Preventing & Counting Gender-based Cyber-Violence, Online Hate Speech & Anti-Gender/Misogynistic Online-Movements

Panel at The 5th International Conference on Men And Equal Opportunities: Men Who Care

Marina Kaljurand Christian Mogensen Michael Flood Christoph May Iris Luarasi Tuija Saresma Seán Cooke Sam de Boise

Thursday, 3rd of September 2020 / Tallinn University

14.15 – 14.30 Challenges: Christian Mogensen, Danish Center for Digital Youth Care
14.30 – 15.30 Searching for solutions

Marina Kaljurand And from here let’s go to Christoph. Christoph, I visited yesterday your Detox Masculinity Network and I was really impressed by the videos and Blogs you had there. You should have more in english because majority was in german, but still if you could share your views on the topic please.

Christoph May Hello from germany! It’s really nice to meet you all and yeah I deeply share the experience from Christian. But I am not working with young boys and teenage men. I do a lot of online community building and real life workshops with grown-ups. I run three Facebook groups for example, that I manage together with nine moderators.

One is on critical masculinity, it’s about masculinities in our social, daily real life, our jobs, our families, our friendships and so on. The second one is on male fantasies. Here we talk about male representation of men and masculinities in tv series and movies. And a third one is on male monocultures, where we do research on male-dominated groups to discuss their structural power and how to break them up.

We have four thousand members in total there and the daily topics and talks and posts are really interesting. It is a high level of discussion and awareness, but it needed a couple of years and a lot of work until we got to this point. After two years and hundreds of threads we realized that we needed some rules and strategies to avoid trolls, hate speech and anti-feminists. So we have four main rules I would like to share with you.

The first one is we only talk about men and masculinity. We needed this rule, because we noticed that especially men are really good in whataboutism and try to derail any topic really fast into talks about women. So with this rule we make sure that any thread is self-critical and about masculinity. Our second rule is about the standards of intersectional feminism and pro-feminism. So against all kinds of discriminations of course. The third rule is against tone policing. You are not allowed to attack someone’s voice, tone or emotions. And our fourth rule is about victim blaming and not all men argumentation.

So these four simple rules work really good to avoid hate speech and misogyny and anti-feminists. I highly recommend to find your own rules to build up safe and supportive communities. It is absolutely important to create a critical but peaceful environment where everyone feels welcome and safe. And of course it is really interesting and often a tough journey. And it’s so much intense, emotional work you have to put into this, but it’s absolutely worth it and I’m still learning every day.

Marina Kaljurand Thank you, thank you Christoph.

❍ Ambassador Marina Kaljurand was elected to the European Parliament and started her duties as MEP on July 2nd, 2019 after resigning from the Estonian Parliament (Riigikogu). She is the member of the Estonian Social Democrats Party since June 2018.

❍ Christian Mogensen is a special consultant for the Danish Center for Digital Youth Care. He holds a master’s degree in philosophy and psychology, and has worked extensively in understanding digital groups and social clusters.

❍ Dr Michael Flood is an Associate Professor at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Australia. He is a highly regarded researcher on men and masculinities, gender, and violence prevention, with an extensive record of community engagement.

❍ Christoph May is a researcher on masculinity. He gives Seminars, Workshops, Lectures and Webinars on critical masculinity and male fantasies in TV series and movies. In 2016 he founded the Men’s Studies Institute and in 2018 the Hetox Magazine.

❍ Iris Luarasi PhD is the First Vice President of GREVIO at Council of Europe. She is Executive Director of Counselling Line for Women and Girls, one of pioneer women organization in the country, which fights gender-based violence and does lobbying and advocacy for women’s rights.

❍ Tuija Saresma, Adjunct Professor of Cultural Studies and Gender Studies, is a senior researcher at the Research Centre for Contemporary Culture, Department of Music, Art and Culture Research, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. She studies populism, belonging and displacement, and hate speech on and through social media.

❍ Sean Cooke is the CEO of the Men’s Development Network. A critical part of our work is promoting an end to violence against women, this is delivered through a number of campaigns including the White Ribbon and Turn off the Red Light, and through our domestic violence intervention programme MEND.

