 This is the second seminar of the Gender and Peacebuilding Seminar Series that are co-sponsored by the USIP Gender Working Group and the Institute for Inclusive Security. On November 3rd, we had the first seminar and we discussed the necessity of engaging women in negotiations and ways in which that can be done. It was a very nice discussion. Today we are shifting our focus to security and the reform of security institutions and approaches. So I would like to begin just to contextualize some of these issues we're dealing with, with a story, a story that was shared with me that I think really puts out some of the issues that we could be coming up against when we're trying to address issues of security in women. So this is a story about somewhere in Africa. We have a young NGO worker coming into a community with the task of trying to figure out what can be done about the problem of women getting raped when they go to get water at dusk. So this young project manager calls a town meeting and she says to everyone that shows up at the meeting, she says we really have a problem in this community and we're getting together here gathering in order to solve that problem, to identify solutions to that problem. She said we have women are getting raped consistently when they're going out to get water and let's talk about what we can do. A man raises a hand and says the water is coming back, what's the problem? So what do you do in these instances? Right? When we're trying to address some of the problems but we are coming up with resistance in the local community, what do we do? What kind of issues can we raise? What kind of dialogue can we have so that these sorts of mindsets can change? So it is likely that we can encounter such mindsets in our work that we do as we strive to solicit the participation of women in our various peace building efforts or projects. The threats, the security of women during a conflict and its aftermath are different than that of the men and these threats are as varied as there are numerous. Let's consider for example that women are often shut out of DDR programs either because they have no weapons to hand in, whether they are bush wives or shared a weapon with others so they don't have their own weapon to hand in to participate or they believe that they will not find a husband if they are recorded as having been a combatant or they may be prosecuted for their actions. As a result they are forced to live on the streets and susceptible to human trafficking, prostitution and of course no education for them and their children. Let's also consider that most conflict environments are rife for domestic violence which ensues when the man comes home and tries to cope with a new gender balance in the household as well as economic and social hardships. We cannot claim to have established peace when women are being abused in their homes. So what do we do? The purpose of the seminar series is to basically offer two types of crucial instruments or tools for us to engage women in identifying solutions to security threats. First is to give us guidance in making convincing arguments for those that remain skeptical about the importance of engaging women in identifying the path to peace and implementing those solutions. The second are concrete approaches, tools to elicit the contribution of women in peace building efforts. We have to listen to women and we have to be flexible and creative. The following quote is an example of what we can encounter if we really listen. A woman should know her limits and if not then it's her husband's right to beat her. But if a woman earns more than her husband it's difficult for him to discipline her. We get to listen to various points of use and we can identify solutions that way by listening to the women and engaging them. Today we have three distinguished panelists who have been thinking and working in these areas for quite some time. And they have seen the exclusion and marginalization of women first hand. Their presentations will help equip us to foster peace building solutions that include a gender perspective. You'll notice that on the invitation General Khmerit was also going to join us to share his insight. However he was just this past weekend deployed to Chad so he cannot be with us. However he was very kind to put together some recommendations and some ideas that he has based on his experience and you could pick them up outside. We put them up for you. So with no, well before I present our speakers I want to tell you that this event is being webcasted. We have on our website, you know people can watch this event. The main purpose is to allow members of the Women Waging Peace Network, which works with inclusive security to participate. During our question and answer discussion section they will, if they are interested or if they have something to weigh in, they will send us an e-mails and we'll try to incorporate their comments, their questions or their recommendations to us in the discussion. So we'll be reading their e-mails as they, if and when they come in. So with no further ado I'll introduce my colleagues and our panel in order that they will be speaking. Jackie O'Neill and you have, by the way, the bios outside. So I'm going to let them get going with their presentations. But Jackie, who's from the Institute for Inclusive Security, is going to speak about the specific contributions that women make in the security sector and the concrete recommendations to engage them. Toby Whitman will be, who's with USAID, is going to be talking to us about the lessons learned on operationalizing women's engagement with the military. And Scott Carlson, who's an advisor at USIP, the rule of law center, will be using broadly accepted, or we'll talk about, sorry, using broadly accepted human rights principles to structure programs, analysis and relationships in a post-conflict environment, leading to the empowerment of women and the establishment of stable and inclusive institutions. So I will turn it over to Jackie and then we'll go through the different presentations. If you have pressing questions after each presentation, please just write them down or something so we can go through all the different presentations first and then you can form a line and buy the microphone and then make comments or questions or engage in the discussion as you wish, okay? Thank you, Nadia, for moderating and for creating the seminar series with us and also for your leadership on this issue within USIP. And of course, thanks to USIP for hosting us and also for making this available online. And this webcast is a really exciting thing for us. As Nadia mentioned, Inclusive Security supports a women-waging peace network of about 1,000 women peace builders around the world. And Nadia and USIP really wanted them to be able to engage in activities like this and not just sort of be broadcast later online but be online in real time so that they can actually contribute. So I heard from a number of our network members from Pakistan, Iraq, Sudan, Liberia and elsewhere who said they were going to tune in technical abilities permitting and I really hope that they're watching now and that we'll be able to hear from them. I want to start with just sort of mentioning how I became engaged in this subject as it relates to Sudan in particular. In 2005, I was living in Khartoum and I was working three days a week at the UN Peacekeeping Mission at Unmiss. And then I was working three days a week at all women's university called Afad University. And so I'd spend three days working with these women leaders who were doing this really tremendous work, very active politically and working very hard on Sudan's reconstruction. And then I'd go to the UN office and work with some very, very hardworking and very well-meaning people who were working on the same issues. And unfortunately never did the two worlds really ever meet. And it became very clear to me that there was an incredible lost opportunity there that there were people with very similar and shared objectives who were really not connecting the US or sorry, the UN staff people really had no idea of the capacity and the activities that the Sudanese women were already engaged in leading and the Sudanese women leaders really had no idea how to access the UN. And that's how I became engaged in this topic to begin with. Soon after that I began working with the Institute for Inclusive Security. And as many of you know, we're a DC-based advocacy organization and we promote the full inclusion of all stakeholders, especially women in peace processes around the world. And when we say peace processes, we define it broadly as meaning everything from actual negotiation, so being at the table when peace agreements are negotiated, to implementing peace agreements, which of course has a major component related to the security sector. And I was drawn at first to Inclusive Security's very pragmatic approach in that we argue that women need to be involved in peace processes and peace building not because it's their right to be there, although we do believe that to be true, but because when women are engaged and are involved, it creates a more sustainable and more lasting peace. So we advocate to policymakers around the world, we provide training to women leaders and also to civil servants, to the military and to police around the world, and we conduct research to document the very specific contributions that women make to peace building. And I want to open and begin with discussing a case study that we recently wrote up and it relates to a provincial reconstruction team in Kandahar in Afghanistan. So one of the women that we work with, one of the members of our Women Waging Peace Network, works and created a women's economic empowerment organization in Kandahar. And they began selling their handicrafts on the base of the provincial reconstruction team in Kandahar. And one day while she was at the PRT base, a female Canadian NATO officer, so a female military officer approached her and said, I'd really like to have some interaction with Afghan women. I'd really like to just talk to Afghan women. Can you help me? And so what our network member did was she created, she gathered members of her organization and reached out to some other women, including stay at home moms, farmers, a whole wide range of Afghan women. And they decided they got together and they agreed with NATO forces on a safe place to meet. In this case, it was the Kandahar airport. So they started to meet and ended up meeting fairly regularly. And the nature of this discussion started with very general topics, such as what are your concerns for your children? What are the issues that, what do you want for your children in the future? What are what are issues that you're just dealing with right now? And the women started to say very interesting and important things. They started to talk about corruption in some of the projects that the PRT was funding. They started to talk about priorities for development that were different than what NATO officials had heard to date. They gave information about areas that were too insecure for NATO officials themselves to even travel in, which again were different than what NATO officials had heard from the, from the beginning. And the NATO officials told us later that they really noticed an increased sense of local ownership of among the people in Kandahar and even if it was the small group. And I think this, this next point sort of sums up one of the best outcomes of what happened in June 2008. There was a massive prison break in Kandahar and about 700 detainees escaped from the prison. And one of the women who was a part of these sort of focus groups, these discussion groups, lived near the prison, heard that something was going on, started hearing explosions. And on her cell phone called her contact at NATO. So she called the one woman that she knew who worked for the military. And she said there's something happening at the prison. That woman at that NATO contact who had engaged with these women, these Afghan women over time, found out about that prison break ten minutes before anyone else at NATO headquarters did. Ten minutes in a prison break is a very long time. And it just goes to show that the goals of these women who are participating in this group were very much the same as those of the NATO officials. And there were some very concrete benefits to them for actually taking the time and making the effort to talk to them. So with that story in mind, I wanted to give, as Nadia mentioned, some very concrete and specific talking points basically on the contributions that women make when they're engaged in the security sector. And I want to point out first that at Inclusive Security in particular, we define the security sector broadly. So of course it includes police and military and armed contractors. It also includes people working in justice and corrections, those in management or executive bodies, departments of state, departments of defense, etc. There are official civilian oversight capacities, so legislators and parliamentarians who have oversight roles related to the security sector. And then of course those providing unofficial civilian oversight like the media, think tanks, academia, etc. So when I say women's engagement in the security sector, I do mean specifically in uniform services but also in the broader scope of oversight and realization of security basically. So what specific contributions do women make when they're engaged in the security sector? First and foremost, they improve operational effectiveness. So namely, they improve a mission's ability to reach its objectives. There are studies of women in police forces in the United States that show that when women police officers are more likely to deescalate tensions and are less likely to use excessive force. Women can also gather different types of intelligence. There are some things, for example, that women are just more likely to tell other women. In General Khmer's remarks that are outside, he notes that in Liberia, rates of reporting sexual violence increased dramatically when the all women Indian form police unit started being able to accept these reports. Having women in police and military in particular also means that they can get a more full picture of the community's actual needs. So they can get a better sense of what security issues are most pressing. Is it drugs? Is it human trafficking? Is it sexual violence? Many of these are issues that women will talk about. There was a great study that came out last year of five different provincial reconstruction teams in Afghanistan. And one of them I'll quote from the part where from the Dutch PRT in Afghanistan. Where it says the team had the impression that many Afghan men found the women to be interesting. And performance were according to the commander of police trainers prone to be more open and even more accepting of female staff. According to the PRT commander talking to a female officer even, quote, loosen men's tongues, unquote, which provided the