A recent NBC News story featured us as an important program helping to reduce violence in boys and young men by changing the perspective of what it means to be a man.
“How does somebody get to the point where they’re taking a gun to school and committing an act of violence?” Executive Director Heidi Randall asks in the article. Then she answers her own question: “That doesn’t come out of nowhere.” Program Manager Jordan Hebert underlined both the asset-based and the practical foundations of our curriculum when he observed, “So much of our work is meeting people where they’re at, and where they’re at is saturated in this culture of violence.”
A recent Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting article observed that the “news media have repeatedly failed to identify maleness as one of the greatest predictive factors of mass violence.”
“Between the Buffalo shooting on May 14 and June 9, more than two weeks after the shooting in Uvalde, Texas, US newspapers published more than 20,000 articles discussing one or both shootings, according to a search of the Nexis database and the website of the Washington Post (which is not in the Nexis database). But of those thousands of articles, FAIR found only 37 unique pieces that made links to toxic masculinity, misogyny, or differences in socialization of boys and girls. Seven were syndicated columns reprinted in multiple outlets, bringing the total times such pieces appeared to 51. Only eight of those 51 total pieces were published in the news sections of newspapers; the rest were in the opinion sections.”
OLIVIA RIGGIO AND JULIE HOLLAR, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (fair.org)
We are pleased that NBC recognized this gap and, in addressing it, shared the importance of our work.