Over the past two decades, ActionAid Association has undertaken various initiatives towards promoting gender equality and sensitivity towards women. In this opinion piece, Mr Sandeep Chachra, Executive Director, ActionAid Association and Shalini Perumal, Communications Officer at ActionAid Association share their insights on “How can social interventions effectively engage and educate male members of society on gender equality and women's empowerment to promote inclusivity and sensitivity towards women.”
Across the majorities of our world, women and men remain trapped in the prison of patriarchy. Together we exist within a social logic where discrimination, oppression and exploitation colour the bonds of care, love and respect between individuals, collectives and communities. Patriarchy extends from within the most intimate reaches of the home to streets and workplaces. We see this happening across the country and the world. Consciously and subconsciously, we remain conditioned and fragmented, and these insidious biases taint our creativity. Thus, continuously challenging these exclusionary ideologies and histories and building advances to realise a new humanity becomes urgent and vital. Patriarchy, thus impacts both women and men.
The resistance to patriarchy is not limited to any one culture, geography or time. There is much evidence to suggest the contrary. In India, historians are teasing out the hidden stories of women warriors, rulers, saints and philosophers and throwing more light on private and public domains and the interplay of hierarchies of class, caste, gender and political power. Incomplete and subverted social revolutions that betrayed the hopes for freedom and equality of women and men are no cause for pessimism and despair. On the contrary, they hold out many lessons for humanity. We need to recognise the victories they fruited, the tasks that still await and the dangers of subversions that happen. An excavation of feminist pasts is a part of building feminist futures. Over the centuries men have played a role of being one with this struggle for justice.
The feminist movement and response in the twentieth century ensured women had the right to vote, a somewhat better place in the world of work, and a formulation of an ideology of liberation. Collective action, movements, legislation and policies have created significant milestones in the path to gender justice and equality. However, many unfinished tasks remain; and new regressions have also occurred. Political representation remains limited, the commodification of women has increased, and sustained crusades of political religion pose new threats across borders. The broken promises, dispersed hopes and fragmented struggles leave deep scars and contribute to the collective shame of humankind.
Left to their own, these scars that de-motivate can become permanent debilitations. Therefore, the vitality of the progressive sentiment needs to be sustained and renewed through emancipatory hope. Ensuring the spirit of solidarity, creating generative spaces, sharing the wisdom of experience, building conviction through practice, spreading methods of grounding and sustaining change, taking concrete steps to sustain and channel the aspirations of billions of women as locally, nationally and internationally organised sisterhoods and solidarities are all much-needed efforts.
ActionAid Association (AAA), while working to ensure the protagonism of vulnerable communities in creating lasting change, not only encourages women’s leadership within community-led interventions, it also provides a feminist orientation to all community leaders and activists, regardless of gender. In addition, AAA employs a gender-sensitive lens across its programming and seeks to address existing gender inequalities while transforming unequal gender norms and attitudes.
The decline in the child sex ratio as seen in Census 2001, from 945 girls to every 1,000 boys in 1991, to 927 in 2001, had led ActionAid Association to undertake a study to understand the underlying dynamics across the states of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh, Punjab and Haryana. The leads provided by the study went into the design of a community-based intervention in the districts of Dholpur in Rajasthan and Morena in Madhya Pradesh, to bring behavioural change in an area with a history of both female foeticide and infanticide. Significant success was met by involving boys in the Bal Manch (children’s platform) and young men in the Yuva Manch (youth platform).
However, the 2011 Census showed a further dip in the sex ratio to 918 girls to every 1,000 boys. This was when AAA realised the need to intervene in a campaign mode and launched “Beti Zindabad!” – Long Live Daughters! This was a national campaign to sensitise society and denounce the male child preference, the practice of sex-selective abortions and the discrimination that the girl child faces throughout her life.
Over the years, the campaign has evolved to encompass issues of violence against women, the need to recognise and celebrate women’s place in the world of work and efforts to ensure women’s access to property, including house and land.
Meaningful engagement with men and boys is necessary not only for women’s empowerment but also for transforming the social and gender norms that reinforce patriarchy and inequality and harm both women and men. Again, we have found that much can be been achieved when the larger community, including men and boys, internalises feminist values and raises women’s issues.
Thus in “Say No to Child Marriage, Yes to School”, a campaign where AAA works collaboratively with State Governments and UNICEF, colleagues strive to engage boys and men in bringing about structural change to end the culturally driven violence of child marriage in India. Launched at the end of October 2019, the campaign reached out to more than 1.4 lakh students, including boys, in a little less than 2,000 schools across 13 districts in Bihar and Odisha and has also been extended to districts in Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal. The campaign's objective is to build youth and adolescents as change agents to transform mindsets on child marriage. In addition, the aim is to build community awareness of how child marriage is a harmful traditional practice that violates child rights and affects both sexes. Significant success was achieved because of the active engagement of male tribal leaders to act on the issue. In addition, male school teachers and students have emerged as leaders of gender equality. Furthermore, male priests and members of Panchayat Raj Institutions have proven instrumental in motivating action against child marriage, particularly as it intersects with other issues such as caste, tribal rights and class.
AAA is also working with UNICEF to provide technical support to the district administration of those districts most vulnerable to child marriage in West Bengal, Bihar, Rajasthan and Odisha. What has been exceptionally positive is that male adolescents have said “No” to child marriage and are coming together to work as champions for the cause. Together with their female counterparts, they have formed a forum named “Balya Bibaha Pratirodh Manch” that has inspired and cultivated young girls' courage to say “No” to child marriage and continue their education.
“From Bystander to First Responder”, a campaign that attempts to combat street harassment and break the bystander effect in cities such as Mumbai and Pune, has seen the engagement of more than 2,00,000 people (including many men). ActionAid Association has trained street vendors, construction workers, auto drivers, Integrated Child Development Services workers and boot polishers to intervene when they witness street harassment. By engaging men in the program, the aspiration to build a culture with zero tolerance towards street harassment and violence while also training the potential first responders on response actions has proven beneficial. After training about 10,000 people, including a substantial number of men, AAA witnessed a positive behavioural change in the participants. For example, a tuition teacher helped a student deal with the harassment she faced on a bus, and a woman helped a neighbour deal with a man who would harass her when she washed clothes at the public tap.
We need to highlight that while privileging the power of some men, patriarchy also imprisons all men – dehumanising them. We must also break down the wrong notion that feminism is against men. Feminism stands for justice and equality for all.
When we celebrate daughters through slogans such as “Beti Zindabad!” we call for an end to injustice. Let us all, women, men, girls and boys, regardless of gender, campaign together for sharing care work at home, securing women's place in the world of work and women's right to property.
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