PRT with very useful information. Women can also provide or perform some roles that men simply can't, such as physical searches of other women at border points and border checkpoints. Having more women in police and military services also increases the ownership, local ownership of these security forces. I think we've all come to the point now where we acknowledge that communities need to be able to see themselves in their police, in their military. So we have to have a diversity of races, of ethnicities, of religions, and the same goes for gender. In the areas of justice and corrections, women have been found to be more likely to identify and prioritize the prosecution of sexual crimes. In Sierra Leone in 2002, there were 250,000 women who had been raped in the Civil War. And there were women in the special court following the war who developed a special prosecution plan for sexual violence. They signed female investigators, they created sensitive interviewing techniques and more. Having women in the security section can reduce at least the perception of corruption, if not corruption itself. Nicaragua, for example, had a massive police reform program in which they increased the number of women police officers, to now being one of the highest in the world at about 25%. And they credit that with a massive turnaround in public confidence in the police force. And as Nadia mentioned earlier, women are also essential to facilitating the reintegration of combatants in DDR processes. So they tend to deliver, as you can imagine, many of the services that are actually critical to reintegration and then to be there and stay in communities much longer than the international community does following a DDR process. And there's also growing evidence that women can be highly influential in the disarmament process itself. There's a new book coming out by a woman named Vanessa Farre called Sexed Pistols about women and small arms. And she looks quite specifically at the role of older women in the community and the moral influence that they have over young men and their ability to and their interest in disarming and surrendering their weapons. So I could go on, but want to turn briefly to some very specific suggestions for actually engaging women in the security sector. And I'd say these recommendations are aimed primarily at people working in large institutions, as I imagine many of you are, such as government departments, civilian agencies, the UN, NATO, the OSCE, and others. So first and foremost, I think by far the most important thing to do if you want to increase attention paid to this issue is focus on raising awareness about women's specific contributions to operational effectiveness. So in other words, focus on helping people understand why engaging women makes their jobs easier. It can't be perceived as an add-on or a nice to have. It has to be understood as absolutely integral to a mission's success. And people need very specific examples to know why. We document those examples and share them, especially ones that occur in your own organization. Write them up as talking points and get them into speeches, get them into newsletters, on your intranet, in training materials, et cetera. I can't stress enough that no one else is going to write these down. And if you see in particular a good news story, write it down and share it. Secondly, acknowledge that awareness and goodwill on this subject aren't enough. Some approaches are straightforward and they're readily apparent, but some are sensitive and challenging to identify, so people really need training. But I would emphasize that not all training is created equal and some training, quite frankly, is very bad. A lot of police and military, for example, are told to avoid eye contact with women or to avoid contact altogether, so as to risk not offending them. Again, it usually comes from a genuine and well-meaning place. We work at Inclusive Security with a lot of police and military deployed to Afghanistan in particular and we hear this again and again. What we also hear is that people are told to do this when they start. They realize about six months into their deployment that it's not true, that there are ways that they can reach out to and engage with Afghan women. And then it's time for them to go home, and it's too late. And then a new rotation comes in with the exact same problem. So if you're overseeing the delivery of training or delivering it yourself, assess it. First of all, is it happening? And second, are they talking about anything practical? Or is it simply a review of theoretical frameworks related to gender? Which may be necessary, but really not all that helpful when someone gets into the field. And thirdly, who's delivering it? Is it a junior woman or is it a senior or high-ranking man? It matters, especially related to gender. Who delivers this training? Thirdly, if you're overseeing these types of programs, require a certain proportion of the trainees to be women. I came back just a few months ago from doing some work with the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe, the OSCE, and met a number of great people working on police training programs, including a man who told me they were advising their local partners at an OSCE mission in providing police training. And he said, I always insist that there be at least 25% women in the trainings that the OSCE runs. And he said, my local partners sometimes send me lists of trainees and there are no women on them. And I just send them back. I just say, there need to be 25% women on this list. And sometimes they'll send them back and say, no, no, no, we can't find them. They're just not there. They're not available. And he says, no, they're there and I know you can find them. So doing that shows that you mean what you say. And it also puts women in the position of gaining the skills and the recognition among their own colleagues and improving their ability to actually do the job well once they get there. The same man also told me that in those training sessions, women are almost always some of the best contributors to the sessions. So don't be afraid to say that to fund something, we need to have a minimum percentage of women. And I'd say the same goes for study tours and delegations, etc. There's no shame in asking and being very specific and saying we want to have 25% or even higher proportion of women. Third, you need visible and very senior level support, especially for men. People have to know that this gender issue is not just a passing fad or something that they're doing for political correctness. And there are a lot of strong and very excellent men on this issue. So find them in your organizations and profile them. Get them to do this work and give them a very specific role. It makes them look good and it's important. And the symbolism of it can't be understated. Fourth, start early. The earlier you get women involved in a process, the easier it is for them to be engaged later on. So inclusive security focuses a lot on women in peace negotiations because that's where a lot of very critical issues are determined. UNIFEM released a study last year showing that 2% of the signatories to peace agreements are women, 2% of signatories. And the UN, I'll point out, has never appointed a woman as its lead mediator to any conflict. So we need women, or we need to include women in US and other country delegations to negotiations. And we need to insist that the UN and other agencies do the same. And finally, recruit and retain more women. It's easy to say, but hard to do. But it's absolutely critical to get more women in the pipeline, so to speak, and to have more women at senior levels. Again, hard to do, but I'd say one of the positive aspects of this is that women around the world face many of the same challenges and have many of the same reasons for not engaging in the security sector. Inclusive security worked with the US State Department a few years ago to look at why there are so few women police officers who sign up to be serving in US and UN-led peacekeeping missions around the world. And what we found was the same thing for US women as for women around the world, two main issues. One, they lacked an awareness of what the job involved. So they were looking at advertisements that showed men in camouflage carrying machine guns jumping out of helicopters as advertisements for serving in a UN peacekeeping mission. Anyone who will do that in particular in the police will tell you, first of all, UN police are not armed, so they won't be carrying machine guns. They're not jumping out of helicopters. What they're doing is relating to the community. One of the, what they should be doing is relating to the community. And we found that women police officers in the US in particular just didn't have a strong handle of what the role would actually involve. And secondly, and I think this applies broadly to women around the world from our experiences that they lacked confidence to do that. They didn't see other women role models in the security sector who are telling them, no, it's important. You bring important features to this job and you can do it. And so one of the ways that we're addressing that with Nadia's colleagues here at USIP is through in-prol, trying to create an online network of women in the security force or in the security sector so that they can actually engage with each other and share much more realistic stories about what it's like to be working in the field, to be what the recruitment processes are like, what actual conditions are like, and encourage women to build that confidence and build their interest in serving in the security sector. And finally on this note, I would add, create very specific targets for recruiting women and create incentives for actually meeting them. So if you're evaluating contractors, for example, who are required to or who are recruiting women, favor ones who have proven their ability to recruit and promote women. Put these responsibilities in formal job descriptions and then actually evaluate people's performance against them. And finally, consider providing additional funds or even special recognition for those who do increase the number of women in their recruitment or in their ability to actually promote them to senior levels. So I know Toby and Scott have a lot more to add on that, so I'll stop there. Thanks Jackie, it was very insightful. I'm sure you have many takeaways already from this, so that's very good. We'll turn it over to Toby. So first off, just a huge thanks to Nadia and USIP and Institute for Inclusive Security for organizing this very important seminar series and for extending invitation to me for this event. I'm gonna speak a bit about the lessons learned on operationalizing women's engagement specifically with the military at the tactical operational level. But I wanted to start out with a story about Liberia to highlight several points, and I'm hopeful we might have some Liberians participating via the web. So as many of you know, Liberia has undergone an incredible transformation since decades of civil war. President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has set very ambitious security sector reform goals for her country to turn the armed forces of Liberia into something that people run to rather than run away from. The US has played a very large role in that transformation, vividly, sometimes controversially. I know a US Navy officer from my work in Liberia who was a condo there as part of the Office of Defense Coordination to help the reconstruction of the AFL in 2007. One day he was participating in an AFL recruitment event, and he hadn't received any specific instructions for the event, aside to facilitate the sign up day for new cadets. At the event in Monerovia, he noticed that throughout the day, there were tremendous numbers of women who were waiting in line to register, but that oftentimes the men were cutting in line in front of them and they were never getting up to actually register. He actually thought that a lot of the women were even leaving and were never even, never ultimately participating. So while he hadn't been given explicit orders that day to access to address women's participation, he knew that he wasn't achieving his objective of ensuring that the maximum number of candidates were registered that day. So what did my wonderful Navy officer friend do? He didn't form a working group or create guidelines, but he created two lines, one for when and one for women to register. And the women were able to get up to the registration desk. So I like this story for two reasons. Number one, it shows that increasing women's engagement in security sector is not rocket science, it takes common sense. And number two, it shows how engaging with women helped to support his overall mission. It was a very, very pragmatic approach that proved to him that proving that involving women helped to advance his institutional and specific goals. So while in this room, we think that women's engagement, we think about women's engagement as both a rights issue and a practical issue. The best and easiest, and I think in this case, easy as on our side way into the practices of other groups is to show them how this is in their own best interest. Similar to what Jackie is saying. We need to focus on all of these win-wins first as the fastest way to build momentum around the issue. It's the lowest hanging fruit, and it's a mistake for us not to focus on grabbing it first. A rights issue can become a capstone once we've made progress with all of the rest. For my own work with the military via US aid and with those in civil society abroad, trying to work with the military, I believe the key to increasing engagement with women is through these practical considerations. I want to speak a little about a tool created by US aid that really illustrates what it means to practically convince not just civilian actors, but the military to engage women as resources for stabilization. The tool is used in stability operations and is called TCAF, the Tactical Conflict Assessment and Planning Framework. TCAF was designed for both civilian and military practitioners working in unstable environments to identify local causes of instability, to design activities to counter those drivers of instability, and to measure overall impact. To date, TCAF has been used in Anbar Province in Iraq, across southern and southern eastern Afghanistan, by Marine units, Army units, and by US aid's Office of Transition Initiatives. It was just part of an interagency conflict assessment in Ecuador, and we're in dialogue right now to implement the tool in the Horn of Africa in Kenya. At its core, TCAF is an assessment tool with questions about the priority concerns of the local area and root causes of instability. But what's critical to the tool's success is that analyzers interact with the population, not just part of the population, but all segments of the population, and that means women too. We've essentially made the argument to the military that women are a critical