For a moment my eyes turned away from the workshop participants and out through the
windows of the small conference room and towards the Himalayas, north of Kathmandu. I
was there, leading a workshop, largely the outgrowth of remarkable work of UNICEF and
UNIFEM which, a year earlier, had brought together women and men from throughout South
Asia to discuss the problem of violence against women and girls and, most importantly, to
work together to find solutions.
As I turned back to the women and men in the group, it felt more familiar than different:
women taking enormous chances – in some cases risking their lives – to fight the tide of
violence against women and girls. Men who were just beginning to find their anti-patriarchal
voices and to discover ways to work alongside women. And what pleasantly surprised me
was the positive response to a series of ideas I presented about men’s violence: until then, I
wasn’t entirely sure if they were mainly about the realities in North and South America and
Europe – that is largely-Europeanized cultures – or whether they had a larger resonance.
Here, then, is the kernel of this analysis: