk to their friends about sex, some do it with emotional purposes rather than informative ones (Pariera, 2018).…”

Reducing Health Effects on Deceit in Heterosexual Sexual-Affective Relationships: The Impact of the Preventive Socialization Program (PSP)

“…PSP is a research line based on the knowledge accumulated through two decades of competitive investigation aimed at discovering reasons for the prevalence of gender-based violence in society. Among the findings is the existence of a coercive dominant discourse that links attraction with violence in dominant traditional masculinities [ 10 ], and how this link is affecting the socialization process of heterosexual men and women in their sexual-affective relationships. The shaping of this kind of socialization process is directly becoming a risk factor for gender-based violence victimization.…”