PANACEA 2020

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The fight Against Gender Based Violence For most of us, the idea of eliminating worldwide violence against women is well and truly in the ‘too hard’ basket. But not for feminist icon Dr Emma Fulu. Interviewee : Emma Fulu By Kate Maddams Dr Fulu is a global leader of research into violence against women as well as the founder and CEO of The Equality Institute, a Melbourne-based agency focusing on ending violence worldwide. Good morning Emma, thank you for chatting to me today. I wanted to start by getting some insight into how and why you started The Equality Institute. I’m a researcher by background, and have been researching in the field for almost 20 years now. I initially was doing a degree in International Development Studies at university where I became interested in the gender dimensions of international development. My family is actually from the Maldives, so when I finished my honours degree I went to the Maldives to work at the Ministry of Gender. One of the first things they asked me to do was look into the issue of violence against women. They had anecdotal evidence that the problem existed but didn’t really know the scale of the problem so they asked if I could try to do some research. I ended up working with the World Health Organisation (WHO) to do the study – the first national prevalence study in the Maldives . From then on I kept working in the space. I’d found my passion. I worked with the United Nations (UN) and then moved to South Africa to lead another global program on violence prevention. In the midst of that I had 3 kids. So I was doing a crazy job, travelling a lot, and the truth is I burnt out. I knew I was still passionate about the work but was struggling to do the career. So I moved back to Australia to be closer to my family and to re-asses, and that’s when I started the Equality Institute. I started it with the idea that I wanted to combine research with policy and create a space where there was nurturing and I could balance my career with my family. It started small but it has grown now to be a global agency. We’ve worked in more than 20 countries, we have an office in Timor-Leste and I’ve since set up a charity in New York. That sounds very exciting. Could you tell me a little bit more about what you do at The Equality Institute? 38
We’re a global feminist agency and our priority is advancing gender equality and ending violence against women. We do that through 3 core areas – research, creative communication and policy and advocacy work. So for example, we do a lot of research to try to understand violence against women and also to evaluate programs and policies to see what’s working in different settings. We then work with a lot of global organisations like the UN and Word Bank to help set the policy agenda, and then we also do work on social media to ignite the conversation around feminism and gender equality and how to end violence. It sounds like extremely rewarding work yet at the same time the content of the work is also deeply upsetting. How do you manage the nature of the work? That’s a good question. The focus of our work is predominantly on primary prevention, so trying to address the root causes and we take a very positive, strength based, empowerment approach. So even though the content of the work is very heavy, because we are working to create positive change, that keeps the work positive and engaging and it feels like you’re doing something meaningful. For me, I feel like I’d be more depressed if I wasn’t doing anything towards the issue. It’s a deep passion for me and for members of my team so I think as hard as it is some days, we all feel better for actually trying to do something to end violence against women. I think we also see change happening, so while from a distance it can look like this issue is overwhelming, that’s not true, we are actually seeing rates of violence decrease in some countries, we are seeing programs that are actually having an impact on the ground and we are seeing women and girls all over the world leading that change which is really inspiring. So most of the time I feel inspired more than I feel upset, but we do have to take care of yourself as well because it is hard work. You know when I started in this field about 20 years ago, no one was talking about violence against women and now it’s on the global agenda. There’s the sustainable development goals which all countries have to report on. In my career I have seen massive change, and that’s motivating. There’s been some concerning reports of increased violence in the home during COVID-19 lockdowns around the world. Can you expand upon this? Sure. There definitely is, and while we still don’t have all of the data, what we do know is that in Australia we’re seeing increased rates of reporting around violence against women. We also know that during the lockdown, unfortunately home isn’t always the safest place for some women and children. It also makes it harder for these people to seek support. We’re also seeing diversity in the types of violence that women are experiencing, for example technology facilitated abuse and more controlling behaviour. The pandemic is also impacting gender equality through risk of catching the virus. In the vast majority of countries, a higher percentage of front-line workers (health workers for example) are women, putting these women at a higher risk of being infected with COVID-19. On top of this there have been interruptions of supply chains for medical products. For example women’s access to contraception is being impacted because the world’s largest IUD factory has shut down. Shipping interruptions are also worsening the issue. So there’s a huge number of flow on effects that we’re just starting to get a better sense of, but we really need to collect more data to get a better understanding of the situation. 39
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