With 25th November, once again women’s rights advocates, activists and practitioners are commemorating the 16 days of activism to end violence against women. For us, this is the time of the year to remember and salute not one, not two but over 3.5 million extraordinary women and men across South Asia – the 3.5 million ‘change makers’ who have taken the simple yet brave step of pledging publicly never to tolerate and/or commit violence against women in their lives and to talk to ten more people within their spheres of influence.
This simple pledge has become a powerful tool in the social movement called ‘We Can’ lovingly known as ‘mumkin hai’, ‘aamrai pari’, ‘hami sakchho’ and in 16 other local variations across the globe. What started in South Asia as a 5 year, 5 country campaign, has today spread to 16 countries continuing to inspire ordinary women and men, girls and boys to join forces to make a dent in ending violence against women.
Why South Asia?
South Asian countries have one of the worst indicators on continued violence against women. Nearly 50% of women in South Asia face violence in their homes. With entrenched social attitudes, beliefs and practices overtly and covertly condoning violence against women, violence is a silently accepted reality of women’s lives and breaking this silence would threaten their lives.
Everyday violence has become common sense and even considered ‘normal’ by women themselves, their families, neighbors, friends and family, creating a pervasive culture of gender-based violence in South Asia, eroding women’s fundamental rights. This also explains the uniformly poor gender-related development indices in crucial sectors like health, nutrition, education, political participation, and employment. Sharp gender bias has also led to 50 million fewer women in the population; girls and women in South Asia die prematurely through neglect and violence. This is known as the ‘missing women’ phenomenon. This situation will not just be changed by state laws and international agreements. Until men’s and women’s belief that violence against women is a ‘private’ matter and culturally acceptable is challenged and changed, the violence and discrimination will continue.[1]
Change begins with me
The central tenet of the ‘We Can’ campaign has been the mobilization of changemakers – triggering a process of deep personal change among millions of men and women, challenging and changing attitudes, beliefs and practices that perpetuate and condone violence against women. The campaign is based on the following core principles:
– Change is possible and is necessary
– Personal change is necessary for larger social change
– Every individual has the power to change and hence also the responsibility to change
– The journey and pace of change will differ for all individuals
– It is critical to ‘break the silence’ surrounding violence against women
Based on the above core principles, the campaign strategy has been to take a supportive role, rather than a directive one. The campaign core group believes that change is an iterative process for each one of us, but there are certain stages that an individual passes through, starting from pre-contemplation, to contemplation, moving on to preparation for action, action and institutionalization of change. Each individual moves through these stages at a different pace and might move back and forth between these stages. It is the positive reinforcement and support from the campaign that helps her or him tread the stages. This cycle is repeated over again and again to deepen the changes.
Personal is political
The campaign goes beyond personal change at individual level to collective action as well as changes at institutional level by encouraging changemakers to talk about this pervasive issue within their sphere of influence, triggering supportive and growing networks of like-minded individuals within institutions such as families, communities, schools, and workplaces among others. Growing number of networks within any institution build a demand for change from within and campaign support to the leaders within those institutions helps them to respond positively to this demand for change in institutional norms and policies.
Personal stories of change
With a sophisticated theory of change underpinning the ‘We Can’ campaign, what remains most inspiring, are the individual changemakers’ stories of personal change. From the young girl in Udaipur, India, who bravely confronted her elder brother for being violent and disrespectful to his wife, or the housewife in Nepal who realized that she had been giving herself excuses and tolerating domestic violence in the name of love, or the numerous young men in Bangladesh who pledged to share household chores with their wives, and followed up with actions, despite the negative reactions, even ridicule from their friends and family, or the old man in Sri Lanka, who, after 38 years of a turbulent marriage, attended the We Can awareness raising sessions and decided to’ give equality a try’. Today, he sits with young people and says, if only he had taken this small step 38 years ago, his life would have been different.
The stories are numerous and each one is unique. What is common in all the stories is, that the simple messages of the campaign resonated with their lived experiences, the campaign messages did not ridicule, blame or dehumanize them, rather gave them the option to change, to join with numerous others like themselves and the platform to invite others to join the same journey.
Despite the grim statistics of violence against women, it is these 3.5 million stories of personal, collective and institutional change that give us hope that change is possible and that it is in our hands to trigger that change, that We Can and We Will.
[1] Towards Ending Violence Against Women in South Asia, Oxfam Briefing Paper, August 2004
Nidhi Labh, Rashmi Singh, Prasanna Gettu are members of the We Can Global Network and remain active in the We Can campaign in South Asia. All of them are women’s rights activists, who continue to challenge discrimination in all spheres of life. This blog is also published on atriaontmoet.nl.