Mavi Kalem Sosyal Yardımlaşma ve Dayanışma Derneği Hayata Rengini Kat!
Male Participation for Women’s Empowerment Implementations Restarted
The workshop series, which we took a break due to the pandemic, is once again meeting with men
We started the ‘Male Participation for Women’s Empowerment’ Study in 2019. In our studies with women over the years, we have seen that women do not receive enough support from their husbands. From this point of view, we created a workshop series with the idea that men should be informed about women and girls’ access to basic rights and services, their empowerment in economic and social life, and that they should support these processes.
From the beginning, we designed the ‘Male Participation for Women’s Empowerment’ Workshop Series to be implemented face-to-face. That’s why we didn’t apply it during the restrictions due to the pandemic were on, from March 2020 until 2022. We looked forward meeting new participants for two years and finally we realized our first implementation.
We hosted the first group of men at the Esenyurt office of our Gender-Based Violence Prevention-Response and Child Protection Empowerment project. We observed that everyone in the group actively participated in the discussions, could easily share their own experiences and ideas, and were pleased to take part in the study. The Meeting session we held before we started the workshops helped us get to know each other better and create a neutral and bias-free space.
We were very motivated by our participants’ leaving with a smiling face at the end of each workshop, and by the impressions we gathered from their feedback and from the section in which they conveyed the content of that workshop as if they were telling a friend they met on the way. As one of our participants said, “I wish there were more participation and we could reach more people, so many people would benefit from this awareness meeting.
‘Male Participation for Women’s Empowerment’ Workshop Series implementations continue with different groups.
You can also find out about the ‘sex-based violence awareness meetings’ we have developed based on this study and conducted with men here.
