The Power of Partnership

Connecting the Dots: The Link Between Family Violence and War with Gary Barker and Riane Eisler

Cherri Jacobs Pruitt with Riane Eisler Season 2 Episode 21

This episode explores the profound connection between intimate violence—primarily in families —and its role in perpetuating violence in broader societal relations. Research reveals that such violence is not just a private matter but a fundamental aspect of domination systems, laying the groundwork for war, terrorism, and crime. By overlooking family and intimate violence we miss a crucial piece of the puzzle in understanding and dismantling systemic and intergenerational violence. 

Equimundo: Center for Masculinity and Social Justice

Nurturing Our Humanity, How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives, and Future, Riane Eisler

The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics, Riane Eisler

The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future, Riane Eisler (https://centerforpartnership.org/resources/books/the-chalice-and-the-blade-our-history-our-future/)

The Power of Partnership: Seven Relationships that will Change Your Life, Riane Eisler (https://centerforpartnership.org/resources/books/the-power-of-partnership/)

Center for Partnership Systems (https://centerforpartnership.org/)

center@partnershipway.org

Center for Partnership "Join Us" email link  

Resilience, Rising Appalachia (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tx17RvPMaQ8



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Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Power of Partnership podcast. My name is Rianne Eisler, I'm president of the Center for Partnership Systems and I want to introduce this wonderful podcast that brings you voices from the partnership movement worldwide People using partnership practices to build a world that values caring nature and shared prosperity prosperity. The Power of Partnership podcast is hosted by Cherry Jacobs-Pruitt, a health policy and partnership scholar. Today, Cherry and I are joined by Gary Barker, good friend and founder of the Equimundo Center for Masculinity and Social Justice, and I have to say that the work that he's doing is wonderful and our discussion is going to be how we can create a world of care and substantially decrease violence, beginning in families.

Speaker 2:

Welcome Rianne and Gary to today's episode of the Power of Partnership podcast.

Speaker 1:

I'm so excited to be interviewing you both today and I'm excited to be here too, with you and with Gary, so honored.

Speaker 3:

Likewise Thanks for having me. I'm excited about this conversation.

Speaker 2:

So can we begin by my asking you both to share a bit about the work you do and what's brought you to this conversation today about the importance of addressing the issue of family violence, as we're trying to build a world that's based on caring. And, gary, let me go ahead and start with you on this question. Sure, yeah, thanks for that question.

Speaker 3:

You know my life cause and the cause of my organization is about how do we engage men and boys in healthier, more connected, more caring, more empathetic and fair ways of being in the world. So much of what we try to remediate or pick up the pieces later, whether it's violence by men against women, men's violence in other spaces, whether that's bullying at school, other forms of even more harsher forms of violence are, in the majority around the world, carried out by men, and so we believe we need to look upstream, to where they start relationships in the home, and whether those are based in care and egalitarian ideas, partnership ideas, or whether those are based in domination and violence.

Speaker 2:

And can you share just a touch about your journey that has brought you to devoting your life to this work?

Speaker 3:

Yeah. So how did? Yeah, how did I get to this space? I mean one. I've had the amazing fortune of a father who was a social worker. His career was devoted to the care of children who needed out-of-home support, foster care, adoption, other services. The majority of those cases involved violence in a family and the ripples that came along with that. My siblings are adopted. We had foster kids.

Speaker 3:

For me, a man modeling a vocation of care and a cause of care, and I suppose for me it was both the personal and the political, to use that feminist expression. I mean, my dad, you conjugated the verb care as a political word. This was not just what we do in the home but as the politics of caring for others. And that contrasted often to versions of manhood I saw outside the home, in my school, among other places. I was witness to a school shooting in my secondary school, my high school in suburban Houston, texas, and just an acute awareness of how we make men's violence and how it's all that other manhoods are possible right. A version of manhood based on care was for me kind of a guiding light, and it just seemed obvious at a certain point that in this field of violence, prevention, shining a light on men's ability, desire, possibility for care was a key solution and way forward.

Speaker 2:

Thank you. How about you, Rianne? Can you share a bit about your journey that's bringing you to this discussion today?

