There's a moment in every conversation about violence against women where it gets too easy to draw a clean line: good men on one side, bad men on the other. My guest on this episode, Bob Cullen, doesn't let you stay in that comfortable place for very long. Bob runs the Success Stories Programme, working with men, many of them in prison, many of them written off, to unpick something most of us never stop to examine where our ideas of masculinity actually come from, and what they cost us.

What struck me talking to him is that Bob isn't speaking from theory. He spent years in prison. He was addicted to drugs from the age of twelve. He defined his own worth, for most of his life, by his willingness to use violence, and he'll tell you plainly that there was a time he'd have called that strength. Now he calls it what it was: a form of self-protection learned so early it felt like identity.

Patriarchy isn't an abstract word: it's a rulebook.

Bob's work starts from a simple but uncomfortable premise: most men have never actually been asked what patriarchy is, let alone how it shaped them. In his workshops, that's often the first surprise: men who've lived inside a system their whole lives without ever being handed the map of it.

The rulebook, as he lays it out, is brutal in its simplicity. Boys learn early that crying is weakness. Anything coded as feminine gets mocked out of them by their friends, often before they're even ten years old. Being socially excluded from the group feels, on some primal level, like a threat to survival. So, boys learn fast what keeps them safe: aggression, toughness, a willingness to posture or fight.

Emotional suppression isn't a personality trait men develop. It's a survival strategy they're taught.

The line between victim and perpetrator is thinner than we want it to be.

One of the more difficult ideas Bob puts forward is this: violence is rarely someone's first encounter with violence. Almost always, a man who goes on to hurt someone was hurt himself first, often as a child, often in the home. He backs this with research (the work of James Gilligan, former head of the Centre for the Study of Violence at Harvard, comes up more than once) showing that shame, poverty, isolation and exposure to violence are the real drivers behind why people become violent. Not evil. Not a switch that flips. A pattern passed down.

Bob is honest that this is his own story too. He grew up around violence, defined his sense of self through it, and describes years of self-hatred that followed every violent act he committed, even as he kept doing it. He attempted to take his own life twice within three months before he ended up in prison, a fact he doesn't soften or explain away.

Why "men just need to talk" misses the point.

This is where Bob pushes back on a lot of the current conversation around masculinity. Everyone agrees men should talk more, express more, open up more. But he argues that framing, on its own, is close to useless if it doesn't also confront how men were taught to become the way they are in the first place. Talking is a start, not a solution.

He's equally sceptical of the "not all men, but always a man" style of public messaging, the men who publicly distance themselves from other men's misogyny. His view is that this often comes from men who never had to build a violent identity to survive, and that positioning themselves as one of the "good ones" does more to shame other men into silence than it does to actually change anything. Shame, remember, is one of the core drivers of the behaviour in the first place.

What changed for Bob.

The turning point wasn't one dramatic moment. It was a slow accumulation: getting clean, tracking his food and sleep, training obsessively enough to notice how his body affected his mind, meditating on a prison floor for two minutes at a time until it became hours, and reading everything he could get his hands on. He credits a string of women (teachers, mentors, prison educators) with quietly changing the direction of his life at moments he least expected it. Reading bell hooks and Angela Davis while inside prison reframed how he understood patriarchy entirely and eventually led him to the very programme he now runs.

What he builds now with Success Stories is deliberately non-punitive. Instead of shaming men for the beliefs they were handed, he creates spaces of accountability: men holding each other to a standard, without judgement, without the "not like me" posturing that he believes just pushes people further away.

Where this leaves us

Bob's final answer, when I asked what advice he'd give young people, was strikingly simple: be impeccable with your word, don't make assumptions, don't take things personally, always do your best. Four old principles, doing a lot of quiet work.

What stays with me most, though, is his honesty about not having forgiven himself, and his belief that maybe he isn't supposed to. Not as self-punishment, but as a kind of permanent accountability, a reminder of who he could become again if he stopped doing the work.

This wasn't a comfortable conversation, and it wasn't meant to be. But if we actually want fewer men to become violent, conversations like this one, the kind that trace the thread all the way back rather than just condemning where it ends up, are exactly the ones we need more of.

Bob's full story is a lot to sit with, and this piece only scratches the surface of it.

Have a listen to the full episode for the rest of the conversation.