The biggest hurdle in fixing anything is to get most feminists to admit there are fundamental and inherent gender differences in behaviour. Until we get to that point this debate will stay stupid. For example, educating boys on how to behave towards women won't solve the problem of violence toward women. Because men who assault women aren't wired in the head like the rest of us. Most men never do anything bad toward women and make considerable efforts in protecting women around them. That is normal human male behaviour. Men don't need education to protect women. It comes naturally to us. I think its instinct. We protect our in group and keep a watchful eye on the out group.
The implication that sexual assault perps have different wiring is difficult to reconcile with incidents of sexual assault.
Take the Steubenville high school rape case, for instance. A whole group of boys took part in the assault either as perpetrators or spectators. What are the odds that they all shared the same mental deficiency that made them capable/tolerant of such cruelty?
I think that such cases are not far removed from the men described in Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men:
While this book discusses a specific Reserve Unit during WWII, the general argument Browning makes is that most people succumb to the pressures of a group setting and commit actions they would never do of their own volition.
I am confident that if you go through life with your eyes open, you'll find men everywhere going along with shitty behaviour rather than stopping someone doing what they know to be deeply wrong. To use your own phrase against you, it "is normal human male behaviour".
On some level this is how the relationship between men and women are built:
- the sexually successful man is the one who manages to produce a baby, either by diplomacy or by force. This implies some level of aggression, regardless of how subtle it is.
- the sexually successful woman is the one who raises a child to adulthood, meaning she's found a committed partner. This implies caution and care.
So in practice what happens is that in communities where women's rights are respected, and sexual violence is dealt with by the law, we breed out men who use force, and breed in men who use diplomacy and social skills. But even then, no matter which way you slice it, a significant chunk of the men who pro-create will have found their partners by sheer persistence and aggression, but will have achieved consent rather than resorting to sexual violence. Somewhere in the middle of all of this is a subset of men who are sexually aggressive.
If you take this heuristic to somewhere like a war-zone in Africa, rape is not only widespread, but it's an act of war, so communities move in the opposite direction: more sexually violent than diplomatic men are being bred.
But the story doesn't just end there. Another part of it is the financial inequities between men and women. Many women also need to pair up with terrible dudes because it's quite literally their only way to survive.
And so I think you could build an argument that our very best weapon against sexual violence would be to increasingly protect women's legal, bodily, and financial rights. Sexual violence won't go away, and it's unlikely that it will ever be eliminated, but it would be lessened.