part of a counterinsurgency strategy. If General McChrystal says to understand the local population, we are emphasizing to brigade commanders down to staff sergeants that the local population includes women. This means non-commissioned officers who might not have joined the military to talk to local women now need to engage with women to be effective at their mission, stability operations. We make these points in our training in the model, an intensive multi-day pre-deployment training. So to reiterate Jackie's point, training is essential to help, first to make the case for why engaging with women is important, and number two, really practically, how do you do it, and specifically if you're in a unit with no female personnel and with no female interpreters, which is sadly often the case. What we've found as well is providing examples of what it actually looks like when you engage only men versus what it looks like when you engage only women is really important. And we kind of have it easy because we're collecting a database of gender disaggregated data and can visualize the different priorities that women have via health, education, irrigation, security. But providing that tangible evidence in other circumstances is critical and speaks to the power of gender disaggregated data and the critical role that institutions have in requiring that. So what's exciting about this is it's not just the US military that's benefiting with this tool. Women really are getting their voices heard and they're contributing to activity to design and it's a win-win situation. Now I'm certainly not going to say that it's perfect as it exists. It's a work in progress, particularly in Afghanistan where it can be challenging to access women and we do need to do it better. But I think the example is worthwhile because I feel that we have made the case successfully and that there is a demand for perfecting how to actually do it. So how do you do it? If we want to think about lessons learned on actually engaging with women from a tactical perspective, I have some recommendations both from the TCAF experience and from others. First off, like the story that I started with, don't overthink it. Gender mainstreaming sounds very, very daunting. Being practical is very straightforward. So think like the Navy officer at the AFL recruitment event. Secondly, we need to promote more civil military cooperation to include women. When we do our training with military units, we encourage them often to work through partnerships with other US government civilians, US aid implementing partners, contractors hired specifically to conduct TCAF assessments, and even parts of the host nation government. Some of these actors have more women in their ranks, can hire women more easily to fill the need, or simply have more flexibility to interact with women by virtue of being the same nationality as a local population. Just because the military has a paucity of women doesn't mean that there aren't other options, which brings me to speaking about the need for increasing the number of women within formal military institutions. I don't think we can really talk about increasing interaction with local women without addressing this issue. And I don't want to beat a dead horse or say that in every instance, you need women to interact with women, but it certainly can help. And we know that many times women in the formal military have been more easily able to access women, and there are great success stories of that. One example is a new Marine Corps female engagement team, or FETS. A report on their activities found that the approach works very well with benefits among the population that can't be achieved by men. The report says, quote, female Marines are extended the respect shown to men but granted the access reserved for women. FETS were often invited into areas in Afghanistan where all male units were not. And when the patrols returned, they discovered that, quote, some Afghan women had been anticipating the opportunity to meet with American women. In one home, the women said that they had caught glimpses of the patrolling FET through a crack in the wall and that they had prayed that you would come to us, unquote. The fact that the Afghan women welcomed return visits indicated that their partners hadn't punished them for speaking to Americans as many individuals often think. So it's not just recruitment and retention with women in formal institutions, but making sure that they're in the right places. So the issue is really having commanders with enough foresight to assign his or her female soldiers or Marines to line units to work with female interpreters to access the perceptions of the female population. There are female soldiers and Marines, but they're often logistical, medical, or other support units. And they're usually very few who are assigned to combat battalions. So one creative approach that Marines have used in Afghanistan to address this, they've actually formed a specific unit of women at the Marine expeditionary brigade level, very high level division, division level, that they then travel around to different areas in our kind of the expert female force. Another recommendation is to create a demand for more female interpreters. We hear this time and time again in our trainings. Men can work effectively with female interpreters to engage local women. And this is a very leveraged way of increasing access to the population. There's also the side of the potential benefit of economically empowering local women who when we increase the demand for this type of functionality. So we tell many of the military units that we work with on TCAF, please request female interpreters. Another important recommendations, and this is within the military community and really across the international community is that we all, we need institutions that need to execute better transitions of personnel during deployments. All of the strands often are dropped when one group leaves an area and a new group enters and you have to re-weave a cloth of connections during a new assignment. This is costly in all measurements, but it's very, very costly for connections that have been developed with women where personal relationships can often take time to develop. We need better transitioning of key women contacts across redeployments. Leave a list of key contacts if their deployment overlaps make introductions but don't let hard relationships, don't let hard-earned relationships with her. One example I have specifically is working with a women's advocacy organization in Liberia called Security for Women Through Advocacy Coalition. They had developed an amazing relationship with the head of the Office of Defense Coordination at the US Embassy in Liberia and had coordinated a series of events to bring their network members and AFL members into high schools and colleges to recruit women to join the forces. And when the colonel of that office left the entire effort floundered and they had to start from scratch and lost valuable time and resources. Lastly, we need to be patient and flexible with accessing women in the field and we need to be creative. One Army unit who was doing TCAP analysis in Eastern Pactica had very, very difficult circumstances on the ground. It's a very unstable environment. But what happened is that they ended up building trust with the men in the local community through some of their military doctors who were providing healthcare at first to the men and then ultimately were providing healthcare services to the women. And they ended up having conversations with those women about their priorities but they did it through the the guises of developing trust through the health clinic. So going about it through, through a lateral entry point was really helpful for them to ultimately to have further conversations. Highlighting other specific examples from Afghanistan of how to meet with local women, the critical importance of recognizing how to create secure environments for meeting with local women, particularly for the military, getting outside the wire, establishing points of contact that are off base, organizing regular meetings, but being conscious of varying the dates and times of those meetings and varying the dates and those times of those meetings for times that make sense for local women. What fits best into their schedule? When are they most flexible? And how can we facilitate their participation either through reimbursements for travel costs, childcare, other ways to make it easier for them? So I like sharing those kinds of details because it gives you examples of the kinds of tangible things to be thinking about, but I don't wanna be so prescriptive as well because it isn't a one size fits all solution. It's thinking about the kinds of questions that you have to ask in different environments to figure out the best way to interact with women. So in conclusion, I feel very optimistic. I think there is incredible rising awareness in the military, particularly around the growth of stability operations that women are resources to accomplishing the mission. It's just really now about consistent implementation, the devil being in the details, but with more opportunities like this seminar to share these practices, hopefully we'll get there. Thank you. I think that demystifies things rather than increases the fog. I'm struck by what the speakers before me, Jackie and Toby were stressing, which is this notion of including women and that being a force in and of itself for stabilization. And I think I'm coming at this from a human rights-based approach. And what I wanna do is sort of talk about what some of the principles are that motivate us in many of our international interventions and are supposed to guide the way we structure our operations. But I think that in reality, we don't walk the talk. And what I'd like to do is describe a little bit of what I think the talk is and how it might look if we walked it. And in particular, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna use the international covenant on civil and political rights as the lens for looking at these issues. And I choose the international covenant on civil and political rights as for one very important reason in the United States, and that is that the United States is a signatory and has actually ratified this human rights treaty. The United States has not ratified the Convention on Elimination of Discrimination against Women, CEDAW. But the ICCPR, as it's referred to, does in fact deal with the issue of discrimination against women head on. But before I dive into that, what I wanna talk about, since I'm talking about laws, I wanna talk about what are some of the institutional relationships that are involved in law. And this diagram, I think, shows the complexity of a post-conflict environment and what you're looking at. If you look at the top layer, what we're talking about is a variety of human capital, that can be the citizenry, the government employees, the NGO community, the private sector. And then you have these relationships. How does this human capital work with the institutions of government? And I divided that up into sort of roughly what we would think of as the three branches of government. But as you know, it's not one size fits all. Every jurisdiction has its own approaches to this. For example, dispute resolution institutions can be formal courts, as we know them, or they could be traditional tribal structures that might be taking a lead role in solving disputes. And then as we go down in the diagram, we look at what are some of the common intervention categories. When we as peacemakers go abroad, what are the types of things that we try to do? We try to encourage public participation frequently, build up institutions, create access to information, and increase accountability. A lot of these things you've heard in recent speeches about what we're gonna be doing in Afghanistan and the period going forward. And then there's sort of what are the project elements that we employ for that? There's mentoring, training, equipment, and a number of the practical examples that my colleagues have shared. So what I'm suggesting is that when we look at this complicated situation, we look at it with a human rights lens. And we sort of test whether our interventions and our approaches to these different things are consistent with what are these widely accepted principles that supposedly motivated us being there in the first place and should be guiding us in how we conduct ourselves. I'm gonna divide up the different rights and repackage them in the ICCPR. And these are the categories I'm gonna use. And these categories were not chosen at random. The rule of law department here at USIP has been doing some research and it's been preparing a handbook in connection with United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime, which will hopefully operationalize some of the principles I'm about to talk about in further detail. And these are the groups that they broke the rights into. And I'm gonna try to run through these very quickly. And of course, in the question and answer period, feel free to bombard me if this sounds too, again, mystifying. I like to start though with Article 3 because that's at the very beginning of the ICCPR and it sets up and that's the language of Article 3 up there. It's not ambiguous. I mean, it basically says that men and women should enjoy equal rights to all the rights in the covenant. And I think it's up there not by accident but by negotiation and forethought. And what we should be doing is thinking about how that applies to all the other civil and political rights that are contained in the document. So let's take Article 16 as the next one, the right to legal personality. Well, we all think we're born. We immediately have our legal personality at birth, but that's not really the end of the story. Look at the northern half of Cote d'Ivoire. The Malians and the Birkenabbi who occupy that, even if they were born there, don't necessarily have Iwarian citizenship or they're not even recognized as being legal entities in the north part of Cote d'Ivoire. So what are the consequences of that? Well, if you're a woman, can you access social services? You don't have an ID card, you can't vote. You're basically voiceless. And so if we really take that right to legal personality seriously and we think about it in a gender inclusive way, programs should be in place when it comes to registering the people in the northern part of Cote d'Ivoire to make sure that women are included in that process. Same obviously goes with Article 25, the right to vote, petition, participate in government. I mean, if we're looking at these and taking these seriously, the Iwarian examples, obviously applicable here as well, if you don't have an ID card, you don't have a voter registration card, not only are you cut off from social services, but you're not gonna be participating in the government structures, you're not gonna be involved in the political process generally. In most policy conflict