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

Abstract

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.

1. Introduction

For many feminist writers, care is integral to building relations of solidarity in the face of oppression, and to addressing ongoing histories of harm, including increasing state and structural violence and overlapping economic crises (Fraser 2016; Chatzidakis et al. 2020; Puig de la Bellacasa 2012; Tronto 2017). The material conditions and effects of the global economy over the last decade have also driven increased inequalities in sustaining care industries. However, we continue to see limited long-term structural change to promote shared practices of care and reduce harm, or to truly value those who do so in their personal and professional lives.

In this global context, the term ‘collective care’ is emerging as the new ‘self-care’ within shared feminist and activist discourse. This shift is evident within anti-violence and social justice campaigning and programming, observed in the language and actions that non-profit and grassroots organisations are adopting (Hassan and Kaba 2025). In turn, collective care is being embedded in the framing of institutional policies and resources of international violence prevention and response organisations. For example, the United States (US) Agency for International Development has instituted the Collective Action to Reduce Gender-based Violence (CARE-GBV) program, under which funded organisations are encouraged to embed collective care and self-care as an ‘ethical obligation’ to staff (CARE-GBV 2022, p. 2). While the language of collective care is increasingly common within efforts to address gender-based violence, there remains a substantive gap in the research on what this can look like in practice, and how this radical notion is actually supported, resourced, and implemented.

In our Australian context, it has become a rhetorical trope to state that “everyone has a role to play in ending violence against women”, framing that is embedded for instance within policy frameworks like the National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children 2022–2032 (Department of Social Services 2022, p. 63).1 However, the emphasis on community and societal elements to pick up these roles, without demonstrating and resourcing exactly what they are, who can take them on, and how to support their influence towards real change, is contested in ways that reflect concerns over gender politics, power, and the framing of gender-based violence as a structural and/or individual problem (e.g., Zeuschner and Camilleri 2025; Hill 2025). Indeed, the extent that one has a responsibility for others seems fraught in Australia without surfacing and building relational purpose—an effect of the neoliberal ideologies that pervade Australian social policy and determine resourcing for violence services (Carrington 2016; Sheppard et al. 2025), and which create substantive barriers for sustaining collective action against gender-based violence.

In this paper, we ask what possibilities emerge for conceptualising and actioning the radical notion of ‘collective care’ as a practice ethic in the prevention of gender-based violence. In so doing, we aim to demonstrate how local practices of collective care challenge normative framings, and how these practices can offer pathways to change the patriarchal power structures that enable gender-based violence. Learning from two Australian studies that explore how gender-based violence prevention work is enacted and engaged with by practitioners and community members alike, this paper offers opportunities to value collective care for transformative change to address violence-supportive norms and structures. Through these reflections on collective care in action, we hope to support the gender transformative work of violence prevention by referring to the everyday possibilities of care. While existing violence prevention research pays attention to the affective practices of grassroots movements and structured programs (e.g., Casey and Smith 2010; Carmody 2013; Keddie 2021), we suggest there is a critical opportunity to conceptualise these processes as collective care. This gap means a lack of recognition and support for practices of collective care as they are reflected in grassroots and professional settings, highlighting real concerns that arguably enable the inequities such work aims to disrupt.

We argue that by building care toward and alongside one another, many community members and those working to prevent gender-based violence provide and sustain relational practices of resistance against violence in their work. Such efforts are necessary to advance the transformative structural change required for ending gender-based violence. In this paper, we make three main contributions. Firstly, we conceptualise collective care as a practice ethic to prevent gender-based violence. Secondly, we distinguish collective care from the dominant health and individualised framings of care in violence prevention discourse. Third, we provide empirical evidence by synthesising findings from two qualitative studies that demonstrate how this approach to collective care is enacted in both grassroots and professional violence prevention contexts.

Through our analysis, we find that collective care is not an accessory to prevention, but the core practice ethic through which preventing gender-based violence becomes possible, sustainable, and structurally meaningful. Bringing attention to how more people can be involved in preventing violence as a form of collective care informs real change, from the perspectives of both young people and practitioners. Further, this approach troubles the assumptions underpinning the individualised language of ‘roles and responsibilities’ to direct attention back to the structural level. Providing evidence of how this occurs both professionally and at the grassroots, this paper offers a theoretically grounded understanding of collective care in the context of gender-based violence prevention, one that explicitly values collaborative and relational practices across individuals and communities as critical means of broader social change.

2. Literature Review and Theoretical Framework: Collective Care as a Political Ethic

2.1. Feminist Care Ethics

Feminist and queer scholars have long recognised the potential of care, connection, and relational ethics for challenging “dominator culture” (hooks 2004, p. 55) and countering relations of violence and inequality (Held 2010; Puig de la Bellacasa 2012; Tronto 2017). For care ethicists and workers, the practice of care is ongoing, political, and dynamic. Feminists argue that the global interdependence of explicit and implicit relations of care also offers insights into how we might move beyond or prevent crises and catastrophes (Chatzidakis et al. 2020). Demonstrating care can build understanding and a sense of belonging, essential for violence prevention. However, the political and gendered positioning of care with labour frequently reimposes relations of power and inequity over what is possible (Fraser 2016).

