Men's Rights and Feminist Advocacy in Canadian Domestic Violence Policy Arenas

Abstract

This article examines government and advocacy group texts on three recent Canadian domestic violence policy moments. Drawing on governance, feminist poststructuralist, and social movement perspectives, it examines men's rights advocates' and feminists' discursive actions and their influence on officials. The research aim is to explore the provisional, intrinsically incomplete, and indeed questionable success, to date, of Canadian anti-domestic violence advocates' strategies and tactics of resisting men's advocates' efforts to delegitimize gendered constructions of domestic violence. At the level of political action, the article contributes to efforts by feminists internationally to safeguard protections and supports for abused women and children in a political context marked by the increasingly prominent influence of men's rights and associated antiprogressive backlash.

The Harper Government's New Right Neoliberal Agenda and the Dismantling of Status of Women Canada and the Family Violence Initiative

“…As stated on its 'Who We Are' webpage (SWC 2013b) when Harper was in power, Status of Women Canada existed to advance equality for women through sponsorship and coordination of efforts focused on 'increasing women's economic security and prosperity; encouraging women's leadership and democratic participation; and ending violence against women and girls'. These aims remained consistent with the work of Status of Women Canada from the 1970s forward, during which it functioned as a site through which feminists and feminist-sympathetic individuals and groups networked and strategized to enhance support services for women, conduct research, and lobby federal, provincial and municipal governments and the international community on a range of issues salient to gender inequality (Brodie 2007(Brodie , 2008Gabriel and MacDonald 2005;Jenson 2008;Kantola 2010;Kantola and Squires 2012;Mann 2008Mann , 2012Morrow, Hankivsky and Varcoe 2004;Rodgers and Knight 2011;Shaw and Andrew 1995;Weldon 2002).…”

“…Across these arenas, men's rights advocates are vehement that men are equal or primary victims of family violence, and that their victimization is in large part a consequence of feminist-influenced laws that both deny men's victimization and demonize and disenfranchise men. Disparaging official statistics that unequivocally identify women and girls as the principle victims of intimate violence, and taking specific aim at Status of Women Canada, Canadian men's rights advocates and their so-called pro-family allies have long demanded that the Government of Canada either provide equal funding for specialized services for men, or cease funding advocacy and support services for women (for review and analysis of these arguments, see Bertoia and Drakich 1993;Young 2002, 2007;Dragiewicz 2007, 2014;Dobrowolsky and Jenson 2004;Dragiewicz 2008Dragiewicz , 2011Erwin 1993;Girard 2009;Mann 2005Mann , 2008Mann , 2012Menzies 2007;Minaker and Snider 2006;Rosen, Dragiewicz and Gibbs 2009;Snow and Moffitt 2012).…”

Sexual Violence in the ‘Manosphere’: Antifeminist Men’s Rights Discourses on Rape

“…MRAs also contested feminist assertions about the gendered character of domestic violence and challenged anti-violence policies for being biased against men (Dragiewicz 2008(Dragiewicz , 2011. Claiming discrimination against men, advocates sought to disband domestic violence services that protect women (Dragiewicz 2008(Dragiewicz , 2011Mann 2008). Sidestepping structural understandings of inequality, the antifeminist MRM appropriated formal equality arguments, asserting men's equal right to parent and insisting on gender symmetry in domestic violence.…”

“…Here we examine popular MRA websites to reveal a set of interrelated claims about sexual violence, including: that sexual violence, like domestic violence, is a genderneutral problem; that feminists are responsible for erasing men's experiences of sexual assault; that false allegations of sexual assault against men are widespread; and that rape culture is a feminist-produced moral panic. This paper contributes to a feminist literature that has critiqued MRA deployments of discourses of inequality, disempowerment and silencing to frame feminism as persecuting and denigrating men, and as seeking to take away their human rights (Dragiewicz 2011;Kimmel 2002;Mann 2008;Messner 1998). While these highly misogynist discourses are challenging sites for feminist research, we contend that it is important to engage as there is a real danger that MRA claims could come to define the popular conversation about sexual violence.…”

“…While there have been many scholarly analyses of men's rights campaigns around father's rights (Boyd 2004;Boyd and Young 2002;Collier 2009) and domestic violence (Dragiewicz 2008(Dragiewicz , 2011Mann 2008), the only explorations of MRA activism surrounding sexual violence, to date, have been journalistic accounts (for example Matchar 2014). Here we examine popular MRA websites to reveal a set of interrelated claims about sexual violence, including: that sexual violence, like domestic violence, is a genderneutral problem; that feminists are responsible for erasing men's experiences of sexual assault; that false allegations of sexual assault against men are widespread; and that rape culture is a feminist-produced moral panic.…”