"...and here are our raped women"

The other day a colleague told me about an evaluation in a war-prone country. The international consultant who led the exercise had called a meeting with the "beneficiaries" - women who used services designed for survivors of gender-based violence. At one point in the meeting, the consultant reportedly asked participants who had been raped to identify themselves by raising a hand.
Does this make you cringe? No? Then, please read on. It is true that in some places some people have blunt ways with survivors of violence. I remember a scene in the Democratic Republic of Congo, several years ago, where someone introduced me to a group of women with the words "and these are our raped women". Would you like to be introduced to a stranger in that way? Now, imagine the memory of that violent incident plunges you back into depression. And rape is taboo in the society you live in and people will ostracise you if they know about it - they won't want to meet you, they won't buy your produce, they'll keep you away from their children...
Even - or especially - in contexts where some people do not seem to respect the survivors' right to privacy and confidentiality, it is a good idea to follow basic ethical rules. Whether you implement a project or you just visit it, you must not do any harm. Reminding rape survivors of their ordeal is bad enough - if you absolutely need them to talk about it, make sure everything is in place to prevent mental health problems and social stigma. A good guide is the PATH/ WHO Publication Researching Violence against Women, available from the PATH web-site. Asking people in public - and even a very small focus group is a public setting - to come forward and identify themselves as "raped women" is simply an insult to women's human rights, and a danger to their well-being and social integration.

End Violence against Women Now: New Learning Modules

The UN WOMEN Virtual Knowledge Centre endvawnow.org has been enriched with new modules that provide guidance for a range of interventions to end violence against women. Jasmin Rocha and I are the authors of the "Campaigns" module - check it out and feel free to comment (click on the little envelope below) if you come across anything that needs enriching or improving! You can also register on endvawnow.org to indicate your preferences in terms of topics and languages. For the time being, only part of the site is available in French and Spanish, but eventually, everything will be translated.

Wishes for 2012 starting to come through!

The other day I wrote that I would do more to share findings from evaluations. And now I find out that Oxfam Great Britain has put my whole full big evaluation report on the "We Can" campaign, recommendations and all, in the public domain: ta-taa! Click here if you're interested in campaigning on people's attitudes on gender equality.
The link takes you to the Oxfam Great Britain Policy and Practice web-site, a commendable mine of publications linked to Oxfam work around the world. 

Good Resolutions for 2012

A very healthy and happy 2012 to everyone! At the beginning of this new year I realise how busy and stimulating 2011 was for me: I led two multi-country evaluations and two "strategic reviews", all in the complex fields of human rights, gender justice and peace building. Early in the year, I completed a "real-time" evaluation that had accompanied, over almost three years, the development of a facilitation method for strategic planning in conflict contexts. In October, I applied aspects of that method to plan and facilitate a multi-stakeholder, multi-lingual and inter-continental strategic planning workshop - an exhilarating experience. Between Christmas and New Year's Day, my occasional associate Jasmin Rocha and I made time to finally write up our article that presents the methodology we developed in 2010 to assess quality in work with survivors of violence against women.

What are my resolutions for 2012? I can think of a few:

• Insist on working in teams! Combining an "international" evaluator with a "local" expert has proven highly productive. I have also excellent experience working in tandem with academic researchers (like Jasmin Rocha, mentioned above!) who know lots about the possibilities (and pitfalls) of methods in social research.
• Convince clients to publish more of their monitoring and evaluation work! So much work is being done on building monitoring systems, on training people in monitoring, on evaluating development interventions - and so little of it is being shared. There are encouraging web-based initiatives to share monitoring & evaluation (M&E) knowledge, such as AWID's Monitoring and Evaluation Wiki. I vow to use them even more and more interactively - i.e. by posting contributions as well. Now, when it comes to sharing the actual findings, sharing seems more difficult. Many organisations that commission evaluations are shy to publicise any lessons learned. A lost opportunity. In the meantime, I'll do my best to -
• Share more of the insights I gain in evaluations! Often, contractual obligations prevent me from publishing extracts from actual evaluation reports. But I will continue to spread broader ("anonymised") insights, both on methodologies and on the matters examined, in this blog and elsewhere.

And I will brace myself again for many new surprises - my assignments invariably turn out to be different from what I had imagined in the beginning-; I will factor in flexibility but plan and implement my holidays; and talking about holidays, I must return to my knitting now... 

