Transforming Gender Roles

Gender roles and gender violence are linked and it takes the power of many structural forces to keep reinforcing them. Without the tenacity and rigidity of patriarchy, traditional masculinity, violence against women and girls, frozen culture, the gendered division of labor, racism, and class and heterosexual privilege; structural inequality would be significantly eroded.

While the anti-domestic violence movement has been successful at building resources and recourses for battered women, it has not succeeded at stopping men's violence. The latter cannot only be achieved by sending abusers to batter intervention programs. As a society, we need to make fundamental shifts - divesting our communities of misogyny and sexism, and transforming gender roles.

Engendering Change: Transforming Gender Roles in Asian & Pacific Islander Communities asks and analyzes some critical questions; forcing us to take a hard look at all the factors that have to come together to effect transformation.

1. Maintaining Gender Roles: Socio-Structural Reinforcements
   1. Systemic gender violence
   2. Culture
   3. Patriarchy
   4. Culturally relevant issues
   5. Masculinity
   6. Gendered division of labor
   7. Intersections of gender, race and class
2. Confronting Gender Roles and Gender Violence: Two Batterer Intervention Programs for Asian Men
   1. Divesting men of misogyny and sexism
   2. Confronting traditional masculinity
   3. Effects of intervention programs on batterers and their families
   4. Women as enforcers of gender conformity and violence
3. Changing Gender Roles: Principles and Practices
   1. Accountability
   2. Equality in the second shift
   3. Religious ideologies
   4. Masculinity
   5. Predatory violence
   6. Cultural relevancy in Batterer Intervention Programs


• Engendering Change: Transforming Gender Roles in Asian & Pacific Islander Communities