 Hi, my name is Victoria Dar. I am a gender-based violence specialist and I work for the United Nations Population Fund or UNFPA in Laos PDR. Welcome to the UN House. This is my office in VNCN Capital of Laos PDR and so from here we work very closely with Laotian governments and line ministries to strengthen systems to better prevent gender-based violence, respond to incidents of gender-based violence as well as to coordinate all the different sectors that assist or are relevant to gender-based violence. Just to kind of go into a little bit more of the activities and programs that we do under those three pillars. Under prevention, we work with males in villages to try to promote gender equality and transform harmful gender norms. We also work with media outlets to ensure that they are reporting ethically on gender-based violence and also raising public awareness of the harm and consequences of gender-based violence. We do a lot of advocacy work. At the moment we are preparing for the 16 days of activism to end gender-based violence which is a global campaign and UNFPA lead it and we're currently up to 50 partners so it's a lot of work but this year we are uniting to end gender-based violence and that involves lots of different activities but every year we orange the world which is part of the campaign and this year we're hoping to orange some of the major monuments in Laos. In terms of prevention, we've also been working with media at the provincial level to ensure that really key messaging around how to end early marriage for example and how to transform those gender norms so that we prevent gender-based violence from even happening. We're making sure this messaging is being disseminated at the provincial level, the district level and crucially the village level and so that can also involve translating to various other languages other than the the main Laos language there's also Hmong and Khmer language so we've been working with that. We've also been doing a lot more work on technology facilitated gender-based violence which is an emerging issue all around the world including Laos. Just last week we were doing some focus group discussions with university students to understand the landscape in Laos because a lot of the studies on this are very western centric and we want to understand what the nature prevalence and harms to Laos young people are in this country and what was really interesting about those focus group discussions is that what came out is that the the youth in Laos are experiencing violence online in very similar fashion and manner as the youth in Australia or other countries around the world but there are of course some specific contextual issues that occur in Laos and so it's really important that we understand these so that we can work to combat that strengthen the the legal and the policy and regulatory framework here in Laos. So under the second pillar of the work that we do under response we are working to strengthen predominantly the social and health sectors. The health sector is critical of course because often healthcare workers are frontline responders to gender-based violence survivors so we've been supporting them by developing standard operating procedures that are national that will also be used and replicated in at the provincial level. We've been building the capacity of doctors nurses midwives so that they can better respond compassionately and empathetically for survivors that come to them particularly in terms of providing clinical management a forensic examination of rape survivors and also mental health and psychosocial support. With the social sector we've also developed these standard operating procedures both for government social service providers but also non-government and this means that they are able to provide very quality mental health and psychosocial support counseling a 24-7 national hotline for survivors of violence abuse and trafficking they can provide basic healthcare legal counseling they really do it all and so it's really important that we continue to support their capacity building so that when survivors of violence are seeking safe shelter they have somewhere to go and somewhere to provide quality services. The third pillar that I was referring to which is about the coordination is to ensure that all the different sectors that are working in gender-based violence social health education justice police that they're all talking to each other and that we're creating a functioning referral pathway that so survivors do not have to retell their story time and time again and potentially be retraumatized in the process so it's a lot of work that's all during peaceful times we've also been working on building the capacity of the government for gender-responsive humanitarian preparedness and response because Laos does have a lot of flooding here almost annually so it's really important that we make sure that women and girls needs are well represented along the development humanitarian continuum. So that's a little bit about what I do on a daily basis we're very busy but I absolutely love my work and I really can attribute my time to the University of Newcastle where I studied law and sociology and anthropology and I feel like my studies there very much contributed to the career that I found myself in Laos PDR.