Rape is not about sex

Every so often, I facilitate gender training. One of my favourite ways to get discussions started is a quiz, inspired by the 1994 classic, The Oxfam Gender Training Manual (Suzanne Williams with Janet Seed and Adelina Mwau). I read a set of statements - for instance, recent research findings related to the field the participants work in - about sex and gender. For each statement, the participants are asked to determine whether it is about sex (as in biologically male, female or a bit of both - not sexual activity) or gender (roughly speaking, the behaviour societies expect from people according to their sex).

The discussions are always interesting. In a recent quiz of that type, I read the statement:  "A survey in Botswana revealed that 67% of school girls interviewed had been subjected to sexual harassment by teachers; 10% had consented to sex for fear of reprisals." (That was about a decade ago.)
One participant argued the statement was about sex.

What men can do to end gender violence

An impressive TED talk, not only for beginners - click HERE to see it. Jackson Katz encourages "bystanders" to stop "laughing along or pretending not to hear it". The speech is not totally respectful of feminist organisations (shame on you if you're more interested in the video now ;-) but it is definitely worth watching.

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.

Attitude Change on VAW

I had a useful conversation with a social psychologist last month. What follows below is what I have distilled from my notes.

Violence against women is closely linked to individual attitudes and social norms on women’s and men’s roles in society.

Warmth and Attention

At this cold time of the year, at least for inhabitants of the Northern Hemisphere, I realise that I have not yet written about work that I did last year with my occasional associate Jasmin Rocha, PhD candidate in social sciences. We visited organisations working with women survivors of violence in Mozambique, Guatemala and Nicaragua to find out what they considered to be "quality services" for survivors of violence against women. The purpose of this "sense-making" exercise was to generate ideas for an international NGO as to how they could best monitor their grantees' work in this extremely complex field.

EVAW - resources on violence against women

UNIFEM has launched its virtual knowledge centre on ending violence against women (ENDVAWNOW.ORG) in three languages - English, French and Spanish. It includes a step-by-step guide for people who run projects or campaigns against VAW (Start Here: Programming Essentials, M&E) which are quite generic, i.e. they could be applied to virtually any kind of project.