For many feminist theorists conceptualising solidarity, interrogation, and disruption against patriarchal systems, the notion of ‘care’ remains both essential and ephemeral. Fraser (2016) commonly attributes care work to its devalued role under late capitalism, as a requirement for the social reproduction of generations of workers. The practices of the market continuously reassign personal care to those who are more willing and often marginalised (Fraser 2016). From this, diminishing public provision for care work in the global economy transfers and frequently displaces its value onto those more advantaged within hierarchies such as class or race. With such a frame, care is indispensable to the gendered binds of capitalism, and also its rupture.

The reliance on the economy to manage or market one’s inner world toward output means that gendered practices, such as service, care work, and social reproduction, have become morally individuated mechanisms of a so-called rational subject (Puig de la Bellacasa 2012). As Young (1994) noted, despite moral theorising about ethics of care since the second wave of feminism, care has not been effectively translated into public politics. It follows that while care is a transformative feature of feminist political analysis and labour organising, the values of such actions remain markedly gendered within service provision and personal relationships (Young 1994). When ‘care’ is used in public discourse, it often evokes individualised notions and emotional content, becoming contained and weaponised in relation to particular kinds of practices rather than prompting collective action from one’s connection to others. Examples of ‘care work’ tend to describe a range of practices that those working or offering labour in disability support, aged care, childcare, and palliative support perform, whether paid or voluntary, often defined by the constraints of our service economy (Dangar et al. 2023; Davy et al. 2025). In this way, care becomes something one individual provides another as an expected form of labour, both divorced from and dependent on the affective, relational bonds that constitute caring for another. As these institutional and service-oriented framings have often been constructed on individualised terms, we argue they are less helpful for holistic approaches to the structural and normative social change required to meaningfully prevent violence.

Through this lens of what ‘care work’ typically is, ‘care’ as a tool of neoliberal social policy and labour markets evokes individualised notions and gendered stereotypes of emotional support, rather than prompting collective action rooted in interconnection with others (Puig de la Bellacasa 2012). These ideological and economic frameworks contribute to contradictory positions where practices of care are both encouraged and stigmatised. On the one hand, we are praised for self-care, lifting ourselves up, putting ourselves forward, personal strength, empowerment, and resilience, while, on the other hand, we are chastised and considered weaker for seeking support from others or providing care for someone else (Chatzidakis et al. 2020; Rottenberg 2014). Further, as Davy et al. (2025) note, the lack of planning to fully sustain care practices reflects policy reforms that devalue care work, which are apparent across sectors and maintain workforce marginalisation, including in the domestic and family violence service sector. We find this disconnection in the structural positioning of care, shared in the language used to frame, measure and fund most violence prevention work in Australia (see also Carrington 2016; Sheppard et al. 2025).

2.2. Collective Care and Solidarity Against Violence

For those living the daily threat of violence, there is often a risk of exposure to further harm when building resistance movements to challenge inequality and oppression (Sabsay 2016; Butler 2016). These conditions often lead individuals to engage with one another and to care for, or make space for, the ways in which we can change gendered power structures (Ahmed and Swan 2006). The historical and current work of Black, Indigenous, queer, and Crip feminists on care in community is foundational on this point. Many movements resisting oppression have shown that collective responsibility is a necessary alternative to the current structures that underpin violence and dominance (Burman 2016; Howe 2018; Tuck and Yang 2012). Through acts of resistance and by building attention to one another’s needs in context and care, such communities often find themselves better placed to disrupt institutional power and build relations of solidarity and mutual aid (Ahmed and Swan 2006; Burman 2016; Franco-Klothos et al. 2025). On such occasions, practices of care and trust can enhance others’ abilities to support one another with respect and reciprocity.

Without understanding how care supports ongoing disruptions to power, we may overlook the existing practices of care that can protect those who resist violence. Indeed, those materially positioned amidst multiple violent structures of oppression often feel that there is no choice but to care in order to survive (Ahmed and Swan 2006; Carlson and Frazer 2018; Moreton-Robinson 2013; Pratt et al. 2025). For many Black feminists, care for the self and for community are fundamentally interconnected as an antidote to violence and oppression, grounded through relations of solidarity, mutual aid, and shared wellbeing (Finch 2022). It is often the strength of marginalised communities to offer care as a practice that challenges more individualised approaches to equality in many Western contexts (Carlson and Frazer 2018; Hines 2007; Rentschler 2017). For example, Carlson and Frazer (2018) describe online yarning circles where Indigenous activism requires careful solidarity, relationality, and cultural safety to negotiate and challenge ongoing power relations of race and gender within groups. Participants of Hines’ (2007) research with transgender support groups, extending care beyond prior gendered constructions, enable a broader understanding of how structural relations of power can impact diversities of gender and sexuality. These examples demonstrate how paying attention to participation, showing up, redistributing funds, promoting access, and building skills and trust establish collective care between peers to challenge broader power dynamics and support ongoing resistance. For these groups, care is fostered over time through context, rapport, attention, play, humour, trust and understanding, to effectively sustain the material support that can be offered to shift the conditions in which harm occurs.