environments, public safety and criminality are pretty rampant. And the ICCPR, I picked two of the provisions that I think are obvious and extremely important. First is the right to life. And I don't mean this in the rather controversial way that that is used in the United States political dialogue, but and the more just nuts and bolts, plain meaning of the phrase. What I think is interesting, and what a lot of people don't realize is that the right to life is not just a situation of the government shouldn't be killing its people or should be taking care of its people. It's also taking care of the relationships between people. And one thing that these rights frequently embed what I call vertical or horizontal protections, widely accepted terms. And that means that I also have to, I have as a peacekeeper and as a member of state institutions, I have an obligation to not only restrain my forces in the way they behave towards the citizenry, but how the citizens behave towards each other. So it is not an acceptable answer to say, men can treat women with brutality and kill them, honor killings, things like that. These are just not within the realm of these widely agreed to principles, but many people don't think of it in those horizontal terms. Same goes with the right to privacy. It's not just a question of, does the police come knocking at your door at two in the morning and ask to search your house for weaponry with no notice and no sense of restraint. It's also, are your neighbors doing that? So when we as peacekeepers and sometimes you see, there've been some really tragic cases where peacekeepers have not intervened and we all know what some of those examples are while local forces win at each other's throats. If we were really serious about honoring these principles, both on the right to life and the right to privacy, we would have a different policy in those circumstances. The issue of vulnerable groups, women are obviously a number one vulnerable group and I reiterate Article Three here, but I think it's important to think of, it doesn't just happen in terms of pronouncements about equal rights. When it comes to how they're treated as detainees or as aliens, for example, if they are not given a right to legal personality or if they are refugees, how are they treated? Of course, the right to marry. In some cases, forced marriage is a very common practice. A woman doesn't have that right to choose. And depending upon the communities or how fragmented a post-conflict environment might be, there might be certain minority rights and in many cases, the male population may be decimated and so the recognition of those minority rights may be particularly important to women. There's new terminology out there in the legal development and rule of law promotion world and it talks about legal empowerment and it frequently focuses on the role of civil society. In many, many cases, women are the most active members in civil society and there's at least four rights in the ICCPR that are really designed to protect and empower women in that sense. Of course, just the right to freedom of thought and belief but there's also the right to then go out and express that in written form, radio, television, et cetera. And then to come together as women and talk about those issues and then to actually form those organizations. And if all of these things are present, one would have an enabling environment that not only includes women but allows women to create some of the institutional stability that Jackie referred to and really contribute to the lasting peace because not only are they representing women's issues but they're actually creating the entire infrastructure and supporting that for a vibrant civil society which benefits all. In the terms of when you're rebuilding a legal system and you're putting things together the covenant also gives some guidelines. And the first is to bring these principles out of the clouds and bring them down to the earth. And they talk about not only do you put it in your constitution but you put it in your laws, you put it in your regulations and then you put remedies in place so that when these things are actually violated women have a place to go to, to seek redress. And sometimes that requires extra measures. As my colleagues have talked about women interpreters just think about that topic in the case of the justice institutions. Bringing them into a justice institution itself may be a huge challenge. The justice system may have to be brought to them. There's many different ways of sort of thinking about this and once they have a remedy, how do they enforce it? And in many cases, for example a woman may not have, while they may on the books have rights to property if their husband has been killed they may not have any representation that can actually go to the state institution and actually for example secure clear title to farmland whatever it is. Then there's the question and this is one which I think is not well looked at by our own international forces and peacekeepers and that is a lot of restrictions on these rights are justified based upon the emergency circumstances. We have to do this because there's chaos. But the Covenant actually gives some guidelines and it says the least restrictive measures and certain rights cannot be restricted for example the right to life. But it says the least restrictive guidelines should apply and they should be removed as soon as possible. And if we had that lens towards a lot of the things that we see going on right now in a peacekeeping environment we might see a revision of practices that are counterproductive. At least we would have that review process institutionalized. I'm taking policing out for a little bit more detail to show how one particular unit of the post conflict environment can involve a whole bunch of rights. And if you look at the list up here of course it's right to live but it's also freedom of movement. In some cases in this may seem like a rather obscure article but our article 11 talks about you can't put someone in jail because they didn't fulfill a contract. Well if you were to go and analyze why a lot of these people are in detention there are probably a lot of civil disputes where local important people have said this guy didn't pay me X or did that so he's really a thief. And they're converting civil disputes into criminal disputes and putting people in jail. And if the police were educated on what these principles were they might act with a bit more temperament and measure before becoming embroiled in things that they shouldn't. The other thing that I wanted to illustrate by taking police is police is one example but there's the ICPR as many others like this where those general principles we've been talking about so far have been actually elaborated painstakingly by the United Nations and subordinate bodies. And there's at least three different publications that go into great detail about how to operationalize those principles that I was just talking about. So we've got this huge body of literature there's been this huge investment on making these principles work and I suggest that it's time for the policy makers both in New York and Washington and Brussels to actually put more emphasis on operationalizing those. Article 14 is a laundry list of protections and you can look through there and you can imagine how many of those are actually honored in a lot of the post-conflict environment. And particularly if you think about these things in terms of a gender inclusive strategy there's many things in here that could be problematic depending on the cultural context. And the ICPR is not an inflexible imperialistic hegemonic instrument it can be tailored to those local cultural circumstances. What's important is in most jurisdictions wide majority not only does that post-conflict nation at least on paper say they support these principles but all the peacekeepers who show up as well. And in many times the ICPR is actually referred to in UN Security Council resolutions. Detention is one which I think a lot of people don't realize how huge a problem that is and the principles here are again elaborated by other UN documents. But in many cases for example with women detention is a much more significant problem than I think is at first blush. And I'm not talking just about women being detained although I'm sure some of you know the example of when they actually decided to put together a prison registry at the women's prison in Kabul the Policharchy women's prison. They found 100 women were in there who had actually finished their term or had never been charged with anything. Imagine the impact that that had on the families and the financial units that they were associated with. And that's all because in my humble opinion these rights regarding detainee rights weren't really respected. They weren't taken seriously. You're not keeping a register of who it is you're detaining that's accurate. I think you've just flunked the basic preset. And the other thing and I've seen this myself particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa is many of the men who are in detention are the breadwinners and the prison themselves they can't feed these people. And so the women have to have access to some of these rights just to keep their breadwinner alive. They're bringing food to them on a daily basis. And if these rights and principles are not respected at least to some significant degree their entire even if it's just a short stay in prison their entire life could be at stake. They could lose their breadwinner and their position in society just because they can't get access. With that I'd like to close with one of my favorite quotes from someone who was on the Human Rights Committee which is not to be confused with some of the other organs out there in the UN. The Human Rights Committee is a body that specifically focuses on enforcing the international covenant on civil and political rights. And it's won by a famous member who's since left the committee. And she says if domestic courts, legal practitioners and human rights advocates were fully aware of the obligations that their states have undertaken and how those obligations are interpreted and applied by independent monitoring bodies they might well be able to do more to press for effective implementation and to ensure the application of laws and policies was as far as possible consistent with treaty obligations. And I think that sums up my thesis pretty concisely. We've got to talk, we ought to start walking that and we can do it in a way I think that empowers women and at the same time empowers the state institutions that will benefit everyone. So I hope that was reasonably clear and I look forward to the questions in case it wasn't. Thanks Scott. We often hear that culture stands in the way of various third parties to engage women. These principles are universally agreed upon. They're ratified by most countries and so they can help us have tools to reframe the issue and can help us engage women not from a equality argument necessarily if that doesn't work but from a rights argument that can actually help. So sometimes we need to educate the local actors with whom we work and these are tools that can really help to do that and to again reframe the issue away from the gender issue. Okay, that could be helpful. All right, so thank you so much for these three great presentations. I'd like to invite you to come to the microphone and ask your questions. Also there's tea, coffee and water outside if you need to go get a refreshment please go ahead and do that. So if anybody has a question please come up to the microphone and we'll take questions I think one at a time for now and you can address it to a particular panel member or to all three of them or as you wish. Do you want to come to the microphone to stand so that we can hear you? Please just go ahead and form a line or however you wish. Now this one over here. Hello, my name is Larisa Breton. I'm principal at Full Circle Communications. I would like to thank all of you from such a heartfelt perspective for providing actionable measures that people can use and install program programmatically and also to use when assessing programs and developing programs and requirements especially. I have a question for you Toby about TCAP. And it's a little bit of a loaded question so I apologize in advance there's nothing I'm ready for it here it's merely a question. I have extensive experience with the polling that went around the human terrain system from the US Army and in particular Jackie Jacqueline did stuff you talked about when you have wins it's important to say this is a win it is a qualitative measure and we're going to say it is it exists. However with respect to TCAP and the polling the random sample stuff the kish stuff that went on with HTS what's the best way in your mind to move forward to try to get at those qualitative measures in a quantitative sense so that we can have a better discussion with policymakers and with military to help them understand ways forward. If that's an understandable question. I think I understand. I mean so for those who don't know TCAP is a way to distill qualitative assessment information into quantifiable database to then inform programmatic decisions by whoever the implementer is and I think what we are this has always been a foundation of the tool is to not sacrifice rich qualitative information for the sake of developing a nice clean attractive database but that you're really taking the time for deeper interaction with individuals as you're really trying to understand the root causes of instability and to make sure that that information becomes part of the program design so not just you input the information to the database and then it floats up you never see it again but that we really one specific recommendation that we have made now whether it's implemented consistently is another question but that the individual who was actually involved in the interviewing and the assessment then continues to be involved in program design in that particular area so that you're connecting the individuals who have who are more connected to the qualitative information to then continue throughout the process of the program design so that's one specific recommendation because we don't want it's like a game of telephone that by the time you started out with this wonderful nice rich report of qualitative information you end up with one line on an Excel spreadsheet with one word that's the summary of that where we recognize that that's not correct and that we're trying to facilitate the connection of that deeper richer information with the program design so we're trying. Great, thank you so much. Sure. My name is Ruth Sear and I have a question for Scott. In terms of a human rights framework can you give an example where an appeal to the elements of the human rights covenant has worked practically in shifting the agenda in a local environment? Well, I'm gonna take a little bit of a leak and say that hold this up