❍ Sam de Boise is a senior lecturer in musicology at the School of Music, Theatre and Art, Örebro University, Sweden with a doctorate in sociology. His current research focuses on issues of gender equality in music engagement and the role of cultural policy in this process.

All Presentations & Videos

The 5th International Conference on Men And Equal Opportunities: Men Who Care

Presentations & Videos

3-4 September 2020 / Tallinn University

„Despite the continuous efforts, achieving real gender equality is still an unmet challenge all over the world and in many areas of life. To achieve full gender equality, there is a critical need for active contribution by both women and men.

The importance of men’s and boys’ active participation and responsibility as actors of change for gender equality and their role as co-beneficiaries of gender equality policies is widely acknowledged in principle. However, this general awareness is not backed up by long-term commitments and initiatives very often. Organisation of the 5th ICMEO is inspired by an ambition to give further impetus for taking decisive steps towards achieving gender equality and for developing such commitment and action.

At the Tallinn conference we seek to provide a space for furthering discussions and learning from each other’s experiences on topics ranging from caring to toxic masculinities. In this framework, we are addressing issues such as men’s responsibility to care for oneself, care for others and care for the well-being and sustainability of societies, including the promotion of gender equality. Both the challenges and the promising practices covering these topics will be discussed in both panel and workshop formats, involving a range of stakeholders, among them policymakers, researchers and activists.

The 5th ICMEO is organised by the Estonian Ministry of Social Affairs, in co-operation with the Nordic Council of Ministers and European Institute for Gender Equality. It is a follow-up from the previous conferences held in Germany (2012), Austria (2014), Luxembourg (2016) and Sweden (2018). The general aim of this series of conferences is to address both the issues of involving more men in promoting gender equality and of gender-specific challenges men face, including due to restrictive gender norms.“

PROGRAMM

Thursday, 3rd of September 2020

09.00 – 09.30 Logging in and registrat ion of participants in Tallinn

Opening Session

09.30 – 09.50 Opening remarks by:

Tanel Kiik, Minister of Social Affairs, Estonia
Mogens Jensen, Minister for Food, Fisheries and Equal Opportunities and Minister for Nordic Cooperation; Danish Presidency of the Nordic Council of Ministers 2020

09.50 – 10.00 Opening performance

Keynote speech

10.00 – 11.00 Kadri Aavik, Tallinn University

11.00 – 11.30 Networking break

Panel 1 – State policies supporting active fatherhood

Moderator: Christian Veske, European Institute for Gender Equality

11.30 – 11.45 Challenges: Nikki van der Gaag, Promundo

11.45 – 12.45 Searching for solutions:

Jens Karberg, MÄN
Christine Aumayr, Eurofound
Véronique De Baets, Belgian Institute for the Equality of Women and Men
Carla Tavares, Portuguese Commission for Equality in Labour and Employment (CITE)
Nikki van der Gaag, Promundo

12.45 – 13.00 Questions and discussion

13.00 – 14.00 Lunch break

High-level addresses

14.00 – 14.15 Video addresses by high-level representatives of previous organising countries of ICMEO

Panel 2 – Preventing and countering gender-based cyber violence, online hate speech and anti-gender/misogynistic online-movements

Moderator: Marina Kaljurand

14.15 – 14.30 Challenges: Christian Mogensen, Danish Center for Digital Youth Care

14.30 – 15.30 Searching for solutions:

Michael Flood, Queensland University of Technology, XY
Christoph May, Hetox Magazine, Detox Masculinity Network
Iris Luarasi, GREVIO, Council of Europe
Tuija Saresma, University of Jyväskylä
Seán Cooke, Men`s Development Network
Sam de Boise, Örebro University
Christian Mogensen, Danish Center for Digital Youth Care

15.30 – 15.45 Questions and discussion
15.45 – 16.15 Networking break

Parallel workshops

16.15 – 18.00 Workshop 1: Men sharing the burden of professional care work

Moderator: tbc

Food for thought: Alexia Delfino, London School of Economics and Political Science

Inspiring action:

Daniel Holtermann, international project “Boys in Care”
Catarina Lindahl-Petäjä, Health and Care College of Region Kronoberg
Blake Smith, American Association for Men in Nursing