We learn, then, that collective care is distinct from individualised ‘self-care’ because it is anchored in mutual vulnerability, critical recognition, and a commitment to shared structural accountability in addressing systemic inequalities (Banet-Weiser et al. 2020; Chatzidakis et al. 2020). While social movements have sustained resistance on the frontlines through organising praxis, it is the care for one another within the movement and the effort to promote it that becomes increasingly critical in facilitating momentum (Imray Papineau 2025).

We define collective care for the purposes of violence prevention as a relational, ongoing practice ethic that takes time, requires support, and improves the quality and scope of shared outcomes in pursuit of non-violent communities. This focus aligns with how scholars from Black, Indigenous, queer, and disability communities have historically and continue to illustrate its transformative potential for challenging systemic oppression. This approach to collective care contrasts with the frequent framing of gender-based violence prevention messages as the responsibility of an individual, a leader, or a singular influential body. In this context, collective care is the requirement to sustain the connections and support to build movements that can resist violence.

2.3. Ethics of Care, Vulnerability and Power in Violence Prevention Work

Theoretical understandings of feminist care ethics have previously been integrated into conceptualisations of gender transformative change and violence prevention with men and boys (Keddie 2021; Pease 2019). For example, Carmody (2003, 2013) reconceptualises sexual violence prevention through the lens of sexuality, subjectivity, ethics, and power through an applied program with boys and men in Australia. While Carmody’s work has been foundational for meaningfully integrating sexual ethics into prevention pedagogy, decades later this has not translated into widespread shifts in Australian policy or discourse. Relatedly, Cover (2014) asserts that work on recognition, mutual vulnerability, and relational ethics can meaningfully extend sexual violence prevention by shifting how men conceive of masculinity and care for others (see also Elliott 2016). Maintenance of the self is necessary to work for the collective good, indeed an essential part of the work we do in our relationship to care for others (Carmody 2003). However, framings that focus solely on the self now yield institutional models for service delivery, impact measurement, and self-care (or rather, self-preservation) within an emotionally challenging service sector.

Arguably, care is already central to the pedagogy of much prevention work that aims to foster emotional investments among men and boys (Keddie 2021). For example, in their study with men engaged as anti-violence allies in the US, Casey and Smith (2010) identified that almost all the men they spoke to described notable “sensitising experiences” that had made sexual violence feel personally relevant, such as learning about a known woman’s experience of assault. Once tangibly aware, these men were primed to become involved in anti-violence work when opportunities were later shared through their social and community networks (see also Molnar 2022). In other words, being exposed to such sensitising experiences led the men in Casey and Smith’s (2010) study to care about sexual violence as something relevant in their own lives. Research by Piccigallo et al. (2012) with men who were actively involved with anti-violence groups in US universities demonstrated similar patterns. In this instance, peer influence provided a recruitment pathway into the networks through the appeal of connecting with other men known to care about sexual violence. The authors argue that this normative influence enabled the groups to expand and become self-perpetuating by supporting men to collectively pursue progressive gender politics (Piccigallo et al. 2012). In both instances, relations of care provide both the ‘hook’ and the process through which men are engaged in the work of building gender equity and preventing gender-based violence.

As these examples imply, care is emphasised at the program level as a relational practice that can support motivations towards challenging discrimination, violence, and inequality. We can see this in how weakened welfare resourcing of our time demands that the social reproductive practices of support, nurturing, and kinship that bind communities are further offset, privileging some while exacerbating inequalities (Carrington 2016; Horn 2020; Tronto 2017). Maher et al. (2024) have pointed out that within peer work programs in the community sector, radical practices of care offer vulnerability as a resource to support and build connections across service systems. While collaboration is seen as integral to the feminist work of preventing violence (Carman et al. 2022), in the Australian context there are real limitations of relying on government funding models that determine outcomes through short-term gains (Sheppard et al. 2025). Where there is a lack of investment to build on these movements, it arguably indicates a gap in understanding of the work necessary to sustain the movement to end violence. Such failures to adequately recognise and resource gender-based violence prevention at the structural level further necessitate and place greater pressure on community-led work, often from the urgency of crisis.

The success of violence prevention is already dependent on the collective and relational practices we describe. However, this dependency cannot be sustained or fully valued within models that default to individualised accounts of risk, interpersonal responsibility, and self-care and is taken for granted within the structures it seeks to challenge. As we argue, much of this work’s success relies on the history of solidarity and resource-building in justice movements. There is a need to build a shared evidence base that links behaviour change to care for a collective goal, aligned with the structural change required to transform the conditions that enable violence. There is a further requirement to identify features in program design that prevent the co-optation or individualisation of care (Maher et al. 2024). Collective care is required not only as a goal but also to be documented as the practice ethic that sustains this gender transformative, relational labour of social change.

