Abstract:

Education is one of the fundamental pillars of modern societies. Investing in education has multiple economic and social benefits; it is a determinant of the well-being and prosperity of individuals and societies, and is important for promoting social and territorial cohesion and reducing inequalities. In terms of gender in/equality, education is also a powerful driver for more gender-inclusive societies, as it has the potential to raise awareness about it and to prevent and/or avoid reactions that are contrary to women’s rights. Intimate partner violence (IPV) is currently one of the most visible and worrying forms of gender inequality worldwide. Studies analysing the relationship between IPV and education have mainly focused on women, leaving the role of men’s education within this problematic issue unclear. Therefore, this paper intends to enrich the current discussion on these issues by seeking to understand how the literature approaches men’s higher education in the context of IPV. One of the largest abstract and citation databases of peer-reviewed literature (Elsevier’s Scopus) was used to extract documents with the combined words/expressions “men”, “higher education” and “intimate partner violence” or “domestic violence” in the title, abstract and keywords. English articles-only were extracted from the database. After the initial search and reading of the abstracts, articles outside the scope of the analysis were excluded. The remaining documents were then analysed and an in-depth analysis was carried out. Although this study is still ongoing, there has been an increase in IPV-related literature dealing with men’s “higher education” in recent years. Preliminary findings suggest that this is a complex and intersectional issue and that further research in this area is needed to clarify the role that men’s higher education can play in preventing, combating and/or eradicating IPV.

Keywords:

Higher education, men, intimate partner violence, gender.