Speaker 1:

I want to address both these issues how maybe of crime, but not of family. We're all really working on the same thing and the same thing starts with just consciousness in our childhood and in our family relations. And if children either experience or observe violence by those who are bigger and stronger, either against them or against their mothers or against their fathers, are either against them or against their mothers or against their fathers, they learn a very important lesson for fitting into domination systems that it is okay, that it is even more to use violence to impose your will and purpose. But I want to go back to me, since you asked that question, because my passion for this and it is a passion that I have is really deeply rooted in my own childhood, as a child refugee from the Nazis, from the Holocaust, with my parents, and of course, these were traumatic experiences that I won't go into right now, but what they led me to were questions that I'm sure many of us have asked at some point in our lives why, when we humans have well as Gary mentioned such a capacity for caring, for sensitivity, for creativity, why has there been so much destructiveness and violence in such a community? Is it just the way things are.

Speaker 1:

And many years later, of course, I started my multidisciplinary, cross-cultural, trans-historical institute research. And because what I found was that we, the categories, the social categories that we have inherited, really from more rigid domination, what I call domination times fragment our consciousness, whether it's right, left, religious, secular, eastern, western, northern, southern, capitalist, socialist. Moreover, and this is critical, these categories either marginalize or just ignore nothing less than the majority of humanity women and children. I mean, that's huge. And so our conventional approaches, our conventional studies of society, our conventional categories are useless.

Speaker 1:

And I found that, and, to make a long story short, what I discovered were two underlying configurations the domination system, the partnership system, or rather a partnership domination, social scale. It was always a matter of degree. What I also found and I will stop with this is that precisely leaving out the cornerstones of family and childhood and gender is what really makes it impossible, impossible for us to see the whole social picture. And once we take those categories into account, as neuroscience now does, of course and my latest book, nurturing Our Humanity, which came out with Oxford University Press in 2019, really drove us heavily from neuroscience, and what neuroscience shows us is the obvious If you don't take into account family. You fail to take into account the fact that what children experience and observe yes, mostly in their families actually affects nothing less than how our brains are structured.

Speaker 2:

So, gary, can you talk just a touch about your organization Eku Mundo? I know that the work you're doing in that organization is very international.

Speaker 3:

Sure. So I co-founded the predecessor organization to Equimundo that we call Promundo, in Brazil in the late 1990s, research looking at pathways that both led some young men into violence, both that they might use it at home or in the context of a partner intimate relationship and particularly the pathways that kept them from repeating often the cycles of violence they saw or lived. In a nutshell, what I wanted to look at is why some and others not. How do we have young men in a setting of high rates of urban violence, much of that gun related and lethal based, you know, basically rival gangs, police against gangs, gangs against police, extreme income inequality that Brazil and US and many other parts of the world. But specifically looking at that setting in Brazil and understanding how do we have lots of young men and adult men in this setting who don't follow and repeat cycles of violence that they have lived? A couple of things were really clear and I think they kind of framed what we do as an organization, us. They kind of framed what we do as an organization.

Speaker 3:

One was the importance of relationships where young men had family relationships or others outside the household a pastor, a priest, a coach, a male teacher, if they were connected to school who modeled and believed in a version of nonviolent manhood. They were more likely to live that, pretty obvious. But it wasn't just that he modeled it, it also meant that he held that young man accountable, went out at two in the morning and brought him home when he was hanging out with the wrong crowd. So not only did he talk about it, show it, but he was able to instrumentalize it and be there to kind of break those cycles and promote healthier versions of manhood. So that relationship, it could also be a hand to a mother. It was grandmothers holding families together who said I won't let you go that way. And then it was also a sense of self-awareness, that is, to be able to look and say, ooh, I can see a moment where, if I go that pathway, I saw what happened to my brother, my cousin, my male peer and this awareness that I've been shaped by these same forces, but just the power as well of resistance and resilience. And the third factor was a peer group, a male peer group, that said you don't have to live up to that version of manhood for us to consider you a dignified human being. So I think the bottom line is it wasn't individual men able to say I'm not going to be, that it was really the power of relationships and the power of nurturing relationships even in settings of high violence. Now, that doesn't mean we stop looking at the structural factors that led to the violence, but it does turn a lens around and said let's build on resistance. And I think where, in terms of resistance to harmful ideas of masculinity, to domination, using the language that you used, rhian, and to really believe in, I think, your story as an individual coming out of the Holocaust, what does resilience look like? And also, you know, as we looked back and you know this far more than I do if you know voices that existed even in the midst of extreme harm, who pushed back on it, resisted even as they were raised in it, surrounded by it. So I think it's believing in that human resistance to domination and believing that partnership can shine through and that there's more of it. If we actually peel back some of the layers, there is a pulsing heart of partnership and care and concern, including in men, in settings of high violence, high violence. Those conversations led us to create an organization whose cause is around interrupting the intergenerational transmission of harm and promoting the intergenerational transmission of care and essentially we posit care as the solution to violence.

