On “fragmentation”, men’s wellbeing, and the prevention of men’s violence: A response to The Man Cave’s open letter to the sector working with men and boys

Written by Steven Roberts, Stephanie Wescott, Helen Keleher & Amanda Keddie; informed by discussions w/ Marina Carman, Annabelle Daniel, Jackson Fairchild, & five other sector-based colleagues

This piece responds to the open letter written by The Man Cave and shared on 14th May 2026. The call for co-ordination and collaboration that anchors the open letter can feel both intuitive and compelling, but it warrants deeper interrogation. It is important to begin by acknowledging that the open letter to the sector was written and shared in good faith, with a genuine intent to bring people together around complex and urgent issues.

The opportunity for deeper conversation across the field and amongst stakeholders in the GBV prevention space is welcome. The open letter also explicitly rejects men’s rights framings and affirms key feminist principles, including the role of power and structural inequality. How consistently these are carried through in the framing of the problem sits in tensions with these claims, though.

Accordingly, a central concern running through our (somewhat lengthy) response that follows pertains to the framing of the problem itself. The way the field, its tensions, and its priorities are described is not neutral, and it shapes what is seen as the problem, what responses are considered legitimate, and how different forms of work are positioned.

It is precisely because this moment matters that it is important to engage closely with that framing, the assumptions that underpin it, and the differences it brings into view. These divergences, at least in part, undermine the call for co-ordination, and render the framing of the field as fragmented as a fundamental misdiagnosis.

The central conflation: Men’s mental health and men’s violence intersect but are not the same problem

At a high level, the open letter brings together two distinct (though related) domains: men’s wellbeing, and men’s use of violence. Both are shaped by patriarchal gender norms. But they operate through different mechanisms, require different forms of accountability, and sit within different traditions of practice and knowledge. Crucially, they are defined by different kinds of problems.

Work on men’s wellbeing tends to centre what might be understood as the interior dimensions of men’s lives: disconnection, loneliness, identity, mental health and help-seeking. Work on violence against women, children and gender diverse folks centres the exterior of men’s lives: behaviour, power, control, and the impact of harm on others. These distinctions are not superficial. They shape what is understood as the problem, what change looks like, how success is measured, and imply different forms of accountability. Treating these as a single-agenda risks collapsing these distinctions, and in doing so, diluting what is specific and necessary in each.

This is not to deny that these domains intersect. Experiences such as loneliness, shame, grievance and social disconnection can intersect with harmful online cultures and gendered practices, particularly in a rapidly evolving digital landscape shaped by algorithmic amplification, online misogyny, AI-facilitated harms, manosphere cultures and platform dynamics.

These conditions are transforming both the contexts in which violence emerges and the ways in which boys and men form identity, belonging and grievance, creating points of overlap between experiences of wellbeing and patterns of harm. However, acknowledging this complexity does not collapse the distinction between wellbeing and violence, nor establish a straightforward causal pathway between the two.

Fragmentation is being misdiagnosed

It is this distinction that helps explain why what is being labelled as “fragmentation” may, in fact, be a reflection of the field working across fundamentally different problems and towards fundamentally different aims. This is not just a difference in emphasis, but a difference in ontology - what the problem is understood to be. In one case, the problem is framed primarily as one of boys’/men’s wellbeing and social connection; in the other, as one of power, inequality and harm. These framings generate different theories of change, different forms of intervention, and different expectations of accountability.

It may be helpful to briefly think about this in more practical terms. In medicine, different conditions can share a common underlying cause while still requiring distinct diagnoses and treatments. For example, diabetes may lead to both vision problems and nerve damage, but treating one of these does not resolve the other. Each manifestation requires its own form of intervention. In a similar way, while both men’s wellbeing challenges and men’s use of violence must be understood as emerging from patriarchal, capitalist and colonial norms, improving one does not automatically resolve the other. Conflating them risks assuming a causal relationship that is more complex and less direct in practice.

The framing as described in the open letter also risks overlooking the history of the field it is seeking to organise. Work to prevent gender-based violence and advance gender equity has been built over decades through feminist activism, organising and practice. This includes not only violence prevention, but broader gender equity struggles - for women’s rights in economic, political, social and reproductive domains, and their intersection with trans rights movements, which have shaped the conditions in which such work now operates. This history is not uniform, nor without critique. Feminist movements have not always adequately centred the experiences of Black women, Indigenous women, trans women and other marginalised groups, and have also not always been unified on key questions such as the drivers of violence, the role of patriarchy, and appropriate responses to harm (and arguably are still not entirely unified, as per recently revived debates on the size of the role of trauma in GBV). However, this does not diminish the extent to which this work has established the foundations on which current approaches are built.

What must be understood here is that much of what is being called for in terms of systems thinking, collaboration, and cross-sector engagement, has long been recognised and enacted within this work, often under conditions of significant underfunding..