In the following analysis, we provide evidence of both professional and community-level work to challenge and change expectations and roles that allow one to care for another, as they remain connected to this history. This echoes findings from Banyard and Hamby (2022), who remind us that for violence prevention to remain true to its roots in social justice, we must strengthen the conditions wherein social relations can be transformed. Yet, because of the gendered, racial, and classed associations of anti-violence action, this work is rarely remunerated for the attention and labour that prevention work requires. Shared practices of care, then, are often obscured from their cultivating effects when they are most necessary for building. Drawing on scholars such as Hemmings (2012), Fraser (2016), and Tronto (2017), as well as queer feminist praxis, we define collective care not as a feeling but as a relational, ongoing practice ethic anchored in mutual vulnerability, critical recognition, and a commitment to shared structural accountability across individuals, communities, and towards one another. We aim to demonstrate the value of these practices in action and to build a case for further praxis development to help extend and adequately resource those actions.

3. Methodology and Context

This article presents the shared findings of two larger qualitative projects that explored the ‘doing’ of gender-based violence prevention with professional practitioners and young people campaigning as activists or within feminist organisations. Qualitative research with those engaged directly in the delivery of gender-based violence prevention is a growing area of study (e.g., Nevatia et al. 2025; Stanley et al. 2017; Stewart et al. 2023). Both studies received institutional ethics approval (details provided in endnotes), and informed consent was obtained from all subjects. Bringing these studies together supports arguments from violence prevention experts that a greater exploration of what works needs to be evidenced through research and evaluation (Banyard and Hamby 2022). Our attention here recognises the important insights of practitioners and others actively transforming unequal gender norms, structures and relations, whilst necessarily situated within the gendered social world they seek to change. In other words, these individuals possess key experiential knowledge for their commitments to preventing gender-based violence.

In 2020, the first author—a White queer and disabled researcher with experience in gender-based violence prevention—conducted nine online focus groups via Zoom with 32 young people aged 16–25 across Australia. Recruited through health services and social media, participants discussed their use of social media content on gender equality and preventing gender-based violence. The diverse sample included participants who identified as women (n = 23), men (n = 4), and non-binary/non-identifying (n = 5), with 11 identifying as queer, 12 as BIPOC, and 3 as trans. Each 90 min session (3–4 participants) involved screen sharing and discussion of content participants had previously engaged with or created online to explore the ongoing interactions and consequences of grassroots campaign work, its influence on primary prevention practices, and social change in their communities. Recordings were transcribed verbatim and de-identified for analysis. We refer to participants from this research collectively as ‘Study One’.

In 2019, the second author—a White queer researcher with experience in gender-based violence prevention—conducted 16 key informant interviews with 23 Australian practitioners (12 men, 11 women), including three group interviews and 13 individual interviews. These practitioners, mostly based in Victoria, were involved in research, policy, and programming focused on engaging men and boys in violence prevention. Various stakeholder organisations were represented, categorised broadly as domestic/family violence organisations (n = 5), women’s organisations (n = 8), and youth, family, and community services (n = 10). The interviews (45–95 min, conducted face-to-face, by phone or Skype) used a semi-structured guide to explore how practitioners approach the complexities of engaging men and boys in prevention and their reflections on policy and practice tensions in this sector. The study did not aim to conduct a representative sector analysis but rather sought reflections on how practitioners negotiate gender norms and politics in their prevention work. Interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim and de-identified. In this paper, we refer to this group as the ‘Study Two’ group.

Data Analysis

The analysis presented below started as informal discussions between the authors whilst undertaking their separate studies. Independently, we had observed patterns in our data that we felt reflected key writing on feminist ethics of care but that were not well-articulated or valued within existing Australian prevention policy and discourse. We therefore decided to bring our data together to explore a data-driven conceptualisation of collective care as a fundamental practice in the prevention of gender-based violence—one that our research participants were already pursuing but did not often describe as care.

To progress this conceptualisation, we brought together our datasets and collaboratively applied reflexive thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke 2019). This analytical approach was chosen for its iterative, grounded focus on interpretation and storytelling, making it particularly well-suited for feminist research concerned with social justice and transformation through which researcher subjectivity and the participants’ lived experiences are interwoven with existing literature and theory to imagine future possibilities (Braun and Clarke 2019). We engaged in repeated, careful readings of the combined data to achieve immersion and generate initial codes. The coding aim was to identify common threads in the practices of care and labour applicable as both a practice ethic and a prevention objective. We were particularly interested in how participants articulated their approach to the work of violence prevention. While the coding began as an inductive process driven by participant reflections to develop possible codes, we also proceeded through an abductive approach by continuously engaging with feminist ethics of care scholarship to refine codes, determine themes, and develop an overarching conceptualisation of collective care. Both authors then cross-checked the patterns and discussed interpretations against the relevant literature. Through this process, we developed four overarching themes which we present in the findings below.

All data excerpts are presented using pseudonyms and attributed to the study they contributed to, and project- or campaign-specific details have been omitted to support participant anonymity. Bringing these studies together, we found that the cohorts collectively spoke to shared, everyday experiences of formal and informal practices needed to prevent gender-based violence as ongoing work. The resulting themes represent key dimensions of what we argue to be a commitment to practices of collective care in violence prevention.