Speaker 3:

I'm a developmental psychologist and, as Rianne talked a lot about the neuroscience. What I've been looking at is how do we kind of tap into what feels as strong a condition of our human evolution, which is empathy, the ability to read the mind not read into the inside of their mind but that we survived as a species? Yes, in some ways, because some were dominant over others, but even more so because we can look at another human being and impute what's going on with them. We can see when they are in distress. We can learn from that and develop even more complex ways of understanding how the other is feeling and use that to regulate what we do as a human. To say, I can bring joy and care to that person or I can bring harm, and so how do we use that to regulate what we do as a human to say I can bring joy and care to that person or I can bring harm, and so how do we use that empathy tool? So we work across caregiving.

Speaker 3:

We've got a global campaign called Men Care, promoting men's caregiving. Looking at the policies, situations that need to happen there. We do work in violence prevention. A lot of that looking at men's trauma from witnessing it, experiencing it growing up. How to help them be aware of that that they saw, learned and experienced how that can often turn into violence, but the power they have to break those cycles.

Speaker 3:

The third area we work in we will call gender socialization. How do we start at younger ages, promoting healthy ideas about manhood? We've got a campaign called the Global Boyhood Initiative. That is about providing tools and ideas to parents and teachers and others who raise and make boys of how to promote healthy ideas about boyhood from young ages. A lot of what parents are anxious about, whether it's what their sons are watching online bullying, which is another side of this whole conversation is really how to step into conversations with their sons in meaningful ways. So lots of tips there.

Speaker 3:

And then I'd also point to our Men Care website materials from close to 60 countries that affirm it's not as if we have to invent new ways of carrying manhood.

Speaker 3:

They're all over the place Photos and short videos.

Speaker 3:

There's plenty of stories that I think help men and those who work with men and those who work with parents to point pathways to nonviolent parenting and particularly to highlight the millions of ways that many men already are engaged with their children and in other kinds of caregiving relationships in nonviolent ways, and I think it's so important to start with that positive.

Speaker 3:

We're not inventing this. There are plenty of men who already see the benefits, the positive cycles, the benefits to themselves, when their interactions with their family members and those they care for are based in respect and partnership and not in domination. So those are the three pillars we work across. We do research, program and advocacy and, just to end, that we really, really lean into this is not only about we have to call men out and women out who cause harm, but it's much more about calling into this human birthright of being empathetic, caring and in connection and helping men see their benefits to that. I want men to feel after they come out of our work that they benefit too, that they see better lives and better relationships that they themselves have as they embrace these ideas about manhood.

Speaker 2:

You are listening to the Power of Partnership podcast. If you would like us to share your partnership story or if you would like to become a proud sponsor of the POP podcast, please contact us at center at partnershipwayorg. And now back to today's episode.

Speaker 1:

So many of the stories that we have been told about human nature as you point out human nature, as you point out Yari are false. I mean, they're simply not true. And what we have, the psychology has long showed this. Certainly, empathy is ours by the grace of evolution, and it's a progression and, as I write, in Nurturing Our Humanity, all things being equal, we are more conditioned, actually by evolution, to fit into a partnership rather than a domination system. But all things are not equal and there's the rub, so to speak. So our chance, our job really is a cultural transformation and it starts with changing our consciousness.

Speaker 1:

The opposite of patriarchy is not matriarchy, those are two sides of the domination coin. The opposite of patriarchy is partnership. We need a new paradigm. But the real issue is what do we value, what do we reward? And we have inherited an economic system in which anything coded feminine or associated with women not care. And we all have this yearning for care and connection. And we all have this yearning for care and connection. My God, we don't survive unless there is some care of us when we are helpless, when we are born and for a long time after that. We must understand that human nature is not greedy evil awful. Yes, we're achievable of these things, but what we know from neuroscience is that it's not nature or nurture, it is nature and nurture. We need a new paradigm, but this requires both structural changes in our institutions and our economic especially our economic reward system, which we see some trends to it, Stuart.

Speaker 2:

So, in terms of making this paradigm shift and really changing systems, how do you both envision the measurement of that? You know we have a lot of research that shows how children are impacted by violence in families, but how do we use the data to really make systemic and cultural change? Gary, are you comfortable taking first out of that?

