Professor plays role in ending violence

After he watched Eve Ensler's work The Vaginal Monologues more than a decade ago, Fang Gang, a sexologist and associate professor in the Department of Psychology at Beijing Forestry University, decided to make a male version with the intention of reflecting and tackling problems of gender stereotypes from a male perspective. The play, The Penis Monologue, debuted in December 2018.

Fang also launched an NGO called China White Ribbon in 2010, establishing a hotline to offer counseling to abusive males in a bid to help end gender-based violence.

"The root cause of domestic violence is the unequal gender system, based on power and control," he said. "To solve the problem, attackers need to be depowered and the victims empowered, thus overthrowing existing power relations."

In the past 10 years, the hotline has dealt with more than 6,000 calls, of which approximately 15 percent were made by men.

Gu Wei was one of them. The 35-year-old attacked his wife repeatedly during their three-year marriage, starting in 2011. Gu described clenching his fists like "hammers" during the last and worst attack, and beating his wife on the head for several minutes. A month later, she sued for divorce.

The court summons made Gu begin to doubt whether it was right for him to hit his wife, who wanted to know why her husband would be violent to the person closest to him.

After viewing a documentary about women who ended up in prison after killing abusive husbands after long-term abuse, Gu began to understand the pain of female victims for the first time.

Having acquired the number of hotline from the documentary, he called and asked for help. "I just want her to shut up," he told a psychological consultant on the other end of the line. When the consultant responded: "She is a person. Doesn't she have the right to speak?" Gu was speechless and burst into tears.

Counselors helped him understand how his behavior had been shaped by society and examples in his family — his father and uncles all beat their wives. Shortly after his divorce came through in 2015, Gu became a China White Ribbon volunteer.

For years, Fang has devoting himself to promoting equality via changing traditional views of masculinity and gender stereotypes. Each time abusive men phone the hotline, the first move is to applaud them for wanting to change their behavior and seeking help.

It is rare for men to reflect on their abusive behavior and make the change; in most cases, the people seeking help from Fang's hotline are female victims. When men phone, most ask for advice about maintaining their marriage — they often express confusion and complain that their wives have "overreacted" to domestic violence by insisting on divorce.