4. Findings: Identifying Practices of Collective Care in Prevention

The analysis of findings is presented here under four key, interconnected themes: care as collaboration, transformative care, a politics of care, and collective care in structural change. We argue that these critical practices enable engagement and shared solidarity while creating space to transform gendered structures, challenge harmful norms, and build relations of mutuality and non-violence.

4.1. Care as Collaboration

Within both studies, we found that creating brave spaces to show up with honesty, name power dynamics, and risk personal exposure was a key requirement in how participants articulated their approach to the work of violence prevention. Such an approach reflects Hemmings’ (2012) articulation of transformative empathy, wherein collective solidarity and action are forged through actively creating a relational environment and engagement for care. Here, participants illustrate that this involves shared risk, building trust, two-way learning, and the creation of genuine safety and connection—countered with the procedural, including the practitioner. For example, Rachel (Study Two) started with the recognition that this work is “inherently going to be challenging and emotional”, for everyone involved, “so it’s a facilitative process where everyone’s moving, and learning together”.

Young people and practitioners that we spoke to highlighted that the essential work of preventing violence means sharing the load. In each study, this involved offering skills and experiences for others—including men—so that they feel encouraged to take on some of the load. Our participants described this understanding of prevention in a number of ways. For example, Jessica (Study One) explained how in their experience:

I think other people started to see that other people cared about it as well and that would encourage them [to get involved].

(Jessica, Study One)

Likewise, Hannah (Study Two) found care through collaboration by working with men to identify opportunities to contribute and to learn new language for deconstructing power. She said:

I think it’s just saying, this is actually helping [men] unpack, “this is where you fit here, and this is your role, and here’s the language to do that”.

(Hannah, Study Two)

Participants like Hannah acknowledged that the language of prevention is not one that everyone already has. The careful conversations embedded in collaborative work offered gave our participants further insight into the pressures and stress that people in the community might perceive as barriers to prevention. Indeed, although prevention is often couched in universal terms such as ‘equality’ and ‘rights’, prevention is also a type of labour. The practice requires specific expertise and insight and carries considerable risk if not done well. In this regard, Mia (Study One) highlighted that prevention work is not achievable for everyone to implement. She felt that contributing to this change was a significant undertaking to lighten the load for others, sharing that:

Having that open conversation and being like, really, like, obviously this is not achievable for every single person, and it’s quite stressful having to reply to people being like, “I don’t agree with you, you’re wrong” … It’s stressful, sure, but I think people really appreciate that. And I have had people be like, “I’ve changed my mind”, or not.

(Mia, Study One)

Mia’s commentary exposes the heavy burden of care work and the inequitable distribution of labour inherent in efforts to challenge gender inequality. Here, those working to prevent violence reflect what many experiencing and responding to violence within the community reflect: that there is a need to shift from individual accounts to shared responsibility for addressing harm, which is not always readily taken up by others (Zeuschner and Camilleri 2025).

Our participants recognised the various forms of labour that can underpin gender transformation and offered care in their approaches to bringing others on board. Another young person, Danara (Study One), highlighted the significant emotional labour and resilience that such work demands of us. She stressed:

Make sure it’s not a once off, that you’re continuously doing it, that you’re not just doing it in this moment, but also if you’re feeling overwhelmed, it’s okay to take a break.

(Danara, Study One)

Acknowledging that this work can be overwhelming, Danara emphasised the need for continuous engagement and investment in violence prevention. Such an approach underscores the importance of ‘sharing the load’ whilst countering the pressures of top-down outcomes and metrics of ‘success’ in prevention. Our participants frequently positioned themselves in ways that enabled them to collectively challenge and transform unequal gender norms, structures and relations, whether with colleagues, other activists, or their workshop and social media audiences. In foregrounding collaboration and shared responsibility, those working to prevent gender-based violence demonstrated a collective ethic to the work grounded in reciprocity and caring for each other.

4.2. Transformative Care

Participants in our studies emphasised how building connections and shared experiences are transformative practices for prevention. Across both datasets, the participants we spoke to described how they create spaces for vulnerability and affective engagement, and the importance of approaching this facilitative work with ongoing observation, understanding, and reflexivity. For example, Evan (Study Two) explained his approach to getting men on board with discussions about preventing men’s violence:

I think it’s just trying to find a place where men are able to feel vulnerable, and are okay with it, and they’re also provided a safe place to talk openly amongst each other, without judgement—and how do you do that?

(Evan, Study Two)

Feminist literature on care, empathy, and solidarity for gender transformative work comes back into focus here (Hemmings 2012; Keddie 2021). Shared emotional experiences—when managed carefully—can create meaningful ‘hooks’ for supporting men and boys to collectively unpack masculinity, power, and violence (Casey and Smith 2010; Piccigallo et al. 2012). As Evan reflects here, however, there is a gendered consideration in working with men, for whom vulnerability may be perceived as a weakness, rather than as a foundation for building solidarity and support. The work of building collective care among men and boys to address gender-based violence means contending with gender norms and privilege ‘in the room’ as well as out in the world. While men and boys should be supported to understand their own gendered experiences under patriarchy, that reflexive work must not lose sight of how they may also be complicit in and responsible for perpetuating gendered harms (Keddie 2021).