Speaker 3:

Sure. One of the cornerstones of our work is research. We have carried out the largest multi-country study on men's views about their roles in households and beyond and how much they believe in a version of manhood based on equality with women and others, or associated with violence or with nonviolence. Spent a lot of time figuring out how to ask that in the 50 plus country settings where we've carried it out, both linguistic as well as the cultural meaning parts of those and then iterations of studies like that. Looking at what do men think about what it means to be men and their relationships to women? The bad news is, looking across these surveys that we've carried out in every region of the world 2008 to last year and then some more recent ones we're either stuck or going backwards. Young men are less likely to believe in a egalitarian, caring, empathetic version of manhood than their father's generation is. Empathetic version of manhood than their father's generation is. Contrast that to women, who are more likely to believe they have the right to be in the world with equal voice and equal space compared to their mother's generation. The good news is and we've done this in a few countries is asking where kind of ways that men may have stood up for equality and social justice? Have they marched at a rally for racial justice? Have they spoken up at a workplace when they heard a woman being harassed or spoken over? Have they marched for LGBTI plus rights? Have they given money to certain equality causes? And we find that about one in five men will tell us they've done one of those things. So you know one in five. That's in big country. That's a lot of people. We can do some. We can move ahead with that.

Speaker 3:

The third area that we spend a lot of time measuring is around men's participation as caregivers. That we spend a lot of time measuring is around men's participation as caregivers. We are care beings, no matter how you look at it. Probably a third of our lives we are responsible or one of the primary people responsible for the care of others. Think about the care of children, the care of elderly, the care of a spouse, the number of households who have a disabled family member or a family member with a special need. It's about a third of our lives that we are kind of a co or primary responsible caregiver.

Speaker 3:

We tend to think of the world that that's for women to do, but actually in daily practice men are doing more of it. That's also encouraging the number of men across the political spectrum who haven't necessarily said okay, today I'm going to get up and do more of it. That's also encouraging the number of men across the political spectrum who haven't necessarily said okay, today, I'm going to get up and do more of it. Often it's been because life made me do it. Women being more in the paid workplace, we're having fewer children, and so men are paying more attention to the kids who are at home. Covid lockdowns were two years of basically making men be at home Many of us who did more caregiving as a result. So the world is converging a bit.

Speaker 3:

To say whether doing caregiving is the same as being caring is a big question, but the world is nudging men to have to do more of the hands-on. The US, we have more than 2 million stay-at-home dads. That's a lot of men who are making their identity out of being the primary caregiver and are saying maybe success has to be defined in different ways than just income if my female partner is the one who is the breadwinner, so I think how we measure it is along those lines. I'm both encouraged and discouraged. There's a lot of social justice movements that are making noise, and there's a huge amount of counter pushback.

Speaker 3:

Rian, you just outlined a lot of them. The far right has figured out that men's confusion and insecurity is absolute fertile ground for them. We on the progressive side have not reached out in nearly big enough ways to say your life gets better. You live the versions of success that have been taught to you. The dominance narrative that you talked about, rhiannon, is a false narrative. It is not a dog-eat-dog world, so to say. Men, in fact, the empathy part of your brain is where the best of you resides, and if we can make a world that helps you get better at that, you don't stop being productive, you don't stop being in the world in ways that are meaningful to you, but you get to do it in better ways that actually, at the end of your life, you'll both live longer, you'll be healthier, you'll have better mental health and you'll have better relationships. The people around you will love you more and you will be better at reciprocating that love.

Speaker 2:

So Rianne, I know where you know you have done so much work around measuring the value of care and you mentioned briefly about the real wealth of nations. In your research leading up to the real wealth of nations, did you find examples of countries where violence in the family is less and that that's really a focus area that the societies are working on and how that results in economic data that really makes a compelling case that really addressing the issue of family violence is good for society's economic well-being?

Speaker 1:

The Nordic nations are not socialists. They have a very healthy. You know, sweden, finland, norway have a very healthy market economy. Norway have a very healthy market economy, but what they are are caring societies, as they often call themselves, and these societies have rules more to the partnership side, and one of the ways in which they move to the partnership side is gender. Women are 40 to 50% of the national legislature. The other thing about these nations and this takes me immediately back is, as part of their movement towards the partnership side, they pioneered the first laws saying that physical violence in families is against the law, and they combined this with a campaign, a national campaign, to really educate and the work of care being valued in very generous paid parental leave for both women and men who establish and mothers. In fact, if one of them doesn't take it, none of them get it. This is very, very important in designing that law.