for show and tell you probably can't say this. What I did was I tried to walk my own talk and go out into Macedonia after there was the conflagration around 2003, 2004 and there was the Ulfred framework agreement that was supposed to basically reduce tensions in the environment and do that by having a more inclusive approach for the Albanian minority as well as the Turkish minority these would be the Macedonian population and what I did was I took these standards and I developed an assessment tool and a questionnaire and a methodology and I went out with the team and we checked up on how well the Ulfred framework agreement was living up to instilling these equal rights that it was supposed to and then we presented the government through presented the results to the government the government participated in parts of it but we did it through quiet channels and we also did it with delivering it to other major donors such as of course USAID, the European Union and well I can't claim credit I can say that the subsequent programming for example just to draw one on the way they approached the civil service and the police was they actually built into the programming certain inclusive what I would say rights based approaches and they followed that through it was not just in the program design the actual police academy and in the civil service the way they restructured that and so I would say that that is a good example of a concrete success I think probably at a certain point in time the implementers didn't realize what they were working on and that they were really so rights oriented they did of course when they were handing out the books that made the citations to it but it reminds me of something Toby just said an answer to the previous question it's important to have the people who are involved in the assessment and design followed through on the projects to keep reinvigorating that and so I would probably say it's a qualified success I don't know if there's still all sitting around with coffee to ice in the yard or an ice stand let me weave in one comment that we got from one of the women that are watching the webcast and I should say I guess we got a call saying that I should tell whoever's watching what the email is again remind them so it's gender at usip.org where you can send an email but let me just read this interesting comment and then we'll move over to questions again it says hi this is Samia Ahmed from Sudan first we would like to thank the Institute for Include Security and USIP it is really great to be part of this session while it is happening it is really empowering we hope this will continue Jackie gave examples of positive engagement for women to add to these women can also contribute well in security policies in our context like Sudan the visibility of women in the security sectors as policy makers is badly needed as the image right now is for women at implementing roles like in police security and intelligence usually as implementing officers availing opportunities and skills for women to be able to promote their skills in the area of security work and take part in designing of policies and practice and utilize opportunities like security arrangements in peace agreements etc when we talk about women engagement in security we also need to take into consideration the conditions of women who participate in rebel movements or armies and often in DDR programs the nature of their participation is seen and dealt with as providers of food and stuff while most of them play similar roles as men and often suffering more because of their gender during their struggle my questions what are the techniques and approaches used in the north and western world to build links between women in the security sectors and the general population or is it not a big issue and not needed are women well or where to recognize in their context apart from the missions they get sent to abroad and when these women participate in the missions abroad are they sent to adhere to examples to dear sorry for example to 1325 referring to the UN resolution or is it just a military police order and do they realize the kind of messages their presence brings in countries like ours she just had one more comment and then we'll get to the questions apart from the inclusion of women in the formal security sector structures while we still don't see investments of inclusion of women in the informal structures like community initiatives protection measures and programs led and supported by peacekeeping missions UN and international community although there is a global experience that points out to the importance of this thank you and best wishes thank you Samia and we'll try to address your questions does somebody want to go first? sure that's great first of all that they contributed I mean just to highlight what's happening we have women in Sudan who are watching what's going on and actually sending in comments so this really highlights I think what I made in my opening comments that there I mean there's obviously incredible capacity there to contribute to these issues and I'm really grateful to USIP for helping make those voices heard Samia made obviously a number of great points to address some of the questions are women well recognized I think she was referring to a number of maybe western or northern as she called it militaries we work a lot with women in NATO forces and elsewhere work I was in Brussels earlier this year speaking with the committee of women in NATO forces I think there's always a struggle of women in security forces don't want to be seen of course is dealing explicitly with what they would consider women's issues so you know a number of the points I made related to women being more better positioned in many ways to deal with issues of sexual violence and others women in security forces will be the very first to tell you that they want to be police officers or they want to be marines they want to be members of elite and security forces they don't want to be serving only women and dealing with only women's issues so I would say that women in these security forces and men who are working with them really have an obligation to treat them as professionals first and foremost and to figure out ways that men can that they can first of all access their unique skills but also take them very seriously and as professionals one of the highlights of international security and women's participation relates to the situation of Liberia and General Khmer referenced it in the remarks that are available outside I really hope you'll take a copy makes excellent points in them and he noted that in India Liberia or India sent to Liberia and all women's formed police unit so they sent I think about 125 at a time women police officers and you know they did their jobs extremely professionally and they did a great job but one of the impacts of them being there was just the visibility of women professional security officers among the Liberian population and they did a number of things to actually interact with the community so as Toby mentioned they were going to speak at high schools and at trade associations and they were going to speak to young women and provide for them this role model of women who were not working explicitly on women's issues they were not doing the logistics that a lot of women end up doing and the recruitment of local Liberian women to the Liberian police force or the Liberian national police following that increased by 300% so the increase of Liberian women applying to be Liberian national police officers increased by 300% following this deployment so I would just say that you know I think we all have to be careful in identifying the unique and specific contributions that women make in saying that those are not their sole skills and that women very much want to be taken seriously in all forms but the kinds of messages and role models that they provide are really powerful Good Anything else? No? Okay we may come back to this issue it's a very interesting issue trying to draw parallels are there any lessons that we can learn on donor countries are trying to set an example or do they have answers in terms of how are women being linked to security issues and as security providing officials and they're linked to the general population it's very interesting Can I, sorry make one other final point just I realized I didn't address the issue of links between women and the security sector here in the general population I was in Kyrgyzstan in November and had the chance to have a really amazing interaction with a group of community police advisors and so the organization of security and economic cooperation, the OSCE was working with Kyrgyz National Police and they had this incredible model of community interaction and what it was was they supported the establishment of these community advisory board community police advisory boards around Bishkek, so the capital of Kyrgyzstan I had this amazing opportunity to go there and what I realized was it was groups of people of really just interested and committed citizens who had a liaison officer from the Kyrgyz National Police and they just talked regularly about security issues so there was a women's committee they created databases of at-risk families that had issues of domestic violence they talked about vulnerable people in their communities and one of the things that the police did to encourage this is they had regular open houses where people from the community could come and just have a look at the police station effectively and they could bring kids there and look at the jails and say this is where you might be detained in future if you break the law this is how we work, this is where we collect information it was just a really powerful model of the fact that this is a community police service not a police force as Toby was talking about and they really took seriously this fact and the majority of the people on their community police advisory groups were women and so I thought it was a real model of how to actually engage women in these issues and they did that by making themselves first of all appear to be much less threatening and then physically being out there I just wanted to say the very fact that Sami is asking this question about what can be learned from other parts of the world just really speaks to the critical need for exchange of information and trying to share lessons learned to create partnerships and opportunities for learning between women who are in the security sector both within their countries and across different environments it's something that inclusive security actually spent a little bit of time facilitating trying to connect female Liberian police officers with Canadian female police officers Jackie is Canadian and is a really really exciting model that we would advocate for those of you know audience who are involved in to try to replicate in other areas. Thank you. Okay thanks for your patience we'll move to question I know her. Hi my name is Liz Panarelli I work here at USIP and my question is about gender disaggregated data I personally feel that it's important for increasing attention to an inclusion of women in all processes but coming from a university and perhaps idealistic context where there are movements to move gender beyond the binary of men and women and wondering about and maybe from a human rights perspective or in cultures where that binary isn't applicable and here in the United States how to collect gender disaggregated data in a way that is open and inclusionary to all genders thanks. Thank you. I will jump in on that from a rights perspective I think that's a crucial point and the data collection and many of the environments we work in at least from a formal perspective is either non-existent or chaotic or struggling at best and so you it's really hard to get a clear picture sometimes there even in a case where they do have potentially the data collection though you have what I would call mental roadblocks I want to give one example there was a country that will remain nameless where I was working on some domestic violence legislation taking a rights based approach there was no opposition to us working on that there was no cultural resistance but there was also no perceived need of course they didn't have domestic violence in this country because and they cited their data was that there was not a single situation where it had been reported at one of their hospital emergency rooms so it just wasn't an issue it's very kind of me to offer to talk about that with them but they just didn't have that problem well we all know that that's a ridiculous claim because domestic violence occurs everywhere but I think one of the challenges is to in some cases just educate and use different strategies to get people into the data collection mode because I think you're right on I mean it's not being collected adequately because it would tell many different stories once you have that data set there's a lot of different aspects at least from a rights perspective you can learn about and it's not just data about you know coming into emergency rooms or hospitals but look at the state budget how much is allocated to things that might affect various genders do they have any set asides is there a ministry of women's issues or things like that and so I think it's a very spot on question unfortunately I think my overall answer is we're not doing a very good job yet okay thank you hi my name is Elena Tanze and I'm a member of the International Security Network and I'm going to ask a little bit of a selfish question can you recommend agencies or security groups that are currently pushing to hire women since I and several other people I know are looking for jobs and if you can't answer that specifically maybe advice on your own issues specifically maybe advice on your own experiences in the sector and how to improve that climb thank you we can go back to it if you want to think about it we'll address that we'll just think about it a bit hi I'm Kimberly King I'm with the Alliance for Peace Building and a couple of comments and questions first Scott when you were talking about the different issues and especially in detainees I was just in a meeting where I think it was highlighted even more for me in the country of Nigeria and we were looking at reforms there and the statistics on how long folks were detained especially the women for one two and three and more years before they even are heard or listed and I wondered about I think you made a reference to that part of the process but I wanted to be able to find it more in your outline and also to ask if this outline is available online or some way we can get the because there was a lot of detail I apologize for that and the speed with which I went through it I'd be glad to share it with you and glad to have further discussions and your spot on with your question the intake process and actually getting that person registered is so crucial because in most legal situations that's when certain protections are supposed to