Strengthening relationships and connection are central to how our participants articulated their approaches to facilitating transformation grounded in shared vulnerability, empathy, and investments in supporting change to prevent violence. As Caroline (Study Two) reflected on her work with men:

This is what we’re trying to unravel. This is what we’re trying to explore … ’Cause the more times people can have the right conversations and explore their journey of, “This is what it meant for me” … that creates rebellion and it also creates new thinking.

(Caroline, Study Two)

Our participants often framed their approach to the work as supporting others to make connections between their own lives and the gendered norms and structures that sustain violence. This work is fundamentally relational and enhanced by having these conversations together. Andrea (Study One) noted during a focus group:

You want to try and, to change someone’s mind you’ve got to get them empathetic, and you want to get them to relate to what you’re saying.

(Andrea, Study One)

This emphasis on making emotional and intellectual connections can create compassionate allies in the movement to end gender-based violence and mitigate potential backlash. Such connections can form the basis of ongoing solidarity by normalising the work as a project of transformative empathy (Hemmings 2012). This is, again, a process of two-way learning and movement for prevention workers and their audiences, one to be approached with humility and mutual respect. In Rachel’s words:

This is their lived experience … Yeah, and it’s very humbling [for facilitators] as well.

(Rachel, Study Two)

Rachel’s comments here speak to the recognition and centring of lived experience in her own work. Like Andrea, this helps to bring audiences in and critically interrogate gender-based violence while managing potential resistance within workshops. The work of remaining humble and of listening generously requires attention to whether and how empathy and vulnerability are being mobilised in colluding or transformative ways.

4.3. A Politic of Care

Collective care must be deliberately anchored in its political and relational dimensions, including recognition of the labour required to sustain communities in which we collectively care for each other. Without direct, critical attention to these dimensions, alongside the gendered, neoliberal structures that minimise and privatise responsibility for care, there is a risk that this work is easily co-opted and undermined (Carrington 2016; Fraser 2016). The systemic conditions and resulting violence that collective care seeks to remedy must remain in view.

Our data illustrates how social reproduction of both violence and its prevention are cumulative and interlinked in important ways. For participants in both studies, this work can be undertaken with care to support the connections needed to make lasting change. As Andrea describes here, for example, challenging rape myths helps to unpack the individualised way that sexual assault is often constructed by public and media discourse. She said:

I guess you understand it as something that’s like a snowball going down a hill. It’s not just one instance of, “Oh, this one girl got raped”. There’s so much behind it that led to that, and I find that people that have arguments against this stuff don’t understand that part of it. They just see instances as a moment instead of a lifetime, which is so hard to try and convey.

(Andrea, Study One)

In this sense, the participants in our studies found working with and paying attention to the challenges that come up when talking about violence and discrimination is a critical part of building care and affective solidarity in prevention (see Hemmings 2012; Keddie 2021). For practitioners in Study Two, it was important to start with acknowledgements of how inequalities shape everybody’s experiences, so they could then have those careful conversations in potentially transformative ways. Rachel shared that this is deeply reflexive work about supporting others to connect the personal with the political:

We are all products of gender inequality, and it impacts us in different ways, but it also informs who we are, how we understand ourselves in the world.

(Rachel, Study Two)

Starting from these reflexive positions, our participants across both studies provided insight into how everyone comes to and might respond to the work of prevention. As Caroline noted from her work with men, bringing in this knowledge with care can support imaginations for new futures:

This is what I say to men all the time, is that the personal is political. You’re telling your freaking story from how it feels is a political story. It is a, a statement about what it means to live in the world as you … So what is their [men’s] stories of resistance?

(Caroline, Study Two)

This approach recognises how critical reflection on felt experiences of the world can be a source of affective dissonance, solidarity, and transformation (Hemmings 2012). Participants like Rachel and Caroline also noted that this practice of shared critical reflexivity is a requirement as structural inequality is often blinding. That is, for men who have been socialised under patriarchy and to view those gender relations as ‘natural’, it can be deeply challenging and discomfiting to learn to see and feel gender inequality (Keddie 2021). Our participants understood this barrier to solidarity and strategically worked with critical reflection, empathy and vulnerability to support new ways of seeing, feeling and relating in their work to prevent gender-based violence.

The direct and relational understanding of how violence occurs and what can be done to challenge it offered greater meaning for both professional practitioners and young people seeking to support others than is often promoted in the wider discourse about creating change. Michelle (Study One), a young person who also worked within the prevention sector, pointed out that this difference was imbued in the public language that prevention practitioners often use. She said:

A thing I’m spotting here is how passive the language we use in the sector is. Whereas … some of this other content, they’re kind of more engaging, it’s active, it’s direct. That’s not how we’re trying to engage with other practitioners, as they’re already on board.

