Campaigns to End Violence against Women and Girls - Virtual ...

Promoting leadership and guidance by the women’s movement: Women’s
organizations have been at the forefront of campaigning to end VAW, making the
problem visible as a human rights issue, and a health and social challenge, and placing
it on international agendas. Over the last few decades, many women’s organizations
have developed critical skills and experience in analyzing and challenging social and
cultural norms that foster VAW. Campaigns to end VAW should draw on this experience
and promote women’s leadership so as to contribute to social transformation towards
gender equality.
Mobilizing communities and promoting local leadership: To create a supportive
environment for change, a large cross-section of communities and key community
leaders need to take responsibility and get involved in ending VAW. The general ethos
behind successful campaigns has been that every person can and should be an agent
of change, and that local leadership must be supported. Decentralized campaign
leadership and grassroots level activism that mobilizes ever larger numbers of people
from varied backgrounds can help create a ripple effect and build critical mass, which in
turn, can impact the reform or transformation of social or institutional practices (e.g. law
enforcement, court system, improved services).
Example: The campaign against foot-binding in China is an example of one that
involved a cross-section of the community. It is arguably, one of the first campaigns to
end VAW in the modern world. Foot-binding was a “traditional” practice in China where
young girls’ feet were broken and wrapped in tight layers of cloth so that they would
grow into deformed, tiny lumps, so-called “lotus feet”. It was thought that girls with “lotus
feet” would be more likely to find a wealthy husband even if they were disabled for all
their lives. Many contributed to the movement to end this practice, including political
leaders who outlawed it in 1912, respected Chinese scholars who denounced it as a
cruel practice, and Christian missionaries who worked with local communities to raise
awareness. In addition, the success of the campaign owed much ultimately to parents
who formally committed themselves to not binding their daughters’ feet, and to keeping
their sons from marrying girls with “lotus feet”. In communities where both the “offer” and
the “demand” side were thus tackled, the practice reportedly disappeared within a single
generation.
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Campaigns December 2011