A new blog on Egypt

Ahmed Badawi, a political economist, has started a witty blog called "Postcard from Egypt". Find it on http://www.transform-egypt.blogspot.com - the first post could be seen as a reflection on order and disorder.

New Call for Proposals!

Click on the link to find out more: The UN Trust Fund to End Violence against Women Announces New Call for Proposals | Say NO - UNiTE Attention: they tend to fund rather big projects. Bon courage!

Research on Gender Relations

There has been an encouraging flurry of research projects, "baseline" studies and evaluations on gender relations.  It seems that in recent years, hundreds of thousands - maybe millions - of people have been interviewed. They have been asked what they think and do about the roles of men and women, girls and boys (and maybe people who fit into an in-between category) - in the household, at school, at work, in politics and other aspects of life in society. I suspect that quite some people may have undergone several interviews by different research teams, especially in those parts of the world that receive extra donor attention - my mental map shows big blotches of donor interest around Bukavu, Goma, Kabul, Phnom Penh, to name a few places. 

Does anyone care as to what that means to the people who are the objects of such studies? People with a professional research background normally do, as they have learnt about the importance of ethics in research. Basically, you don't want to inflict harm on the people you study. The risk of causing potentially lethal mental health problems is particularly high when you investigate gender-based violence - that is why PATH and UNICEF have produced a most commendable guide on Researching Violence Against Women. If you plan to do any research - even just a few interviews - on the subject, do read this guide. It can save lives.

Now, I feel that we should think beyond the recommendations of the PATH/ UNICEF guide if we want to avoid deepening the attitudes and social norms that underpin unequal gender relations and gender-based violence. 

Research on social cognition - i.e., on the ways in which people and societies think - shows that even the tiniest gesture or conversation contributes to reinforcing - or weakening - individual attitudes and social norms. Hence, it is important you design and phrase your questions very carefully. For example, the question "it is important for a man to show his wife who is the boss" implicitly transports at least two gender-unequal notions: that (i) the man is the boss (note that he is not referred to as "husband", but as the generic "man"), (ii) he owns "his" wife. Now, if your questionnaire includes the symmetrical question "it is important for a woman to show her husband who is the boss", you may cause some hilarity - but it may be a good way to ensure you do not deepen those stereotypes about men being true men only if they hold power over women. The same applies to questions of the type "A woman should be able to choose her own friends even if her husband disapproves". Again, gender bias could be offset by asking the same question with reversed roles ("a man should be able..."). 

Imagine a woman being taken through, say, 30 questions, most of which implicitly portray women as having to ask permission from men, as being beaten by men, and so forth. The questions are administered by people who have come from outside, who take notes and who record the interview - a very impressive setting. In my view, such a situation is harmful and very likely to deepen women's sense (the interviewee's and the interviewer's!) of powerlessness. That in turn will prevent them from developing their own strength and power. Likewise, men who are interviewed with similar stereotypical questions (without the "neutralising" questions that would reverse roles) may leave the interview with a deepened feeling it's a true man's duty to control his wife. 

Any research is an intervention. That applies to natural science (remember Heisenberg's uncertainty principle?) and even mores so in social science, where the researcher is part of what he studies. Interviews manipulate people's minds. If they reflect the dominant bias and stereotypes about gender relations, they will reinforce such bias and stereotypes, making gender equality and violence-free lives even more distant goals. And they are unfair to both women and men. They ignore the power women (can) have, and the burden "male supremacy" may mean to men.

Do you know anyone who works on these issues? I'd love to hear about that. Please share such information as a comment (below).

A commendable series of "webinars"

For free on-line seminars on evaluation, click here: Equity-focused evaluations | MY M&E! I particularly recommend the 22 November instalment with Patricia Rogers and Richard Hummelbrunner - on how to make log-frames more effective for complex interventions.

A women's classic, 2011 edition!

Hooray - "Our Bodies, Ourselves" has been updated, 40 years after the first edition of this classic on women's health and sexuality. Find the table of contents, the introduction, readers' praise and more by clicking on this link: Our Bodies, Ourselves 2011 Edition - Our Bodies Ourselves

New Fund for Young Feminists

Click here to find out more: Grants Program : FRIDA The Young Feminist Fund