It will create opportunities for participants to practice their skills in front of their community members. Participants start to develop their self-confidence and eventually realise that they are capable of planning events that bring community members together, sharing their knowledge on gender and gender-based violence and motivating others to end gender-based violence. With this confidence they continue to engage their families, peers and community members as they grow older.
In India, 35% of women face violence at the hands of men (ICRW, 2011). This is a violation of Women's rights mostly related to education, health & safety. The traditional approach to tackling this problem is to support women directly. However, this approach does not address discrimination at its root cause i.e. inequitable social norms, and is alone not delivering the required results in reducing inequality and violence. Young boys/men therefore needs to be involved as part of the solution.
The Public Action Events are a platform for participants to raise awareness on Gender Based Violence in communities and also to build their confidence to take required actions against it. Programme graduates have demonstrated more equitable attitudes, higher level of respect for towards female relatives and have continues taking actions against street sexual harassment, child marriages, education and community campaigns on various women centric issues.
By 2027, we aim to raise 60,000 gender equitable boys through direct implementation of this programme as well as supporting other organisations in adopting this approach. These boys will not just change their own behaviour but influence fathers, friends, other family and community members to change theirs. Women and girls in the lives of these boys will experience a significant reduction in or in fact zero gender based violence and discrimination at hands of boys.
This project has provided additional documentation in a PDF file (projdoc.pdf).
