Gender Based Violence

by Janine Schooley, PCI's VP for Technical Services & Program Development

“It’s important to shoot for the moon; Even if you miss, you will still be among the stars…”
-- Anonymous

It has been very gratifying to see so many presentations that mention or focus on the need to address gender-based violence as a growing social driver of the epidemic, particularly in a country such as South Africa. Not only was this featured in President Clinton’s keynote address, including his announcement of support for a UN agency dedicated to women, but it was discussed during several mainstream panel presentations. PCI and others have been focusing attention lately on developing an effective social mobilization approach to changing norms that fuel gender-based violence. While this approach is comprehensive and not prescriptive in the least, it struck me, when listening to some of the presentations, that we should more proactively include a few additional elements into our thinking:

1) Involvement and engagement of groups that work with men and boys. Although of course our approach engages men who are police, policy makers, media influentials, among others, and targets men as part of general society through social change amplification campaigns, perhaps we could be more overt in our promotion of an ethic of responsibility among men and boys by engaging groups already involved in this effort. There are male-oriented civil society groups in South Africa, for example, who are fighting against “risky masculinities” -- dangerous conceptions about what it means to be a man and how manhood should be proven. These groups will have much to offer to the process of changing social norms.

2) Women aren’t just victims; they are key actors in social change. Rather than think of women as being a somewhat passive ultimate beneficiary of our social mobilization work against gender based violence, we should think of ways of empowering women to be active agents of social change. One way of doing this would be to incorporate an economic empowerment component into the process so that their self esteem is increased and their ability to engage actively in the process of social change is enhanced. It’s not enough to modify the attitudes and behaviors of all the social actors and processes that influence behaviors that impact women; the women themselves need to be mobilized.

3) There is a critical subset of women that deserves some special focus. Hate crimes against certain women are apparently on the rise in much of Southern Africa. This includes horrific acts of violence against lesbian girls and women, sex workers, and others. Many of these women are imprisoned and then raped (“state violence”). Many suffer a double stigma of being HIV and lesbian or sex worker. Many suffer psychological violence/abuse as well as physical. This is clearly a small, but increasingly ugly subset of vulnerable women and there are undoubtedly key groups that work with and on behalf of these women that we could partner with.