Boys with progressive views on gender less likely to be abusive: study

TORONTO -- Boys who are surrounded by abusive behaviour toward women and girls may be more likely to be violent in other areas of life, but progressive views on gender could dramatically decrease those odds.

New research published last week in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine suggests that if a teenage boy sees one of his peers abusing a female, he is more likely to also act abusively toward females as well as partake in bullying and fighting.

“These behaviors aren’t happening in silos — if we’re going to stop one, we need to also be addressing the other,” said lead author Elizabeth Miller, a professor of public health at the University of Pittsburgh, in a statement.

But researchers say boys with more progressive views on gender were about half as likely to engage in violent behaviour.

“Our findings highlight the wide-ranging impact that witnessing sexual harassment and dating violence has on our teenage boys, and present an opportunity to teach adolescents to challenge negative gender and social norms, and interrupt their peer’s disrespectful and harmful behaviors,” Miller said.

Researchers surveyed 833 teenage boys from the ages of 13 to 19. All of the teenagers lived in “lower resource” neighbourhoods in Pittsburgh. Seventy per cent of the teens identified as African-American and 21 per cent as Hispanic, multiracial or “other.”

Each teen was paid US$10 to complete the survey, which asked them how likely they were to agree with statements such as “A guy never needs to hit another guy to get respect” and “I would be friends with a guy who is gay.”

Researchers then used those answers to determine how progressive each respondent was in terms of how they viewed gender roles.

Teens who said they’d seen their peers engage in at least two of nine harmful behaviours, such as making disrespectful comments about a girl’s body, were two to five times more likely to have engaged in multiple violent behaviours.

Often, those behaviours had nothing to do with dating.

“This reinforces that pressure to conform to stereotypes about masculinity that perpetuate harmful behaviors toward women and girls also is associated with getting in a fight with another guy,” Miller said.

Curiously, the report found that even boys who held more progressive views on gender were just as likely to engage in homophobic bullying as those with less progressive views. Alison Culyba, an assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Pittsburgh, called the discovery “puzzling and troubling.”

“We believe it may be because these teens have normalized homophobic teasing — it is so commonplace, they may see it as a form of acceptable, possibly even pro-social, interaction with their peers,” Culyba said in a statement.

Of the teens who said they had dated, one in three said they had been abusive to someone they dated in the last nine months. More than half said they had been involved in sexual harassment, and 68 per cent said they’d been involved in physical fights or threatened or injured someone with a weapon.

The findings may not apply to other geographic regions, researchers say, because the study was “conducted in urban neighbourhoods with concentrated disadvantage.” Researchers also point out that the study is based entirely on self-reported behaviour.

Researchers involved in the study have also participated in programs geared toward encouraging youth to intervene when they see disrespectful behaviour and reinforcing more equitable gender attitudes.

About 1 in 11 female and 1 in 15 male high school students in the U.S. reported experiencing physical dating violence, according to figures from 2017.