What is being described as fragmentation, then, seems to better reflect substantive disagreement across the field about causes, evidence, power, and purpose. These are not peripheral tensions, but central to how the work is understood and carried out. Rather than breakdowns in relationships or modes of miscommunication or mistrust, they are disagreements about how power operates and how harm should be addressed.

For many in the women’s safety sector, these tensions arise not from an absence of collaboration, but from long-standing concerns about how violence is conceptualised, how accountability is maintained, and how feminist knowledge and practice are engaged (or not).

Alignment is not a neutral solution

If fragmentation is not simply a technical problem, then alignment is not a neutral solution. While the open letter positively gestures toward holding multiple perspectives, calls for co-ordination inevitably reflect a position about how the field should be organised, what should be prioritised, and whose frameworks should lead.

The call for a “shared agenda” warrants particular attention. While the letter emphasises the need to come together, it also outlines what that agenda could look like, without a clear process for how it would be collectively shaped, contested or governed. This creates a tension between the language of collaboration and the reality of agenda-setting (and, indeed, a ten point agenda of work is provided in the letter).

Without explicit mechanisms for disagreement, negotiation and accountability, there is a risk that “shared” becomes a shorthand for alignment around a pre-existing frame, rather than a genuinely co-produced direction. This is important because, while multiple perspectives may coexist, they do not carry equal weight in terms of power, harm and material impact. Treating them as equivalent risks obscuring important differences in accountability.

There are also practical implications to this framing. Positioning the field as fragmented and in need of integration can shape how funding, policy attention and legitimacy are distributed, potentially privileging new or centralised approaches over existing work, rather than investing in and strengthening what is already in place. Further, as is established above, what is being conflated here are two distinctly different problems and fields, and therefore, we need to question who this alignment seeks to benefit.

There are also differences in how knowledge is understood

Alongside these ontological differences are epistemological ones. That is, differences in how knowledge about the problem is generated and applied. The distinction drawn between “research” and “practice” in the letter suggests a divide between those who produce knowledge and those who implement it. In reality, that boundary is far more porous. Beyond this, the framing of “practice” appears to implicitly apply to organisations working to support the social and emotional wellbeing of boys and men.

This overlooks that women’s safety and violence prevention organisations are also deeply practice-based and have for decades been generating knowledge through frontline work, community engagement, and sustained interaction with victim-survivors, in behaviour change work, and prevention work with boys and men. Social research on both experience and perpetration of violence, in turn, routinely engage with lived experience and qualitative insight.

The result is not simply an incomplete picture, but a misleading one: a false distinction that obscures the extent to which practice, evidence and expertise are already embedded across the field. The distinction isn’t really between “research” and “practice” — it’s between different focus areas and goals. People work across both men’s wellbeing and violence prevention, in research as well as in practice.

To frame this as a divide between those who generate knowledge and those who apply it is at best misplaced. It positions some forms of work as grounded, practical and connected to lived experience (men’s health work), while implicitly casting others as abstract, removed, or overly theoretical (violence prevention). This false and unsustainable binary obscures the depth of practice expertise within violence prevention and women’s safety work, and re-centres authority in ways that are not reflective of how knowledge and practice are actually organised across the field.

More fundamentally, these differences are not only about who is involved in producing knowledge, but about how the problem itself is known. Different parts of the field draw on different ways of defining, measuring and interpreting what matters. Measures of emotional wellbeing, connection or help-seeking, for example, do not necessarily map onto, or serve as proxies for, understanding patterns of violence and entitlement. Treating them as such risks a category error: assuming that insight into one domain provides reliable knowledge about the other.

This matters because what we choose to measure shapes what we see, and what we see shapes what we do. If the indicators used to understand men’s wellbeing are taken as indicators of reduced risk of violence, there is a risk that important dynamics of power, control and harm remain insufficiently examined; and then there is no shift in dial on rates of gendered violence.

(some of) what might be needed to more generatively proceed

This is already getting too long, so let us move to some requests to the authors and endorsers of the open letter. The invitation to dialogue requires more than a call to align. It requires in our view engaging directly with the differences in how the problem is understood, and the implications of those differences for the work. This, in turn, requires at least four things (and, we are sure, a whole lot more).

1. Acknowledge differences in problem definition, and don’t equate this to fragmentation

The letter explicitly acknowledges the importance of healthy disagreement, noting that tension, contestation and critique are necessary parts of this work. This is an important and welcome position. However, when co-ordination is framed as an obvious good, and fragmentation as a clear problem, a tension emerges. It becomes difficult to express not only disagreement, but also more fundamental differences in how the problem of gendered violence and its causes are understood, without those differences being read as evidence of fragmentation.

In this way, the framing risks becoming self-reinforcing, with differences in approach, purpose or underlying assumptions at risk of being interpreted not as signals of meaningful divergence, but as problems to be resolved. This creates a subtle pressure toward alignment, even where those differences are substantive and unresolved (and in some ways unresolvable).

2. Make power and accountability explicit

Violence against women and children cannot be understood without reference to power, entitlement and inequality, including misogyny, and intersections with class, race and colonialism. Framing concerns raised by women’s safety advocates as matters of “discomfort” risks mischaracterising what are, in many cases, questions of safety, power and evidence.

