“Everyone’s Moving, and Learning Together”: Young People and Practitioners Working with Collective Care to Create Futures Without Gender-Based Violence

Gender-based violence may be considered a failure or absence of care across the interpersonal, symbolic, and structural levels. Feminist scholars have called for closer attention to an ethic of care as one vital pathway to shared solidarity for social justice and relations of non-violence. Works from Black, Indigenous, queer and disability writers and activists have similarly illustrated the transformative potential of collective care for building community and ending systems of oppression. In this paper, we draw on this critical literature to argue for framing collective care as both a practice and a long-term objective in work to prevent gender-based violence. To illustrate this framing, we share empirical data from two Australian studies: one with young people using social media to prevent gender-based violence, and one with prevention practitioners who work with men and boys. Our findings are organised around four central themes: care as collaboration; transformative care; a politic of care; and collective care in structural change. These findings represent patterns in practice, political approach, and imagined futures among our research participants that we suggest are reflective of ongoing commitments to empathy, compassion, and accountability. These patterns are substantively distinct from much mainstream programmatic and policy approaches to gender-based violence prevention, which often reproduce individualistic frames and are constrained by funding and governance models. We argue that violence prevention is fundamentally a shared project of collective care: supporting one another to recognise, interrogate, and challenge the gendered norms and structures that perpetuate gender-based violence. This work is inescapably relational, political, personal, and motivated by a shared sense of caring for each other.