The European Network of Migrant Women (ENoMW) has submitted its position on the engagement of men and boys to CoE Gender Equality Commission.
The Gender Equality Strategy 2026–2030 explicitly identifies the engagement of men and boys as both “key actors and beneficiaries of gender equality”. This policy direction is also translated into EU funding through the Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values (CERV) programme and its Daphne strand on preventing and combating gender-based violence, where the 2025 Daphne call accounted for €23 million.
Key Concerns and Negative Impacts
ENoMW raises serious concerns that activities involving men and boys have not been financed through additional resources specifically allocated to work with men and boys. Instead, resources available for addressing violence against women have been redirected from women, victims, and specialist women’s organisations towards interventions targeting men and perpetrators.
Funding priorities requiring work with men have also brought non-specialist organisations into partnerships addressing violence against women. ENoMW observed that some organisations working with men demonstrated very poor understanding of the structural and sex-based causes of violence against women, downplayed male violence, adopted approaches that are apologetic towards perpetrators, or sought cultural, religious or other explanations that effectively justify or minimise men’s violence.
There are also no systematic mechanisms assessing whether projects engaging men produce a substantive and measurable contribution to equality between women and men or to preventing violence against women.
What Does Not Work
ENoMW identifies several approaches that should not be used to address gender equality and violence against women:
- Redirecting women’s rights resources towards men, resulting in resources intended to address women’s structural inequality being redirected.
- Presenting men as more effective or credible advocates, which reinforces precisely the patriarchal authority they are supposed to challenge.
- Creating a false symmetry between women’s and men’s experiences. Restrictive expectations associated with masculinity should not be treated as equivalent to women’s structural discrimination and exposure to male violence.
- Allowing male participation to weaken positive measures for women. Male participation should not become a condition for the legitimacy or funding of women-only services, spaces, or specialist organisations.
- Relying excessively on education and awareness raising. Perpetrators often use violence deliberately to exercise power and control, so effective prevention must include investigation, prosecution, sanctions, and accountability.
- Measuring success through benefits to men rather than outcomes for women. Interventions should ultimately be assessed according to whether women become safer, more economically independent, more equally represented, and less burdened by unpaid labour and male violence.
Conditions for Promising Practices
ENoMW does not consider the involvement of men and boys to be an objective in itself. Engaging men and boys is considered promising only when it contributes to measurable improvements in the rights, safety, and substantive equality of women and girls.
Such engagement must not divert resources from women’s rights organisations or specialist women’s services, replace women as experts, representatives, or decision makers, or present women and men as equally disadvantaged by patriarchy.
It must recognise structural inequality between women and men and maintain a clear focus on male responsibility for violence against women.
Meaningful Contributions and Responsibility
Discussions should be framed around men’s responsibility, accountability, and consequences for perpetrators rather than mere participation.
Men’s contribution should consist of:
- Challenging misogyny among other men.
- Refusing and challenging sexual harassment.
- Rejecting violence and coercive behaviour.
- Taking an equal share of unpaid care and domestic work.
- Challenging sexual objectification and commodification of women.
- Refusing participation in prostitution and other forms of sexual exploitation.
- Challenging pornography and misogynistic sexual norms.
- Supporting effective accountability for perpetrators of violence.
Online Environments and Media Research
ENoMW also stresses the importance of looking beyond explicit hostility, such as the manosphere, when mapping online environments and media research.
Mapping efforts should examine narratives normalising pornography, prostitution, commercialisation of women’s reproductive capacities, including surrogacy, misogynistic stereotypes, organised opposition to sex-based rights, and the role of algorithms in monetising exploitative material.
Content should only be classified as supportive of equality if it recognises women’s structural inequality, supports safety, challenges entitlement, and strengthens women-led organisations.