This publication provides an overview of a three-day workshop on 'Strengthening partnership with men and boys to promote gender equality and end violence against girls and boys’, organised by Save the Children Sweden-Denmark, Regional Office for South Central Asia on 23-25 March in Kathmandu. Around thirty participants from the region met and shared their practical experiences of and theoretical insights into working with men and boys on issues (masculinities that promote gender equality and non-violence towards children and women). They also developed strategies and concrete action plans for increasing partnership with men/boys to address violence against girls and boys and for promoting gender equality from a child rights based approach.
Violence
This paper explores how to address gender based violence in ways that help empower women and reduce gender inequalities in the context of Papua New Guinea (PNG). It provides an insight into gender-based violence in PNG, including the causes, extent and the social impacts of gender based violence in the community. It concludes with key lessons and recommendations on how to address the issue in ways that engage both men and women.
Please see below for the report, in PDF.
This post is a partial response to finishing the book, Love and Pornography, by Victoria and Garry Prater.
Let's begin with one basic observations about how things work in dominant Western societies:
Misogyny is not only corporately manufactured, but is also promulgated, promoted, heralded, and honored as "sacred" in a society that continually finds new ways to violate and degrade women as a gendered class.
Male privilege is a complex, vast, endemic matter, a bit like air--hard to notice unless it hits you in the face. If you're a woman living in a home with a man, that happens literally with atrocious regularity. I say this with knowledge that in the U.S. it is now "Domestic Violence Awareness" month. (I think it should be called "Let's Do Something About the Terrible Fact that Men Beat the Shit Out of Women at Home" month, but that's a topic for another post.
Interventions that treat men as the villains and women as the victims have not taken us far. Not all masculinities (or ways of being a man) are harmful to men, women and children. This was the starting point for a three-day workshop organised by the South and Central Asia office of Save the Children-Sweden, which was held in Kathmandu in March 2004 on 'strengthening partnership with men and boys to promote gender equality and end violence against girls and boys'.
After a woman who, fearing for her safety, called herself “Claire,” revealed the disgusting details of a gang rape that was allegedly perpetrated against her by an Australian football team, 100,000 people responded in support of the man who, according to her testimony, orchestrated the gang rape against her.
Yesterday, August 4th, was President Barack Obama's 47th birthday. He chose to celebrate by bringing cupcakes to Helen Thomas, who shares his birthday and was 89. At the same time, my friend Byron Hurt and his wife Kenya Felice had a baby.
This morning, I wake to the news that another man shot three women in Pittsburgh. My friends Jason and Lahia live there - I have been calling and texting, hoping Lahia was not one of the three women killed.
How does it all make sense? What does it all have to do with masculinity? With feminism? Profeminism? Violence prevention?
It’s been a dizzying couple of weeks here in Durham. Rape charges dropped against the lacrosse players. Another survivor’s life poked and prodded by a public that has little interest in her health or happiness. District Attorney Nifong’s scandal. Finnerty and Seligmann invited back to Duke in “good standing.” Survivors of sexual violence re-traumatized by public attacks and re-assertions of one myth about rape after another.
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I am a U.S.-born radical activist and writer who strives toward the realization of women's full human rights. I support radical feminists' humanitarian struggles to end all manifestations of white, heterosexual, and male supremacy, and have done so for the last twenty-plus years. Most of my closest friends during that time have been women systematically harmed by what I not-so-affectionately call Corporate Racist Atrocious Patriarchy (CRAP):