(Michelle, Study One)

Michelle’s comments indicate that such a direct acknowledgement and active challenge is not always apparent within the sector. Michelle felt that, in her experience, messaging tended to focus on the ‘why’ rather than the ‘how’. This has implications for the ongoing work to engage others in the collective efforts necessary for preventing gender-based violence. Here, young people and practitioners explicitly recognise and validate that the emotional and political cost of doing anti-violence work is a necessary one for sustaining engagement. This perspective demonstrates that while there continues to be a lack of recognition and resourcing for this labour, our social conditions require and engage this maintenance. We can see this both as a structural failure and a strength that collective care as prevention practice attempts to mitigate.

4.4. Collective Care in Structural Change

The localised acts of collective care as collaboration and transformation that we have described above connect to broader aspirations for non-violent futures. As we noted above, the ‘hook’ for engagement in violence prevention is often generated through gendered positionings and personal investment (Casey and Smith 2010). Participants across both studies offered parallel reflections on the work of caring for the prevention of gender-based violence as a mutual responsibility for communities to ‘care with’ (see Tronto 2017).

This work is critical because gender-based violence and gendered power are embedded across social life, institutions and structures in ways that continue to limit our imaginings for non-violent futures. For example, Caroline explained:

The reality is, and like, what I say to people is that men will experience more violence from other men than women. So the men who aren’t users of violence are actually scared of those other guys. They don’t know what to do about them either. I’m not saying that’s a pass for them, but we’re kind of all feeling the same stuff … Because they can’t be what they can’t see because where have they got any men showing them how to do it differently? When do they see it? Their whole world is all of that Alan Jones2 shit as well.

(Caroline, Study Two)

As Caroline reminds us, violence too is an everyday norm of which men are both the recipients and beneficiaries. The cumulative repetition of rape myths, masculine dominance, and patriarchal power reinforces this norm and harms women and girls, trans* and gender diverse folk, and men and boys themselves. In her work with men, Caroline reflects Tronto’s (2017) notion of ‘caring with’ where building trust through shared solidarity can be connected through challenging those broader societal norms of oppression. Transforming the pervasive gender inequality embedded within these norms, structures and relations is a fundamentally difficult and long process. Learning from our participants, we find that the commitment to preventing violence is life-changing, purposeful, and necessary.

Collective care then is a commitment to being deliberate in creating non-violent counter-norms and supporting others towards resisting structural inequality. Hannah shared her commitment, saying:

So, I understand that everyone comes from these issues from a different place and that we’ve all been embedded in these structures of sexism and gender inequality … Even if it takes years, I’m still here to have the conversations and support, and I’m not going to get anyone’s back up or have fights that I would normally, at the pub … I understand that it is a really slow, long process and that I wouldn’t try and get people offside, from the beginning.

(Hannah, Study Two)

Like Hannah, participants across both studies were intimately aware of the practical and political realities of violence prevention. As Hannah emphasises here, sticking with the work requires caring and understanding that preventing gender-based violence is a slow process, which means holding attention and movement building beyond initial quick wins. She explained further that in her work, this often looked like creating links between someone’s and the conditions in which they might take action in:

I think it’s [men] not knowing where they fit into the gender equality dialogue … This is actually helping them unpack, “This is where you fit here, and this is your role, and here’s the language to do that”.

(Hannah, Study Two)

Similarly, Meena (Study One), a young activist who also worked in a feminist organisation, commented:

It’s baby steps, right? Like, I think it’s how to make the most change, like in the little bit of time that you’re given, the little bit of time that someone’s looking at what you’re doing, or whatever it is, and kind of knowing your audience helps with that. And I do believe sometimes that going radical now and then, you know, helping people learn from that is also absolutely works.

(Meena, Study One)

In these ways, our participants gave value to every step and moment in their journeys of building trust, support, and care for the bigger movement, a process of accumulating care for the ongoing goal of ending violence together. For our participants, collective care is paying attention and working with one another, within and against structures that create the conditions of inequality and violence. We argue that this willingness to work with care is taken for granted because of the deep social investment required, which is not guaranteed for all.

5. Discussion

The collective care articulated by the young people and practitioners in our studies orients simultaneously towards individuals, communities, and as a mode of broader structural transformation. This practice is deeply relational, reflexive, personal and political, bringing together shared efforts to transform structural inequalities and violent norms. Rather than displacing survivor-centred approaches, collective care builds up the relational conditions that sustain efforts to prevent violence before it occurs, while also supporting direct resistance to gendered harm. Participants’ accounts across both studies reported here illustrate what feminist and queer theorists describe as the political and material labour of care (Fraser 2016; Puig de la Bellacasa 2012; Tronto 2017). If collective care is already an everyday norm for preventing violence at the community level, then prevention systems must empower people to build these connections and work together to overcome constraints. Only then can the skills required to end violence be shared, valued, and sustained.

Across both studies, participants described how they maintained connection with the community and the work itself, even when organisational pressures, social contexts, funding models, and short-term evaluation requirements made this difficult. These constraints mirror broader critiques of neoliberalism in social policy, where responsibility is individualised, and care is framed as a personal resource rather than a collective principle (Carrington 2016; Chatzidakis et al. 2020; Rottenberg 2014). Our findings show how such structures fragment the relational labour on which prevention depends, contributing to a loss of practice-based knowledge that critics have used to dismiss prevention as rhetorical (e.g., Hill 2025).

