Preventing Gender-Based and Intimate Partner Violence: Why Engaging Boys and Young Men Early Matters

It’s hard to believe that in 2026 our communities are still faced with epidemic levels of gender-based and intimate partner violence.

A recent article in The Conversation examined a disturbing incident at an Alberta school, where a group chat reportedly listed girls as targets of sexual violence. As a researcher, my first question is “Why?” That is always followed by, “How?”

We do not need to look far to understand part of the problem. We only need to look at our screens.

The rapid growth of social media and online communities, particularly since the COVID-19 pandemic, has also expanded the reach of the manosphere: a broad network of digital spaces that can exploit young men’s loneliness, economic uncertainty and anxiety about the future.

These communities tend to offer simple explanations for complex struggles and promise a faster path to success, status, and belonging. That promise, however, is often rooted in narratives that blame women, normalize misogyny, and reinforce distorted ideas about relationships, power, and violence.

If we are concerned about the influence of these online spaces, we also have to offer boys and young men a meaningful alternative.

This means creating credible sources of connection, belonging, support, and guidance that can counter the misleading content they encounter online. Yet this is where the challenge becomes particularly difficult.

We are not only working against powerful cultural influences and digital ecosystems designed to capture and hold young people’s attention. We are also working within fragmented service systems that make the drivers of gender-based and intimate partner violence exceptionally difficult to address, both proactively and reactively.

Too often, conversations begin after incidents have already occurred. After a complaint. After a crisis. After police or courts become involved. After a relationship has become abusive.

At the same time, there are few clear places for young men to turn before concerning beliefs or behaviours escalate. Even when issues emerge, help may be difficult to find, hard to access, or available only through reactive or court-mandated interventions.

By then, opportunities for prevention may already have been missed.

Young adulthood is a formative period for identity, relationships, social connection, and help-seeking (Johnson et al., 2015). It’s also a time of heightened vulnerability to mental health challenges and intimate partner violence (Taylor et al., 2021).

Recent Canadian findings show that many young men continue to face stigma and barriers when seeking mental health care (GreenShield & Mental Health Research Canada, 2026). Nearly half disengage from care before their needs are met, highlighting the importance of designing services that young men can access, trust, and continue using.

Closing this gap shouldn’t require us to choose between accountability and rehabilitation. We can name violent behaviour clearly, centre the safety and dignity of those targeted, and hold people responsible while still helping boys and young men develop healthier understandings of relationships, consent, care, accountability, and masculinity.

Boys and young men should also be active contributors to this change.

Creating spaces where they can speak openly about the pressures they face and what would encourage them to seek help allows us to design responses with them rather than for them.

Lived-experience approaches can help ensure that programs, public messages, and pathways to support aligns with young men’s needs while still centring accountability and preventing harm. These spaces must allow for difficult questions and honest reflection without minimizing the consequences of violence-supportive ideas or behaviours.

These principles are increasingly informing our work at Mhaven, a community-facing anti-violence mental health hub at Waypoint Centre for Mental Health Care. Mhaven brings together mental health and intimate partner violence education, public outreach, service navigation, training, community partnerships, and lived-experience participation.

As this work evolves, we are seeking to better understand how preventative care can become more relevant and accessible to young men, including those affected by violence exposure or use, stigma, isolation, and barriers to help-seeking.

This work is not about shifting attention or resources away from survivors. Survivor safety and support must remain central. Rather, it’s about asking what can happen earlier, before someone enters a shelter, courtroom, hospital, or mandated intervention program.

The Alberta incident reminds us of the consequences of waiting too long. Responding appropriately when gender-based and intimate partner violence occurs is essential, but prevention asks more of us.

It asks us to engage boys and young men earlier, take their mental and relational health seriously, and create pathways to support before distress becomes crisis and harmful beliefs shape abusive or violent behaviours.

Protecting survivors, holding people accountable, and engaging boys and young men in prevention are not competing goals. They are part of the same work – and that work must begin before beliefs that normalize control, abuse, and violence move from screens into schools, relationships, and real-world harm.