First of all, I think it's because there are small pots of money. I can speak particularly about the context in South Africa, where there are still many problems. But I think the people who are working on masculinities there have made a very convincing argument as to why the funds should go to them and not to girls, that we've already settled all the problems with girls.
I feel that one of the issues we have to think about is that all children need support and that we cannot have masculinity studies and feminist studies pitted against each other. If anything, we would still have these as academic areas but we have to be thinking strategically about how this kind of work can actually be supporting both males and females. And I really worry that as soon as you start talking about the idea of a special agency for girls as I did, people will say yes, but what about the boys? And I think we have to show that we're working for both groups and also encourage support for the work of the people who are seeing problems with boys. We have to avoid this polarization and binary analysis.