We also found that for our participants, violence prevention work is grounded in efforts to establish relations of mutual vulnerability. Participants in both studies described sharing personal experiences, acknowledging uncertainty, and supporting one another through emotionally demanding work. These patterns align with scholarship that positions vulnerability as a resource for building relational ethics and disrupting gendered power in violence prevention pedagogy (Carmody 2003, 2013; Cover 2014; Keddie 2021). For young people in Study One, this often occurred through online interactions that enabled them to collectively challenge harmful norms with a wider audience. For practitioners in Study Two, it involved navigating the tensions of engaging men while resisting collusion and maintaining commitments to feminist politics.

Our shared study findings further highlight how collective care can redistribute labour across networks, particularly when community needs shifted. Participants described how others would ‘pick up the work’ when individuals were exhausted or at risk. This echoes long-standing traditions of collective care within Black, Indigenous, queer, and disability communities, where care is a strategy for survival and resistance under conditions of ongoing harm (Ahmed and Swan 2006; Carlson and Frazer 2018; Moreton-Robinson 2013). These practices reframe the rhetoric that ‘everyone has a role to play’ by showing that such roles are not equally accessible or supported, and that those most affected by structural inequalities often carry the greatest burden (Zeuschner and Camilleri 2025).

As feminist and social justice research and activism continue to show, it is the daily work and gendered nature of care that is most often taken for granted. These are most necessary to make explicit in efforts towards social transformation. Collective care to end violence is hard work built from a commitment to a better world. Our findings highlight that this work takes practice, and this practice is often structurally unsupported and enacted at considerable personal cost. When ongoing and interdependent care is devalued or individualised, the work becomes displaced and marginalised (Davy et al. 2025; Fraser 2016). This returns us to the tensions embedded in the rhetoric of ‘everyone’s roles and responsibilities’: the unequal distribution of labour, resources, and willingness to take on these roles continues to shape what is possible. To move from rhetoric toward actionable and structural change, these skills and ongoing practices must be shared, resourced, and promoted through collective care.

This paper has several limitations, which we acknowledge and wish to promote as opportunities for further research and exploration. The two Australian studies we brought together were never intended to directly investigate collective care or to be designed as comparative studies. This means that the paper and its findings reflect patterns shared across existing datasets, rather than testing a predefined framework. Both studies adopted small-scale, qualitative methods to explore in-depth the experiences of our participants, and we cannot make generalist claims about all practitioners or grassroots activists working to prevent gender-based violence in Australia; however, this was not the aim of either study. There remain opportunities for future research to extend our understandings of the dynamics of collective care to prevent gender-based violence, and to demonstrate the implications of these practices across different community, organisational, policy, and national contexts.

6. Conclusions

What is apparent in the conversations reported in this paper is that collective care reflects both the practice and objective of what it means to end gender-based violence. What needs to occur, then, is to document and promote how collective care can be modelled and adopted within gender-based violence prevention programs and broader systems to achieve long-term change. Such actions are often taken for granted, marginalised, and lost in the mechanics of social interventions in ways that cannot be addressed without ongoing investment. Positioning collective care as a necessary ethic within structural change further values and promotes evidence-building about the everyday, relational practices that support preventing gender-based violence as everyone’s business.

We have argued for a conceptualisation of collective care as a relational, ongoing practice ethic that can underpin efforts to prevent gender-based violence. Young people and practitioners in our research enacted collective care through mutual vulnerability, shared accountability, and sustained connection. We suggest these practices challenge the individualised framings that dominate prevention policy and program design in Australia, and they re-centre prevention as a collective, interdependent project. Our findings demonstrate that mutual support in exposing and challenging violent expectations contributes to the groundswell needed for structural change. Such disruptions are not always easy, nor do they always lead to immediate or desired outcomes.

In the Australian context, despite care being central to grassroots and professional prevention work, the connections between these actions are often stifled by funding mechanisms reliant on short-term political gains. The very structures that shape prevention work can undermine the practices required to end violence. Recognising collective care therefore arguably requires a shift in political will around how gender-based violence prevention is conceptualised, funded, and evaluated. This includes embedding the relational practices that sustain social change and learning from communities who have long used collective care to resist harm and oppression.

Our findings show that building collective care can establish a more sustainable mechanism for preventing gender-based violence, enabling others to continue the work. This sustains community knowledge and collective practice in ways that are accountable to broader change, rather than risking individual-level compliance, blame, or burnout. The closer one’s proximity to power, the abuser, or an oppressive system, the more likely one is to excuse or overlook their own capacity to challenge patterns of violence. The same holds when interventions fail to account for the time, difficulty, and affective labour involved in social transformation. Prevention programs that rely on individualised responsibility alone risk collusion, tokenism, and exploitation.

Demonstrating collective care as an inherent part of prevention means that momentum can continue to build, and that connections toward transformative change can be more readily made. Our participants showed that the shared project of ending gender-based violence requires relational, interdependent, and ongoing work that is appropriately resourced, responds to community needs, and is enabled by collective care.