attach and what they do and actually in one country where I was working on this I won't name it but they would move women and men right before they had to register them to another location and then they get to start over before they had to register it so it's a very pernicious problem and and your spot on to identify that and Nigeria is a terrible case too. Right, well we're going into some focused discussions on that so I think assessment tools within the security sector and peace building in the larger umbrella of that about how we're able to identify what is a good gender training and what isn't any thoughts you have about that and we'd like to support the development of that if it doesn't exist. Thanks. Thank you. Great for sure. Thank you for your interest and commitment to that. I found very little in terms of assessment tools on assessing the effectiveness of training on gender. In fact I don't think I've ever actually seen anything that's really good. We've tried to you know we do surveys and get evaluation forms as we deliver training we always try to do a baseline assessment so you know asking general questions at the beginning of a training that get to people's perceptions I think is the biggest issue related to gender training so you know do you think a woman could be the minister of the interior for example you know do you think a woman should be a battalion commander things that don't necessarily talk about skills but that talk about perceptions at the beginning and then really afterwards has that changed so I think we've found that to be one of the best ways to assess whether or not training like this has been effective but as far as a standardized tool I really have not come across anything that's effective. Maybe Nadia has got different experience on that but I would say that's a big issue. And just if I can I was just thinking about the previous two questions do you mind if I please go ahead and briefly talk about that Liz your question about gender disaggregated data I think we've addressed the sort of non binary function of that but I think the biggest way to capture maybe what you're getting at is to actually start measuring collecting data related to specific roles because I think what we find especially post conflict is that roles change you know women are now put in positions of being primary red winners as Scott was saying men are also fulfilling different roles and I think the way that you actually start taking apart the different roles and sort of more gender issues of conflict are to actually collecting gender disaggregated data in places where you think it doesn't matter so you know how many women versus how many men showed up for training on specific issues how many women versus how many men participated or signed up for different social programs etc and I think once you start getting that you can start getting some data on the different roles that people are fulfilling post conflict in particular that gives some more information related to I hope what you're getting at and secondly Elena your question about currently pushing to hire this is an easy answer but police and military are always looking to hire and recruit women and I think it's something that people don't think about enough and I wish I thought about it as a younger woman of actually joining the police and you know I still think about it now it's something that I think a lot of young women as a career option and I think we absolutely should it goes back to these issues of really not you know I had no concept of what police officers could or should do when I was considering career path and I think if I really did have an accurate assessment of that I might have chosen to go into one of those fields and I think we can underestimate the importance of women considering armed and uniform services as career options these days because it really is the best way I think to infiltrate these issues from the inside so easy answer but true I hope I just wanted to make a point about the issue of improving training and I think it's not only just improving the assessment so that we actually do have some agreement on what does a successful gender training look like but to think about what you can do with the outset as well something that USAID has been trying to improve is actually defining competencies for its staff members more specifically so that you don't have a vague competency like understand gender but that you're really at that beginning first step cataloging exactly what it is from the most practical standpoint possible whether it is under competency around collecting gender disaggregated data evaluating program proposals from a gender perspective if it's for contracting specific more tactical kinds of skills around dialoging with women but to think about what can be done to increase the quality of training at that first stage before the trainings are even developed my first experience with training on this issue was at the UN mission in Sudan and I was really engaged and interested in this and so I went to this training and it was the one hour on gender that happens in the induction training so all new people to the mission partake in this training and it was about 45 minutes the definition of gender so what is sex, what is gender incredibly theoretical things that I was confused about by the end actually following this 45 minute discussion and then 15 minutes on the UN's policy of sexual exploitation so 15 minutes on the fact that you will be sent home and you will be severely disciplined basically if you talk to a woman was the key takeaway message so and it was me a couple other civilians and about 40 Nepalese peacekeepers sitting in this training and by the end I was far more confused than I was in the beginning and it had left me with this Kimberley's question about what exactly was the goal of that training you know what competencies did they expect anyone to come away with because it was partly about awareness but there was absolutely no skills angle to it whatsoever so totally agree that the only way training is going to improve is if we start identifying what are these specific outcomes that we want to have come from the training itself I teach in the Academy for International Conflict Management and peace building here at USIP and I've been doing including a gender session in my courses and encouraging and helping my colleagues to develop their own sessions in their courses I would urge people to remember that adult learning principles apply everywhere and the very first principle is don't lecture for 40 hours and get people engaged and thinking and reflecting themselves about some of these issues that's the very first thing and I would like to suggest that you know when we're talking about interactive going to the interactive route when we're educating and training as opposed to lecturing and talking about what's the resolution what's the mission what can you do what can you not do I call that induction training that's what the UN calls it it's induction training it's how to be a good mission participant but then we need to be training people on how to make better decisions how to be aware of various issues that they should be aware of when they're developing programs or making particular decisions so interactive sessions are very very useful and helpful and teach quite a bit to adults and I would like to point to the decaf tool that's been put out a variety of exercises that now there I think there are about 12 of them the it's a training resource put out by decaf that was edited by a variety of people in a variety of institutions including USIP four of us here at USIP were part of the editing board for for these exercises and there's just a tool I guess a booklet, a handbook full of exercises that you can use in training I can share more details of that tool with you but it's very useful there are a variety of exercises in building awareness there are a variety of exercises on how you engage women in the particular justice sector reform in security sector reform in all the way to social well-being issues like health education and things like that so I would urge people to think about interactive sessions and training getting people to not just listen to rules and regulations and principles and what to do and what not to do but really get people to think themselves, talk amongst themselves in small groups and really wrestle with some of the issues on the how to sort of approaches I would also say that it's important when we're doing training to do a needs assessment to understand what our audience you know especially when talking about gender issues where is our audience what are they convinced of what do they need to be convinced of what are they aware of what do we need to make them aware of so it's dangerous to teach people what they already know it's a waste of time and resources but it's also dangerous to go and provide them how to's when they're not necessarily convinced that women can make a difference for example so we need to really make the assessment understand our audience and tailor our training to the needs of the audience and to the work that they will be doing that's always so pretty useful and then I also wanted to bring up an issue that's always about gender going back to recruiting women in security forces here in the west in the US as in places in post conflict environments or conflict zones we have to think about work life balance we have to think about women's issues taking care of children taking care of elders and home taking you know transportation issues all these kinds of things we need to be thinking about those they are obstacles for women to get into some of these jobs that are you know less traditional than the ones that women have been going to so those are the comments and about training I'm happy to talk offline afterwards about some of these tools because women are really really useful could I just make a little I just want to make a little short advertisement that's related to that and build on what Jackie mentioned in her remarks about NPROL international network for the promotion of rule of law if you're interested in rights based security sector reform justice institutions reform I would encourage you to go to nprol.org and sign up and post some of these issues because one of the things is that since you know maybe there's not a great answer right now for how you assess the efficacy of some gender training initiatives but our goal with NPROL is to create a virtual network that will you know allow us to have sort of a you say longitudinal approach so over time as people learn about these things or come up with things they post at Sharon and together you know as a community can then critique and suggest and refine some of these tools and we don't all have to be sitting in the same room to do it so yeah thank you go ahead we've been standing there for a while my name is Elisa Turro and I work at the State Department's Humanitarian Information Unit I want to thank all of you for your very helpful words of advice and comments and suggestions my question at the Humanitarian Information Unit I'm working on research on conflict related sexual violence and rape and one of the things I would like to hear your take on is when women are included in the security sector what are some of the tangible impacts on sexual violence and rape thank you sure I'll start on that one first of all I think not everyone is aware that the UN actually has been working on some very important frameworks related to sexual violence recently so UN Security Council Resolution 1325 was passed about 10 years ago and then in the last I think year and a half there have been three new resolutions some very specifically related to sexual violence including 1820 which really went a long way to I think bringing the international community first of all in realizing that sexual violence is a tactic of war and is a destabilizing force so I think just to frame the answer broadly speaking we're starting to actually acknowledge sexual violence as a tactic of warfare as I said as opposed to just sort of a side issue that is a consequence of war but really to acknowledge it as really integral to the strategies for fighting war first of all so your question was related to the impact of women in the security sector in addressing those issues there are a number of answers and I think of impacts that they make first of all and general Khmer mentions this in his remarks women are just far more likely to tell another woman when they experience sexual violence so as you can imagine it's just incredibly difficult for a woman in a community who's been a victim of sexual violence to go to a male member of a security force who often these security forces have been perpetrating conflict and have been active members of this conflict in their communities to then go to say I experienced sexual violence so I think at its base level women are just more comfortable talking about these issues with other women general Khmer mentioned that sexual violence is now the largest reported crime to the Liberian national police and I think you would not see that if you didn't have an emphasis on having not just women officers but women officers who are actually out in the communities or don't force a woman to walk into headquarters and talk to the clerk at the front desk but people who as Toby mentioned they've developed relationships with and developed trust with you really start to get that information and secondly I think there's some emerging data to show that the behavior of men changes when there is a critical mass of women in any organization and it holds true for men and women in the security sector so some of this is based on research of US police services that when there's a critical mass and usually we say that's about 30% of women the behavior of men changes and I think it really is it will become a truism that sexual violence perpetrated by security forces will decrease as there become more and more women involved and you know for a number of I guess sociological reasons that I haven't studied and don't understand but I really think it's these kind of social pressures are one of the biggest ways to actually decrease sexual violence and sexual exploitation perpetrated by security forces I'd like to add to I think Jackie did a great summary introducing what some of the new developments are I would add one cautionary note and that is while we've finally gotten to the point where we acknowledge rape is an instrument of war and that's a huge step forward and long overdue it actually is not the same instrument in each environment so the impact of mass rape in one culture in one country might have to have a different response I think there are some general takeaways I know having worked in some mass atrocities documentation projects and different locales in the past and one of the things is to create a safe space for women to talk Jackie's spot on they're more likely to talk to women but then there is they don't need to tell the story 17 times