Changing the Narrative on Gender-Based Violence … Starting with Men
USAID supports Venezuelan migrants to become change agents and stop violence against women
When Jose left Venezuela to find a better life in Panama, he had to leave behind his wife and children. As he looks back on his first weeks after migrating, he remembers telling himself, “You are not going to cry. You are a man, and men don’t cry.”
He felt pressure to stay strong and find a way to provide for his family. But as a migrant, this role of provider, which had been emphasized all his life, was one of the first things he lost in his new country.
“When I joined the Positive Masculinities sessions and was asked to analyze what I was feeling, I started crying,” Jose explained. “I was startled because as a man I kept thinking that I shouldn’t cry, but the sessions provided me with the space to understand that it’s not about being a man, it’s about being human.”
Positive Masculinities is the name of an effort that comes out of a collaboration between USAID and the Inter-American Development Bank, with funding from the BetterTogether Challenge, which supports Venezuelans fleeing the political and economic instability in their country.
The challenge invests in innovative and scalable solutions to address obstacles faced by Venezuelan migrants in their host communities throughout Latin America. Preventing and responding to gender-based violence (GBV) was a key priority for the Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment Hub (GenDev Hub), which invested in this activity, because Venezuelan migrants are particularly vulnerable — both en route and as they settle in their host communities.
Venezuela’s political and economic crisis has driven more than 6 million people to flee this once prosperous country. Migrating often comes with increased risk of GBV, psychosocial trauma, and sexual exploitation. Venezuelan women and girls are at particular risk of GBV, as there is a pervasive hypersexualized stereotype of the Venezuelan woman in many host communities. Women are also at heightened risk of intimate partner violence during displacement because social support networks are frayed.
GBV programming often focuses on supporting survivors in the aftermath of violence, but this USAID program goes in a different direction to prevent GBV before it happens.
In 2021 USAID’s partner, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society of Panama, convened 167 migrant men to examine masculinity and gendered power structures. The goal: By putting men at the center of GBV prevention efforts, they became frontline change agents who are committed to ending violence against women and girls.
To get to the root of the problem, the training linked violence against women and girls to unequal power relations between men and women.
The dialogues centered around the problems with traditional masculinity, men’s relationship to violence, and ways to build more equal relationships. Importantly, workshop facilitators also engage participants in discussions about violence that they may have experienced in their childhoods, in migration, or in Panama.
Workshop facilitator Leandro Cardozo, explained: “Once we’ve touched on a personal level, we then start opening that process of asking, ‘How does power look inside you? How do you take it to your family? How do you take it to your community? How do you take it to society?’ And now we’ve got the person peeling layers like an onion towards the external part. And that leads them to confront themselves.”
All workshop participants reported changes in attitudes toward traditional masculinity and how they understand their relationships with women.
Another Venezuelan migrant, Carlos, called the training “as good as gold. It taught me to value my family, but especially my wife and my daughters. To show my feelings to them and to acknowledge the respect they deserve. It taught me to distribute and delegate the power that fathers are conditioned to have, but also that we are all capable of changing for the better at any age.”
This project also helped strengthen peer support networks, which are ultimately the building blocks of egalitarian communities. Prevention programs are key to changing harmful social norms that lead to GBV.
Jamie Small, a GBV Advisor in the GenDev Hub, explained, “If we truly want to end GBV, it is crucial that we recognize men and boys as both survivors and as integral partners in our collective efforts to promote healthy masculinities and to make our communities safe for everyone.”
About the Authors
Ricardo Mejía Miller is a Masculinities Specialist at Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society of Panama. Diana Vernon is a Grants Manager supporting the BetterTogether Challenge through the Catalyst Project at Kaizen, a Tetra Tech Company.
