Engaging men to prevent intimate partner violence: Karthika Baby Sujatha receives Emerging Scholar Award

UNU-MERIT PhD Fellow Karthika Baby Sujatha has received the Harry Frank Guggenheim Emerging Scholar Award for her research on men’s attitudes, social norms and intimate partner violence in Kerala, India. In this interview, she discusses a field experiment involving more than 1,700 men and what it could teach us about engaging men in violence prevention.

Congratulations on receiving the Harry Frank Guggenheim Emerging Scholar Award. What does this recognition mean for you and for your PhD research at this stage of your doctoral journey?

I am very grateful and honoured to receive the Harry Frank Guggenheim Emerging Scholar Award. The Foundation has a long history of supporting research on violence and how it can be reduced, and I am glad that they see the potential in this work.

I also see the award as recognition of a shared effort. The field experiment at the heart of my PhD is joint work with Dr Bruno Martorano, Prof. Arjun Bedi and Prof. Eleonora Nillesen, and it would not have been possible without our field team, gender experts, facilitators, and the men and communities who participated.

The award comes at an important stage. The experiment is complete, and our initial results suggest that even a short intervention can change how men think about violence and gender roles. We are now analysing the group discussions to understand these changes in greater depth, including how participants reasoned about violence, gender roles, responsibility and prevention.

Personally, the recognition is very encouraging.  Intimate partner violence affects the lives of women around the world. This research asks what can be gained by bringing men more directly into prevention efforts and how we might challenge the social norms that allow violence to persist.

Your research examines men’s attitudes, tolerance and behaviours towards intimate partner violence in Kerala. What led you to focus on this issue, and what do we need to understand about the relationship between attitudes, social norms and actual behaviour?

For many years, my work has focused on the well-being of women and children. During my Master’s, I conducted a household survey among marginalised Scheduled Tribe communities in Kerala examining how parental alcohol abuse affects children’s behaviour. One important pathway we identified was violence against mothers by their partners. That finding stayed with me and continued to shape my subsequent work.

India’s National Family Health Survey also shows that many men and women consider a husband justified in beating his wife in certain circumstances. This made us ask whether such attitudes can be changed.

Much prevention work understandably focuses on women, while programmes engaging men often require several weeks or months. We therefore wanted to test whether a shorter, relatively low-cost intervention with men could  be delivered at scale.

An important issue is that attitudes, social norms and behaviour do not necessarily change together. What a man personally believes, what he thinks other men expect of him, and what he actually does may differ. Beliefs may also shift more quickly than behaviour.

For this reason, we did not rely exclusively on what participants told us in surveys. We also observed concrete actions, including whether they chose to sign a petition supporting stronger anti-violence policy or donate to a women’s organisation.

At the heart of your research is a field experiment. What did you do in practice, and what are you trying to learn?

We invited men from 43 villages in Thiruvananthapuram district to participate, with 1,767 men ultimately taking part. Each participant first completed a short survey. Two-thirds were then randomly assigned to an intervention group and one-third to a control group.

The intervention consisted of a two-hour small-group discussion led by a gender expert and a young male facilitator. It began with a short video using real local news reports about intimate partner violence in Kerala.

The discussion then moved through three stages. First, participants considered how violence affects women, children, families and communities. Second, they explored its causes, including through an exercise designed to prompt reflection on unequal treatment and gender roles. Finally, they discussed possible solutions, including ways of managing anger and actions communities could take to prevent violence.

Afterwards, participants in both groups completed another survey. They were also given the opportunity to sign a petition calling for stronger anti-violence policy and to donate to a women’s organisation. This allowed us to observe behaviour rather than only reported attitudes.

Half of the men who participated in the intervention were then randomly selected to join a WhatsApp group that shared short gender-equality videos and articles for one month. Around 30 days later, all participants completed a final survey.

This allows us to examine whether a short intervention can affect men’s beliefs, whether digital follow-up reinforces those effects, and whether changes persist beyond the immediate session. We are also analysing recordings of the discussions to better understand how change may occur.

Why is it important to engage men directly when seeking to prevent intimate partner violence?

Intimate partner violence is rooted partly in social norms around power, control and the expected roles of men and women. These norms shape the behaviour and expectations of both women and men.

Prevention efforts that support women in recognising violence, accessing services and seeking protection are essential. But if we want to prevent violence before it happens, we also need to engage directly with men and with the social environments in which attitudes about gender and violence are formed.

Individual attitudes matter. Ideas about masculinity, authority and gender roles are socially learned, which also means they can potentially be questioned and changed.

The peer environment matters too. A man may privately reject violence but remain silent because he assumes other men accept it. Bringing men together can reveal that others may also question these attitudes and create space for different expectations to emerge.

There is also the wider social norm: what a community considers normal or acceptable. Our intervention therefore did not simply give participants information. It encouraged men to reflect on their own attitudes, hear the perspectives of other men, and work collectively on possible individual and community responses.

The broader idea is that men should not enter discussions about intimate partner violence only after violence has occurred. They can also be engaged as part of prevention.

What would you like this research to contribute beyond the PhD, and how could it inform policy?

Beyond the PhD, we hope the research can demonstrate whether meaningful changes in men’s attitudes towards violence can be achieved through interventions that are relatively short and practical.

Many existing programmes engaging men involve repeated sessions over several weeks or months. They provide important lessons, but this can make them expensive and difficult to implement at scale. Our intervention involved a single two-hour session delivered through existing community platforms.

We are also interested in what actually happens inside these discussions. By systematically analysing the sessions, we can understand how men talk about violence, which issues generate resistance or engagement, and how participants reason about responsibility and prevention. This could help practitioners design interventions that respond more effectively to the concerns and assumptions participants bring with them.

We are also testing whether relatively inexpensive digital follow-up through WhatsApp can reinforce and sustain the effects of a face-to-face intervention.

In India, approaches of this kind could potentially be integrated into institutions and networks that already reach men, including local self-government structures, youth and community organisations, and workplaces.

The challenge extends well beyond India. Many countries have laws prohibiting intimate partner violence while attitudes that tolerate or normalise it persist. We hope this research can contribute to developing practical approaches for engaging men as allies in prevention, while recognising that any intervention needs to be carefully adapted and tested in the context in which it will be used.