and so retraumatizing the person who's been traumatized has got to be in the foremost any strategy programmatically that's developed and I would also suggest that there be counseling services associated with it so there's not only because in many cases justice is not what they're thinking of they're thinking about getting back to normal and in order to encourage them to come into the process and begin to report accurately I think it's important that they also have a tangible benefit which in this case I would suggest would be counseling and another note just on that specific issue I mentioned earlier Sierra Leone and the special courts that they set up to prosecute sexual violence and one of the things that they tried to take very seriously was actually counseling women on potential consequences of testifying so you know not just saying come and tell your story Scott says 17 times anyone who listen isn't it awful what happened let's tell the world let's get justice for you but also really understanding do you want to tell the story publicly there are consequences to you as a woman in your community coming forward with this and I think it's our responsibility as people who are supporting processes like that to really discuss these issues and I think that those are things that women understand and will bring are maybe more likely to bring to the floor discussions like that do you are you interviewing people in a gender sensitive way and are you also counseling them in a gender sensitive way so what are the gender specific impacts of you testifying and making sure that people really do have all the information before they continue to give their story 17 different times one other one other point I wanted to raise particularly around issue of reporting rapes is not only to look at the impact of women in the security sector but also looking at women in the medical field I remember being shocked and appalled at work that I was doing in northern Uganda to learn that I believe in all in you know the four most LRA affected areas in the north there were two doctors who were actually certified to fill out the medical form that a woman needed to actually report a rape and that that in itself was an incredible bottleneck to then going to a police station so to be looking in your research for those kinds of potential impacts within the what services are available in the health fields. Let me just read two comments and then we'll give you the floor this is a comment from Humara Shahid who is a former member of parliament and a journalist in Pakistan she says I believe that in the ground reality it's not the policy shapers or policy makers that face war or even more blatantly bleed in war it's common people and the soldiers and both suffer a great deal the demons of the war remain with them the real connection between women and people responsible for security could be very meaningful for defusing war or the ideology of war the radicalization hatred towards clan, creed, culture or religion. Women shape the mentality and mindsets of the children they bear and the generations they raise their influence is long lasting women are very meaningful reservoir if tapped properly can bring change in very little time women can build peace because they understand peace and need peace for their children and they are natural communicators and can create very effective bridges so thank you for that comment and one other comment and then we'll go to a question in the room from Sami Nihar in Sudan she says despite of the utmost importance of women in police and security we need still to think how we can put gender in the center of their mind and attitude to the best of women victims of war how can we make important role more related to women women's daily life especially in displace and refugee camps so some food for thoughts that should not be ignored so thank you for sending in those comments we've got another one to read but I think we'll go to the microphone go ahead thanks to all of you very much it's inspiring to have both the bottom up discussion of how we can take successes and build them into something broader that we work from broad principles down to specifics I'm Melanie Greenberg I'm co-president of women international security and I also run a small foundation that works on peace building and nuclear amplification and I have two comments and a question first for the people who don't know why we have a report that's about two years old on women in peace operations that I recommend to any of you interested in the subject also for the person who asks about jobs we've got a very good jobs network if you want to join wise and get some ideas the second question our comment involves window dressing and the concern that I have in police reform that it's often kind of easy to try to get your numbers up without real heft behind it and I just give a very small example I was in Mumbai last year and I was struck at the airport how there seems to be about an equal number of airport police who are men and who are women but the women's uniform was a sorry it was khaki with epaulettes that I wondered okay, so they have to run after a drug dealer, a terrorist are they going to be able to run in that sorry and what were they really doing, what was their purpose so I just set those kinds of questions off in my mind my larger question is one of leadership and in some ways we have a small pool to draw from we don't have mediators, as Jackie mentioned female mediators in UNP's processes there are very few heads of state like Liberia that can set these processes in motion, but what can we as an international community do to build leadership either of transitional justice processes in the military and the peacekeeping forces what levers can be pressed to create more of a social movement towards women as leaders in these processes thank you can I shame first of all I think is an answer you know I think it's just not true that there aren't women who have the skills to do this it's just I think we're not looking hard enough to find them and we're not prioritizing it enough one of my favorite stories relates to and again apologies for all the Sudanese examples but a member of parliament in Sudan that we worked with a fabulous woman named Jen Makumba and the secretary general of the UN so Ban Ki-moon was traveling to Khartoum to deal with a number of issues including the crisis in Darfur and so he gathered with him a room full of prominent members of parliament mainly heads of committees and respected parliamentarians so she's the only woman in this room she's head of the economic affairs committee and she sits through the secretary general's discussion and he talks about how important it is to have women involved in the crisis in Darfur they're the majority of victims they have incredible roles in camps and elsewhere leadership to provide important to the reconstruction etc so he goes on he talks about that in a number of other issues then there are a series of questions and finally she finally gets called upon and he says yes we'd like to hear from the women of Sudan on this issue and she says thank you Mr. Secretary General I really want to acknowledge how important your remarks are and tell you that I too am advocating for the same things within my political party, within Darfur with the rebel movements etc but I must say it would help me a lot if you actually came here with some women on your team and he looks around and he had not to say that he didn't have women there but in the room with him at that time there were only men sitting around him I mean people aren't stupid they get the fact that the UN and the international community and the rest of us can go and talk about the importance of women but if we don't actually provide these external signals that yes we actually value this and it's important if the UN says that they can't find women to participate in their world how are we expecting these Darfurian movements to have 25% women at the negotiation table so I think just the symbolism of who we send on delegations who we appoint to senior level positions I mean no one would advocate for appointing people who aren't qualified we're just saying expand your search and make a point of doing it and shame people who don't just talk about it openly I think people are very reluctant to talk about gender or women's representation because they think it's sort of unfairly singling out women or that it makes it a women's issue and I think we just need to start talking about it and calling for it and calling out countries that don't nominate women to senior positions at the UN I work a lot of advocacy in Canada we have great qualified women and we're not nominating them to these senior positions and then we shame the UN for not appointing enough women there's troop contributing and contributing country issues that we can all work on at these base levels I really just think the women are there and we need to start making it more embarrassing for people when they don't make a point of profiling them I would just add Melanie, your window dressing point is a really good one and I really like Jackie's explanation to you Liz about looking at data gathering in terms of roles because if you think about the role you just nailed it can you chase down even a pick pocket in a sorry and if you begin to sort of define roles and what are the sub aspects I think you can get beyond that window dressing or at least begin having a frank discussion I mean obviously the optics that Jackie is talking about are slam docks but you can do a lot of head counting and make it look a lot better than it is and I think that's your point Thank you Let me just read one comment and then we'll go to your question This is from Samia Elashmi She is an advocate and chairwoman of a women's organization working for women's human rights since 1990 in Cartoon She says I think it is extremely important to talk about this important topic because we believe that peace does not mean only not war Peace for me as a woman is social security and welfare so engaging women in security will widen the concept of peace to the soldier in the soldier's mind peacekeepers I've prepared a working paper on the role of women in security arrangement in the new wash up protocol in the Sudan peace agreement the conclusion of the working paper is that war and peace issues are men dominated issues women are not part of it at all even nothing is mentioned about women soldiers or officers so we need to incorporate gender issues in military forces and peacekeeping forces Thank you for your comment Please My name is Majkabwit I'm a retired social worker and I'm married to a Congolese American I'm a South African American This whole issue of tactical violence is overwhelming to us as Africans there is a need to change the mindset that women are lowest on the totem pole of humanity just for starters I don't know if we can also get curriculum in the schools that prepare boys girls to be ready to defend themselves so that by the time you think of applying for a job in the police force and so forth you are empowered also we have a situation whereby um the privacy issue comes up before safety of women we need to have DNA of all those that were paying for to be in the security forces so that when there are rapes we understand that women are raped and their children are raped but there is no follow up whether this is internationally or wherever I would strongly suggest that we have instruments that to bring these people to justice if we are a source of peace and lastly we have to think outside the box now we are a people who are supposedly free but freedom means that we need to take the freedom to a higher level than we did in the past thank you thank you for your comments I have a reaction and I agree with you to start with and I think one of the things that I hope we are now on the cusp of is actually being honest and addressing that those are issues and beginning to gather data and I am quite excited by the I am going to get the tool, acronym wrong T-CAP that Toby is talking about actually has soldiers collecting data on some of these topics because I have found in actually the assessment process of having people go out and ask those questions it changes them they are not unaffected by being involved and actually looking at it because it is real easy to just you know you are in a war environment to shut down and close your eyes and be away from that but if you are involved in that assessment process and looking at what the tactics of mass rape really mean then you can't close your eyes and that changes the way you and you go back to your home capital or wherever you go you are a different person and you carry that sensitivity I think forward into everything that you do so I am very excited about that tool and hope to get a chance to see it one day in person when it is not top secret it is not unclassified yeah but on terms of the DNA point the Stemson Center recently published a really interesting document Bill Durch was the head there and I think it is an excellent piece and what it talks about is criminal accountability for peacekeepers and it is really sparked by a lot of the problems in DRC and some other places where peacekeepers misbehaved and while he doesn't suggest sampling their DNA initially he does suggest creating a system of accountability criminal accountability that at least the peacekeeper will model the proper behavior and then that I think in turn serves for taking it to the next level which is what you are talking about thinking outside the box and taking it to when you are arming local forces projecting those standards forward and but we still have a ways to go that is the sad story but your challenge is one that is well taken and we should all accept it and try to do our best to take it to that next level can I add another point on that and on the issue of curriculum I think that is one of the next frontiers of gender work and women in the security sector work there is a great woman that we work with in Macedonia who is looking at how school curriculum elementary schools are gendered and one of the things that she is doing is now going into elementary schools and talking about if you have look at your class president is it a boy or is it a girl and what difference do you think it makes if it is a boy or a girl do you think if you have a president who is a boy and vice president who is a girl it makes it better talking at school levels I know you were talking more about defense, actual tactics but I think there is a difference and boys who are comfortable with female class presidents at young ages I think it is going to do an important job down the road for paving the way on these issues as the field starts dealing with these issues we are backing up further and further into where these very deeply held perceptions start getting formed and obviously they get formed at very young ages thank you for your comments and insight I am Sharon Kotak at the State Department and I just wanted to follow up on the last comment