Jimmie Briggs’ Man Up Campaign to Stop Violence Against Women

Jimmie Briggs, Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Man Up Campaign to stop violence against women, has been immersed in a global movement to end gender-based and child-related violence throughout his career.

Through extensive travels as a journalist in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, Briggs has produced seminal reporting on the lives of war-affected youth and child soldiers, as well as survivors of sexual violence. He’s written for the Washington Post, Life Magazine and many other publications in addition to writing the book Innocents Lost: When Child Soldiers Go To War (Basic Books, 2005). When considering men’s voices for our blog this month, Jimmie’s name rose to the top of the list. We spoke with Jimmie about his campaign to end violence against women, starting with boys.

Jimmie, how did you go from a big career in journalism to co-founding this campaign?

I felt like I’d reached a place as a journalist where I needed to step away from being an observer and take more of an active role. I felt like a bystander at a certain point. As a journalist I was seeing such compelling situations and terrible stories and it wasn’t enough to just document it anymore. There was this one trip I took to Eastern Congo where I wrote this really terrible story about a twenty-two year old woman. That was my final straw and I decided to leave. I didn’t realize it was going to be a permanent break. I thought it was going to be a sabbatical. From there, I decided to become an advocate and work directly on these issues. I started researching colleges and interviewing all the people I knew from non-profits to learn where the gaps were in gender violence and things just sort of crystallized for me.

Journalists have to be objective and you need a hard shell. It sounds like your exposure to extreme violence and writing so many really hard stories cracked the shell.

Yeah. It was very much that. One of the reasons I left journalism is because it took such a dramatic toll on me, especially as a man. I love journalism but going to hospitals in Congo and Afghanistan, I just couldn’t shake it. I couldn’t leave it.

So instead of leaving it you funneled yourself into it.

Yeah, exactly.

You have been at this for how many years now? Tell me what you want readers to know about Man Up?

We formally launched Man Up in July 2010. Man up is dedicated to mobilizing youths to stop violence against women and girls on a global level. It’s an organic idea. People want to do something with Man Up because globally they are taking that vision of empowering youths to stop violence against women to their own situation and their own communities. They’re finding the capacity for change and that’s really the spirit of Man up.

Are you targeting youths because they are the most malleable? Teachable?

As a journalist I always focused on youths, whether it was youth violence and child soldiers or video game violence within the United States. So this made sense in my advocacy work to focus on that community as well. In 2009 I started building a team and going to donors, talking to people in the field with a similar vision to introduce the idea of a partnership, particularly male allies.

We target youths because they have such powerful potential to affect change. From a personal point of view it makes a lot of sense to work with people before they exhibit certain behaviors, language and attitudes. We educate them to not be misogynistic, to not be violent, to not be oppressive, to work toward equality. I think they have a better chance of inspiring our male and female allies as adults.

I see that you did some work around the Steubenville rape case. Are you surprised by these Steubenville-like events that we seem to be hearing so much more about?

No, not at all. I expect them to happen. It’s been happening too long in this country especially. We’ve ignored the tones of gender violence and inequality at home, in our own back yard. Donors and advocates are so focused on issues of violence around the world that we aren’t looking at it locally. We’ve come to ignore the fact that more people are raped in this country than in the Congo or Haiti. We ignore the fact that too many women in this country are at risk because of challenges around reproductive healthcare. I think Americans are in denial. We like to talk about provocative issues, but not when they are close to home.

So it starts with education and changing the conversation and then what?

Education and then a call to action. What the call to action is varies from each country and society, but it’s important to give people the chance to effect change.

As you are creating an educational movement are you also creating the structure to effect change?

Slowly, yes. Very slowly.

We’re confident that Man Up’s campaign is going to pick up speed as more people understand the power of grassroots change from the youth up.

Written by Jimmie Briggs