Too cognitive, too middle class: A lesson for the church from research into gendered violence campaigns

white picket fence

A paper that explains why social campaigning that seeks to reduce gendered violence might contain some useful lessons for the church, especially conservative evangelicals. “Rethinking Primary Prevention“, a paper by journalist/educator Jess Hill and Michael Salter, the Professor of Criminology at the School of Social Sciences at UNSW, is an insightful contribution to the conversation about gendered violence.

This paper suggests that campaigning to change men’s view of women is ineffective in preventing violence. This goes against the intuitions of many of the people setting up the current response to gender-based violence. This significant paper has attracted the attention of progressives such as Julia Baird and conservatives such as Claire Lehmann, both of whom have written on it in the last week.

Hill and Salter deserve to be widely read for their contribution to the debate on how Australia should combat gendered violence.

But in this piece, I am thinking about how their critique of how Australian society has campaigned so ineffectively to reduce gendered violence can be applied to how churches communicate. Or perhaps how we fail to communicate.

Hill and Salter report disappointing results of the campaign to reduce male violence against women. “As the NCAS [National Community Attitudes Survey] shows, despite intense media coverage and extensive public conversation, alongside large investments in changing social attitudes, the results are underwhelming…  If you look more closely at the Sexual Violence Scale of the NCAS, which measures attitudes towards sexual violence, the mean score has improved marginally, from a score of 66 to 68. Given the time period this covers, we would expect to see much greater improvement: the years between 2017 and 2021 were a period of extremely high awareness and traction on issues of gendered violence.”

Rethinking Primary Prevention uses the well-remembered “Grim Reaper” ads about AIDS as an example of miscommunication. The campaign alienated the very group that needed to act on prevention, gay men, by portraying them negatively, according to Hill and Salter. “It advertised to people who weren’t at risk and positioned those most at risk – largely gay men – as the Grim Reaper coming to destroy suburban families.”

Grim Reaper was a case of mis-targeted communication. “The success of the Australian HIV response was not secured by frightening suburban mums and dads who were never a risk. It was secured by resourcing affected communities, and community-led services, so they could use their knowledge and expertise to connect with those most at risk and implement effective strategies.”

In a key passage Hill and Salter outline the fundamental problem with how the gendered violence message has failed.

“The grounding of our current primary prevention approach is within a safe, liberal, progressive framework, which proposes that our social and cultural context communicates messages to boys and men, a bit like a radio transmitter. According to this framework, boys and men are on the wrong frequency, tuning into Andrew Tate, sexist jokes and male entitlement, and our job is to shift the dial to the right station. They’ve got the wrong message, which is why some of them use or excuse gendered violence; they need the right one. However, when we speak to men’s behaviour change program facilitators, and with men who themselves use coercive control and violence, one of the things we hear consistently is that, even if those men had been subjected to the prevention interventions that we have in place now, it wouldn’t have interrupted their pathway. Norms, values, awareness-raising, education programs – they’re all highly cognitive. They involve thinking and learning – which requires that those receiving the lesson are not feeling threatened or distressed – and they fit very well within a white middle-class model of behaviour change.

“Pathways to committing gendered violence are not just attitudinal – they are biographical. Those pathways are formed through the lives that men have led, and the ways that violence and coercive control becomes a meaningful and available choice to some men and boys but not others.”

In other words, the campaign’s medium and messages might too readily resemble the sort of signalling that those creating it are most used to.

It is only human to have a preferred method of communication. A white middle class model of behaviour change – works well, the paper presumes for white middle-class people. Not so well for those outside that class.

If this criticism is true of the effort to get men to behave differently toward women, it might also apply to another institution that seeks to facilitate change – the church.

There are some church leaders, and churches that communicate very effectively across class divides. But it is not surprising that in general there is a decided class bias in who goes to church in Australia.

The Other Cheek reported on a NCLS seminar by Dr Coz Crosscombe, the Assistant Minister at Mt Druitt Anglican in Western Sydney, on how our communication might have similar flaws to the gendered Violence campaigning. He pointed out the effect of education, often a class marker.

“Just briefly what we’ve seen is a gap between those who come to church and their education levels, and those who are in the surrounding communities where we find that those who go to church generally have a higher level of education or tertiary education. In 2006, about 27% of people who attended churches and filled out the surveys came from higher education backgrounds. 

“That’s now grown to 44% for churches and we know within the Anglican churches actually over 50%. So over 50% of all people 15 years or older have a tertiary education and go to church. 

“Now there are some great things in that and some positive things and differences in the rest of the world and so there are some things to celebrate there. Great university ministries are going on, perhaps helping people move upward, and creating good support systems for immigrant communities. Those things are all really great. 

“However, there are also challenges, and what we’re finding is that a limited number of churches are working in poor communities. Certainly, a limited number of effective ministries are taking place and we find that even those churches in those communities, tend to be dominated by those with a higher education background and often by those who might drive into that community.

And like Hill and Salter, Crosscombe people’s communication preferences reflect who we are: “If we’re already deploying people who have a higher education level, and inclined that way, most likely they’re going to be reaching out to people who also have a higher education background. And so that will continue that disparity. 

“They’re also most likely to put other people in leadership who like them because [they] see that strengths and giftings in others. 

“So the leadership of the church, not just the minister, but the actual leadership will tend to skew in that direction. I think what we miss in this is misunderstanding the people in poor communities. People who haven’t been to higher education can be just as phenomenal leaders.”

Image Credit: WilB / Flickr