Sir, - In a highly confused and alarmist letter, Mary T. Cleary of Amen (September 28th) attacks the integrity of the new Exploring Masculinities programme being introduced into second-level boys' schools at transition year and above. She complains bitterly that she has been refused a copy of the programme, yet feels able to freely criticise its contents. Her entire letter smacks of the paranoia and dangerous simplicity of argument that we have come to expect from Ms Cleary and others who argue that men are now the oppressed gender in Irish society.
The Exploring Masculinities programme is a vitally important initiative designed to promote the personal development of boys as they enter young adulthood. It is a key part of what education should be all about: helping to give young people the life and relationship skills necessary to thrive in an increasingly complex and often dangerous world. It is designed to support parents' efforts to give boys all the help they need to reflect on their identity and to feel good about themselves. A similar kind of programme was introduced into girls' schools some time ago and this is simply doing something similar for boys.
Ms Cleary implies that I deliberately omitted to point out in my Irish Times article that I had an input into the design of the programme and that this is somehow connected to an attempt to "reconstruct" boys. For the record, I had a very modest input indeed and all the credit for this excellent initiative must go to Maureen Bohan and the team at the Department of Education and Science who worked so hard to produce it.
She also seems to imply that the programme is trying to demonise men in some way. I can assure your readers that it does no such thing. She questions its validity as it is based on the premise that masculinity is a social construct. The group of which she is the co-ordinator claims that men are ignored as victims of domestic violence. The supreme irony of her rejection of the programme is that the struggle for men to be seen as the victims of anything, or as vulnerable in any way, arises from how the dominant construction of masculinity says that males must always be strong, competitive, aggressive, never seek help or show their true feelings.
Changing how men and masculinity are constructed is what stopping violence and reaching victims has to be all about. The reason that Amen and commentators such as John Waters miss this crucial point is that their analysis begins and ends with blaming everything on women and on what they, shamefully, call the "domestic violence industry" - see the Amen website, for instance. They have no real understanding of gender relationships or of an approach whereby boys and men can work together with each other and with women and acquire the skills and knowledge to take responsibility for themselves and the positive and negative in relationships and society in order to help develop equal, loving relationships. The best thing they could do is actually complete the Exploring Masculinities programme themselves. - Yours, etc.,
Harry Ferguson, Professor of Social Policy and Social Work, UCD, Dublin 4.