both by Jackie and by the woman who is from South Africa I agree the idea of focusing on curriculum in grade schools and I am wondering have UNICEF and UNESCO kind of been brought in for designing curriculum in conflict areas because I think this would be excellent it is something I never thought of before but I think it would be good thank you I think they have and I don't know the extent to it I think definitely yes I have heard about it but I can't speak any more to it than that to learn more about for sure I think UNIFM may also have been involved in that too so they would be a place to check I have seen some stuff on tables before that look like that I would say I actually have a tiny bit of experience with textbooks and just reminding of how particularly you are thinking about you know developing countries working with their to reform how their historical narratives are constructed of how critical it is for international partners to really international actors to be partnering with ministries of education and local and national actors to make sure that it's not just a western perspective that's getting shipped in via a box of books but it's something that they're intimately involved in creating so I know we all know that but just to remind it and what we also know is that curriculum development is highly political so we need to also tackle at that level but it's definitely something to bring up do we have sure you please we technically have it until 1130 so I have actually two questions I would like to address one is Mr. Carlson and the other one to Anil I came a little bit late when you were talking about Africa so maybe you may have mentioned something on Africa because you have done a lot of work so far as I can tell Sudan as well as Liberia how do you empower women in a place like DRC that is the Democratic Republic of the Congo where you have had extensive sexual violence and all of these things which are still ongoing right now there how do you deal with that issue in a conflict situation like you have right now happening in the Congo there maybe you can comment on that one and what your organization is doing as an advocate group there my question to Mr. Carlson is this you discuss about some of the laws which may apply or some of the clauses the United Nations has passed here in relationship to women and what have you there if you deal with a situation like you have in Afghanistan or let's say the Middle East where you have a lot of tradition there against actual women you take Afghanistan where people like the Taliban are asking women to wear burqas and a lot of those things and I think if they take over for instance right now they are going to expel all the young girls from schools like they have done before because we have seen that the Taliban have done that how do you deal with this situation like this and some of the laws passed by the United Nations to help women here and there but then you have this wall or traditional wall here how do we deal with this are we being realistic in applying these laws here as people residing in the western world versus those people living in traditional society like you have in Afghanistan or even for that matter in the Middle East can you comment on this Thank you sure thanks for your comments just to kind of back up into that starting maybe a little bit with what you were asking Scott I think a lot of it what you are getting to relates to culture and is it culturally always culturally appropriate and is there a culture in which this doesn't hold and I would say that there is no culture in the world where women don't want to have an influence over the decisions that affect their lives if you start with that basic premise then you have to look at well how can we do it in a way that's appropriate so we use examples from Afghanistan a lot because people often don't even think it's possible there you have the Taliban there you have these images of women in Burkas but you also have women who are doing really incredible work leading their communities and to answer your question about the Congo our inclusive security our approach is that is to work over the longer term women in positions of leadership and political leadership in the country so there are a lot of organizations that are providing direct assistance to these victims of this horrible sexual conflict and horrible sexual violence but from our perspective what really is going to create a stable Congo and stable DRC in the long term is to have more women who are members of parliament and more women who are qualified to be working in the civil service and more women in the police and the military and there are a lot of women in Congo as you know far better than any of us in this room do who are really capable and interested in doing that and they may not feel that they have the access right now to doing so so part of our model is to connect women in the Congo for example not with people like us sitting in Washington but with other African women who have faced similar situations and done really incredible work like the women who wrote in today whom I wrote from Pakistan people who are in very different situations and have overcome them to assume positions of leadership because we believe and I think it's very true that as you get more women in senior positions of political importance a lot of these issues will then be addressed so women will be more likely to raise healthcare issues and education issues, curriculum issues water and sanitation issues and that's sort of our longer term approach to dealing with this I think your question is an excellent one and it's one which comes up time and again what you're basically saying is there are these principles people agree to them they sound great but when you get to certain corners of the world there are these cultural impediments I think that is true and I think it is a serious issue but I think there are some strategies for how to approach that and deal with that and unfortunately we've been very late to the game and coming up with some of these strategies and it's partially because I think we haven't walked the talk we like to stamp that UN Security Council resolution and say oh we're going to enforce these beautiful principles and then it's kind of what I would call a fire and forget approach and then let's take Afghanistan what you raised what we're doing now at the US Institute of Peace is we're doing some pilot projects to really understand what are these traditional justice systems and the preliminary data is they're not uniform and in many cases what you find is after a war and I know for a fact this is a significant issue in northern Uganda combatants take on the trappings of local traditional dispute resolution like the Matu Opa there but then they do something totally different it's not really in any way related to the traditional structures and so they opportunistically take advantage of quote unquote local traditions and they fool a lot of western aid providers because they come in and go oh we don't want to trample your culture and then we'll give you these grants so you can do it yourself and these ex combatants are giggling all the way to the bank you know they couldn't care about the old traditional culture they just want to control the property and what's going on in that area so I think step one is to get good data and we don't have it and we don't have a practice of getting that it's fashionable to talk about well we should look at traditional justice systems more but we don't and so there were some pilot projects here at the institute and we're going to get increased support I think for the State Department to broaden that and then when you start to find that they're not all the same we can't promise it's going to be at all reaches of the country but we start modeling that and so the women themselves then are empowered to either potentially a leave and come to the capital where they can enjoy those rights or if their local traditional structure has enough flexibility begin to integrate and introduce those legal development is an organic process it takes a long time it can't be imposed but it can be nurtured and fertilized and I think we've finally gotten around to that approach that we can't go in and in two years you know make everything beautiful and go bye-bye have a nice year and life but we still haven't gotten to the point which is yours of really understanding the variety and texture of the local fabric legal fabric enough but the good news is we seem to have learned that lesson and begin to be moving in the right direction we just need to move faster Thank you I think my question was mostly answered through this gentleman's question but my name is Kristen Lundquist I'm with the Institute for Global Engagement and we are a religious freedom organization and so my question is have you ever come across any new training curriculum that addresses or analyzes the impact of faith both the restrictions and opportunities that sometimes come with that on women's involvement and security building on the ground we had actually last week in Washington DC we had a gathering, our annual gathering we call it our annual colloquium and this year's theme was women moderating extremism and we had delegations of women from Bosnia, Pakistan Rwanda and Lebanon including Humaira actually from Pakistan who wrote in and what a lot of them talked about was research that they're doing on the ways that religion is used to create extremism and to sort of you know to incite extremist activities and then also the ways that women can themselves sort of take back interpretation of be it the Bible, the Quran other texts and work with other women to help them to really understand it sort of for themselves and so it's not a formal curriculum that I can sort of hand to you but we met for example and had here last week a number of Pakistani women who were doing really incredible work in the Swat Valley to work with what they called community peace councils and they developed this group of women peace practitioners and they went around and they were just talking to women sort of helping them educate themselves about what the Quran really is saying on various issues and it's a way, they've been creating this way for women to actually not just have to just have to take what people tell them as religious doctrine but to interpret it for themselves and they report that it's got a really long way in terms of women's ability to influence their husbands and in particular their sons and women's had some really powerful impacts on their sons interest in joining the Taliban for example so I think there's a lot to be done on this and I think women really need to lead this themselves as a real sort of free interpretation and actual study type of initiative because there are a lot of radio programs and elsewhere around the world that discuss religion and talk about it but there are not always all these instances where women are talking with other women about how it actually relates to their lives so yeah thank you my question actually is very much related to the previous one and that is in 2005 I got engaged with this group in Liberia that was schooling ex-combatants and teaching them how to reintegrate into society well it's a faith based organization and they are always struggling to find funds bringing women to the birthing centers and will bearers and looking for an ambulance that's taken 5 or 10 years and just in thinking about engaging faith based organizations like that that are on the ground that are doing very efficacious and efficient operations how do we empower them to have the funds to go forward and replicate those models that they are doing with children and ex-combatants and engaging women as well this particular group had over 100 women that were working within the orphanage, within the school that were working on the same type of issues thank you I think and I am forgetting the exact name right now but maybe Jackie can help me I think there actually are a variety of really interesting kind of composite women's funds that distribute to a whole variety of different women run NGOs around the world and I am not entirely sure exactly how many faith based organizations may be involved with those groups that actually the chair of inclusive security is very involved in but I wonder if that might be those might be interesting channels for expanding resources to faith based organizations I know there is also a and I don't know the name of it anymore I can't remember it but it's a Geneva based organization which is a clearing house for faith based organizations that do development work and this type of combat and reintegration and they exchange lessons learned and also sometimes logistical support for example one will say well we have two spare helicopters can you use them in the library and they will work out a deal and I know a lot of major churches in my area where I spent most of my time in the Balkans I know the Greek Orthodox church was pretty active there and they were very effective and it meets at least annually to talk about information sharing and resource sharing but I it's something like the international council or something pretty obvious but I've drawn a blank now okay well with all of that we'll wrap up no final comments or anything would you like to make concluding remarks here and there or I just really want to thank the members of the Women Waging Peace Network who wrote it and I just can't stress enough how wonderful it is to hear from you and I know a nine o'clock start was early for us here but it enabled people around the world to actually participate before they go and do things that women do all around the world including make dinner for their families so really thank you so much for writing in absolutely second that thank you and thanks for those of you that watched and didn't weigh in and we'll continue that to facilitate the dialogue and hopefully we'll get more and more exchange between women the areas where we're working and us here in Washington alright well we'll close I just have to make two announcements we created a gender and peace building initiative here at USIP in the beginning of this year 2010 we actually have an office we call it a center of innovation so we're sponsoring a lot of events around gender the first one that's coming up is Monday February 8th it's the role of the health sector in addressing gender-based violence the second one is the other side of gender-based violence research on perpetrators in Columbia and the DRC that will be on February 18th in the afternoon so that both of those will be on our website so you can check the website you know and sign up if you're interested so thank you very much for coming to USIP this morning and thank you for your comments and your wisdom and we'll look for the next series which will be on April 21st I believe but you'll be getting emails probably letting you know we'll probably be talking about building civil society at that seminar so thank you and have a good rest of the day