What will it take to end global violence against women?
We posed this question on our blog a while ago and recieved several comments. We'd like to know what you think. More shelters, more prevention education and more outreach to young people, especially young men? Focusing on gender equality, eliminate poverty, and increase women's educational opportunities?
Here's a thoughtful response from Ward Urion that we like: "I agree with the changing and shifting social norms around the value of violence particularly that of male violence and the de-valuing of women. In order to achieve this end, non-violent men need to be engaged in a number of prevention strategies as partners with women in a shared framework and paradigm of prevention. There are multiple strategies currently in various forms of implementation, but no universal framework of VAW (violence against women) prevention. This will require a paradigm shift within the movement of violence against women advocates, activists and educators to begin to come together with other unlikely partners (such as responsible fatherhood programs, male anti-violence activists, etc.) to craft a framework that we can begin to work from universally. In the Men's Network Against D.V. here in Seattle, we believe that in order to be successful at long term social norms change we need to change and transform dominate masculinity by engaging partners that heretofor have been left out of the dialogue and certainly not engaged as partners. Beginning with the "well-meaning man" at the point where they currently are engaged. Coaches, teachers, male mentors, etc. are all partners that have yet to be successfully engaged as partners in ending violence against women. But hit and miss, unorganized efforts will only get us so far. We need a Beiging type conference on VAW prevention."















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