How can we make gender-based violence work more human?
Grocery stores in South Africa are GREAT at branding their grocery bags.
From just my memory, I can recall that Checkers and Pick ‘n Pay have pretty generic blue bags, Woolworths has a bougey fabric black bag, and SPAR has a paper bag that says “GENDER BASED VIOLENCE” in huge black letters with the END in GENDER turned orange.
Gender-based violence (GBV), according to the UN, is “a global problem of epidemic proportions that will affect one in every three women in her lifetime”. GBV is an issue big enough that SPAR, a huge national grocery chain, willingly addresses it as part of their branding and social mission.
In order to fight GBV, we have to know what we’re fighting. But how do we define GBV? What does it look like? What does it really mean?
I recently worked with a team to address GBV in South African mining communities.
Our assignment was to design a curriculum that would equip people working with these communities — in education, health, and livelihoods — to address GBV in their day-to-day work.
Now, to design a curriculum, we had to know what the baseline was. Exactly where do people stand when it comes to GBV?
In true human-centered design fashion, we went directly to the community to find out. We talked to range of people from the community — students, teachers, business coaches, doctors, managers, social workers, and more — to understand people’s current experiences, beliefs, and attitudes around GBV.
Using trauma-informed approaches, we asked questions like — What is GBV? How do you understand it? Does it happen in your community? What causes it? Are there situations when it’s right, wrong, tolerable, justifiable?
The time we had in field was short, but enough to uncover patterns during our debrief. One particular pattern was how people didn’t think GBV existed in their communities, often saying, “maybe in others, but not mine.” Interesting — because this seemed to contradict the reports we had about the prevalence of GBV in these communities.
So a conclusion emerged that GBV has been normalized in the community. People see it or experience it, but because it happens so much, they believe it’s normal or even acceptable.
But wait. Was that really true?
I recalled a story from a doctor at a local clinic. He shared about the intensity of mob justice, of how a man was killed by the crowds after raping a young girl.
That sounded like rape — a form of GBV — was perceived by the community as morally bad enough to incite anger, violence, and a desire for justice.
Is it possible that we were asking the wrong questions or using the wrong words? We wanted people to tell us about their perceptions of GBV — a word that carries mixed definitions and translations — but then we were analyzing their responses based on our perception of GBV.
So I started to research — exactly how is GBV defined? The research and papers, combined with past conversations with colleagues, experts, and those with lived experience, took me down a rabbit hole.
Okay, so… violence is the act of harming or hurting, but what makes it gender-based? Is it specific forms that largely affects one gender more than another? Is it violence that one commits to another purely because of their gender? But what if violence came out of anger or fear? Does that count? Do only women and girls experience GBV? Why do some people say men and boys experience GBV too? Why is trafficking and child soldiers also included in some definitions? (This article does a great job of breaking down the debate.)
Ah the confusion. I had a lot of questions, even as someone who has worked in the space for over 5 years.
I went back to a practice I learned from doing human-centered design: bringing complex, ambiguous, or theoretical things back to the “human” level.
What is the observable, feel-able, human experience of GBV? I had interviewed people with lived experience of GBV before. What was truly felt about their experience?
They were being hurt by someone and were unable to do anything about it.
This was it — the description of GBV through human experience. It may be a simple, unacademic definition but it highlights the abuse of an existing power imbalance while covering all potential variances for who, why, or how (the very things people don’t agree on).
It’s important to be able to name and label our experiences in life.
By giving something a term, we’re able to notice something, generate insight about it, and recognize what to do about it.
But terms are rarely universally applied — heck, even the word for where you relieve yourself changes as you move from context to context (I have such a hard time keeping track)!
It’s for situations like this — when a term used within one context is brought to another context — that we find it helpful to go back to the human experience.
When we do that:
(1) We can get a richer understanding about the beliefs, attitudes, and experiences of GBV, which leads to a more informed solution
Imagine if we asked, “Have you or someone you know ever been hurt by another and couldn’t do anything about it?” instead of, “Is there GBV in your community?”
We may discover that some of our assumptions on what is normalized or accepted may be incorrect.
For example, if someone has experienced marital rape, they might not call it “rape” or “GBV”, but they may be able to express that it was an experience where they were hurt, felt they couldn’t do something about it, and wished for it to stop happening.
With these stronger nuances in our understanding of people, the solutions we come up with will be better informed and better aligned with what communities actually need.
(2) We can save energy trying to get people aligned on the “correct” terminology.
Jargon-y terms are rarely moving or convicting, especially when we’re fumbling about trying to define it. Even the process of correctly using and defining it in the social sector can take costly months of different stakeholders adding their input in a board room.
Rather than getting people to come to agreement on “our” definition, which can even be an alienating experience, meeting people where they are by using words of human experience will help people recognize, talk about, and address the problem at a quicker, more collaborative pace.
(3) We can unify people across genders and positions
You may notice that the definition above encompasses more than what traditional GBV definitions cover. For example, you could say, “What about a male employer verbally abusing a male employee, who can’t do anything about it because he needs his job? Or a government worker who has all the power, neglecting the needs of his or her community? That’s not GBV, but it would count according to that definition!”
But that’s exactly the sort of definition that can unify, rather than divide, people across genders - because it’s a human experience, not a limited-to-one-population experience, even when it disproportionally affects one population more.
You could even say that it helps us as intervention designers to step in with empathy and humility, rather than than sit outside of the problem, because we’re human and we have these experiences too.
At the end of the day, we’re not here to fight against only what falls within the “correct” definition of GBV. We’re here to fight against the abuse of power, against the harming of others.