Speaker 1:

Their educational systems are. In Finland it's always on the top and teachers I mean young people want to be teachers. It's a valued profession rather than a devalued rather than a devalued sort of women's thing, especially in the lower grades. I mean it's all interconnected, so we have to connect the dots. We can't just isolate family violence all to bad. It is directly connected with war, with terrorism, with gangs, with crime. It is part and parcel. It is part and parcel, it is built into domination systems, because how else are you going to maintain these rigid rankings of domination, whether it's man over man, man over woman, race over race, religion over religion, humans over nature? You know this conquest of nature. It's violence, isn't it? It's abuse.

Speaker 1:

But what we are seeing today is really a struggle for our future, because the domination system, guiding pieces of domination and conquest, the kind of technological development that we have today, is taking us to an evolutionary event. So what we're really talking about is an evolutionary breakthrough, which means moving towards the configuration of the partnership system, or evolutionary breakdown. And this is our challenge and what it requires is not only a change of consciousness but a change in some of our institutions and what we value and what we do not value. So we are at an evolutionary turning point at this moment and it really depends on us, because every one of us can have a profound influence on either pushing us back, which is happening, or tooling us forward. But we need what those pushing us back have a really coordinated frame of the domination partnership, nation Partnership, because, in the last analysis, our future really is in our hands, our future is in our hands, Gary.

Speaker 2:

how about you? Do you have some final words you'd like to share with our listeners?

Speaker 3:

You know, I think, the big challenge around our efforts around ending violence, so both parental violence against children, men's violence against women. We are appropriately, morally outraged by it and our arguments have often leaned into that, with very good reason, right. But how do we step into both engaging parents and men to break those cycles, to acknowledge how much belief systems, identities and even woven into the trauma that we've experienced as children, is that violence is not often a rational behavior and that how do we step in and say what are we offering you instead? What are we offering you in terms of ways to negotiate? It is ultimately about partnership. It is how do you dialogue, how do you understand and listen to the needs and realities of the other? So how do we step into that, offering alternatives that acknowledge those layers of trauma, the layers of how much you know, how much it has become normalized violence at home and in intimate partner relationships, and say here's what you should be doing instead.

Speaker 3:

You know we talk a lot about calling men out or calling parents out for harm, but how do we call you in? What's the thing we're calling you into that? We've got to be more than simply saying the opposite of violence is not nonviolence. Nonviolence is not really. There is a political action that is called nonviolence, but at the household level, nonviolence requires unpacking and to say here's what we're at the level of intimate partner relationship. So what is it that we're asking you? To learn instead, to experiment instead, to see the benefits of, instead, to stake your identity around instead, and I think that's where we need to focus on, and it's about care, it's around empathy, it's around partnership that we fill that space.

Speaker 3:

That's simply saying no violence. What do we fill it in with? And to acknowledge as well the deep. You know, I think, all that you cited before, rhian, about what neuroscience tells us about early exposure to violence. Yes, this is not just oh yeah, that happened to you. Get over it now. Stop using violence. That's got to be. It requires trauma support in some cases. It requires deep nurturing and care of those who don't use violence, offering support in non-punitive ways and really stepping into restorative approaches to justice, rather than using violence to tell parents that violence is not okay, which I think is the other thing that we often step into in our rightly justified moral anguish about it. But I think we often kind of perpetuate by using oppressive ways to say that violence is not okay. That is a key learning for us that we step in with compassion while we break cycles of harm.

Speaker 2:

So for our listeners, I will be including all of the resources that Gary and Rian have shared during our discussion today in the show notes, as well as a link to the Center for Partnership Systems email so that you can stay up to date on all CPS programs and resources. Thank you for listening to the Power of Partnership podcast. We're grateful to Rising Appalachia for the use of resilience as our Power of Partnership theme music. If you would like us to feature your partnership story or if you would like to be a proud sponsor of the Power of Partnership podcast, please contact us at center at partnershipwayorg. We hope you enjoyed this episode and will leave us a review on your favorite podcast channel. And don't forget to subscribe to be notified when new episodes are released every other Tuesday. I'm Cherry Jacobs-Pruitt. See you next time on the Power of Partnership podcast.