While the open letter states that safety is non-negotiable, there is less clarity on what accountability to women and gender diverse victim-survivors looks like in practice within this framing. If work with men and boys were to sit alongside violence prevention, rather than dilute it, power and accountability must be made explicit, particularly where tensions arise between different practice priorities and approaches.

This requires clarity about how accountability is enacted, not just stated, particularly where work intersects with the safety of others. Accountability is not just something to be aimed at the boys and men who participate in such work, but also, and fundamentally, the people who lead and staff the organisations that do any work in the name of gender violence prevention.

In practice, this could take a number of forms. For example, organisations working with boys and men on prevention may consider formal accountability structures, such as advisory or governance roles for representatives from women’s safety and violence prevention organisations, or mechanisms for ongoing input from victim-survivor expertise

Relatedly, describing feminist or violence prevention work as “shaming men or boys” should be rejected. While some men and boys may experience shame when engaging with questions of gender, power and behaviour, this is not the same as those approaches being structured around shaming. Greater precision is needed here. Claims of “shaming” risk reframing critical engagement with harm and accountability as an interpersonal injury, and in doing so, redirect attention away from behaviour, power and impact. If accountability is to be meaningful, it requires holding space for critique without recasting it as harm where harm is not being enacted.

3. Step back from chastising informal critique

The characterisation of informal critique or “backroom conversations” as a problem, as per the open letter, warrants careful reconsideration, and better still retraction.

For many women and practitioners, these spaces have not emerged arbitrarily, and have in actuality been historically necessary. They are responses to working within contexts shaped by gendered power, where men, including well-intentioned actors, continue to hold disproportionate influence over agendas, resources and narratives. In such contexts, informal spaces can provide a degree of safety for sense-making and the sharing of concerns that may be difficult to raise openly without consequence.

These dynamics are not incidental. They are shaped by broader logics of masculinity and power, including norms around authority, defensiveness, and control over how critique is received and responded to. Where those dynamics are present, informal networks can become a pragmatic and protective mechanism, particularly for those raising concerns about harm, accountability or the limits of certain approaches.

In this light, “whisper networks” and other forms of informal discussion are not a symptom of dysfunction, but part of how accountability has been maintained in uneven conditions. Treating them as inherently problematic risks overlooking the power relations that have made them necessary, and may inadvertently shift attention away from the conditions that constrain open critique.

This is not to suggest that informal critique is without risk or limitation. But in naming it as a problem, there is a need for care. Without attention to the gendered power dynamics in which these practices arise, such characterisations risk reinforcing the very conditions that necessitate them in the first place.

4. Strengthen evidence, evaluation and accountability for claims

If we are to advance claims about what works, particularly in prevention via work with boys and men, those claims need to be grounded in robust, transparent and contextually relevant evidence. This requires more than evaluation focused on levels of participation, satisfaction or short-term shifts in attitudes. Measures of whether participants enjoyed a session, felt engaged, or reported increased awareness are not indicators of reduced risk of violence or meaningful change in behaviour. There also needs to be questions around whose expertise is diminished or framed as problematic when market-based interventions are positioned as solutions to social problems.

The prevention evidence base consistently points to the importance of sustained, intensive and contextually embedded work. Duration, frequency and depth of engagement matter. Gender-transformative approaches that seek to shift norms, power relations and behaviours require more than one-off or short-term interventions, and cannot be confined to a focus on the interiority of men’s lives alone. They must also engage with the external conditions in which behaviour is enacted, including relationships, institutions and broader social norms.

In this context, claims about impact should be proportionate to the evidence available. Where programs are positioned as contributing to prevention, there should be clarity about what outcomes are being measured, how they relate to harm reduction, and what level of evidence supports those claims. Calls for alignment, scaling or system reform should therefore be accompanied by a clear articulation of the evidence underpinning them, including the evaluation frameworks required to test, challenge and refine them over time.

Closing thought

There is also a broader question of how the open letter’s framing lands publicly. Naming fragmentation in such a visible and expansive way does not simply describe the GBV prevention field. Instead, it shapes how the GBV prevention field is perceived, particularly in a context of already heightened scrutiny. This creates a tension between the intention to strengthen the work and the potential to reinforce narratives of dysfunction. It may also position some actors as arbiters of coherence within a fragmented field, rather than participants within it.

There is much in the original letter that speaks to real and pressing issues, including the need to better support men and boys in a rapidly changing social and digital landscape and to respect the value of the work of women and gender diverse people to create the foundations for prevention work. But if this is to be a genuine invitation to dialogue, it requires more than a call to align. It requires being explicit about the assumptions being made, the evidence they rest on, and the differences that remain unresolved. This would allow for conditions that we need to enable us to have the kind of conversations that we all want to help us ensure that the safety of women and gender diverse people is not at risk of being side-lined by a disproportionate focus on the wellbeing of men and boys.