 people walking in maybe a little late but we have a lot to cover in only an hour and a half of your lunch break so first of all I want to welcome you to the public event the other side of gender masculinity issues in violent conflict my name is Kathleen Kenist as the lead of the Institute's new gender and peace building initiative I want to welcome all of you we have people represented from policy world academic world NGO and many others and we appreciate you coming to the event for those who may be new to the Institute the United States Institute of Peace is an independent nonpartisan national institution established and funded by Congress to help prevent and resolve violent international conflicts promote post-conflict stability and development and increase conflict management capacity tools and intellectual capital worldwide putting together the event today was in part inspired by a book called the other side of gender I first read it three years ago when I was at the World Bank and it really did offer a shift in the gender paradigm for me it basically challenges the premise of the discourse on gender over the last 30 years in which the term gender has often been used synonymously with that of women I think it is timely today amid significant strides forward in the recognition of women not only as victims of war but also important actors and peace building that we also consider the need to expand our analytical lens of gender to include issues of masculinity especially in the context of conflict as more and more information is reaching the general public about extreme sexual violence taking place in the DRC Sierra Leone and most recently Guinea it is evident that we need to engage in analysis that looks at both male and female actors as victims and perpetrators to better inform our policies and our practitioner work the panelists here today suggests that a better understanding of the social roles and social constraints on men and boys and society and especially in conflict settings can contribute to women security and peace building they base their analysis on their own field work in conflicts in Africa and South America let me turn now to our panelists and a few housekeeping details we are oversubscribed to this event so if you have phones I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't mind turning them off because we are webcast and phones on webcast sound peculiar to say the least in terms of being webcast it will be important for our panelists as well as for any of you who would like to make comments or ask questions in our discussion period to speak directly into the microphone so our remote audience can clearly hear your remarks each of our panelists will speak for about 10 minutes and then we will open it up for discussion I will ask the three panelists to give us their kind of wrap-up remarks about 120 and we will close at 130 today in order of appearance I want to briefly highlight the bios of each of the panelists Pia Peters is a senior social development specialist in the Africa region in the conflict and social development unit at the World Bank the work she is involved in directly supports gender and conflict efforts in sub-saharan Africa but her work extends back 15 years looking at issues in Sierra Leone post-conflict Burundi Rwanda and also in Latin America and Caribbean region Mark Summers our second panelist is currently a Jennings Randolph senior fellow here at the Institute of Peace he's also an associate research professor of humanitarian studies in the Institute of Human Security at the Fletcher School Tufts University his work has focused on Western popular cultural icons and youth as important contributors to warfare as well as to peace building and the many countries and work he's been involved in include Burundi Kosovo Rwanda Sierra Leone Tanzania Southern Sudan and finally Maria Kareya is program manager of fragile states at the conflict and social development unit of the African region of the World Bank it's very long title Maria is also the co-editor of the book the other side of gender she has great experience as well in Latin America Caribbean and African regions and she will bring also an institutional framework in which to look at this other side of gender without any further delay I would like to ask our first panelist Pia Peters to take the podium thank you thank you very much Kathleen for the very nice introduction I'm gonna be focusing on the male side of gender-based violence in post-conflict countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and in this context when we talk about gender-based violence or sexual gender-based violence it's in the context of a weapon of war when we think about the male side in this context we see different roles from that man have first of all as perpetrators second of all as witnesses of crimes third of all as family members of survivors of sexual gender-based violence fourth as victims and five and not at least as agents of change I'm gonna run very quickly through these five different roles in this context first of all as perpetrators we believe that there is a need to understand much better where especially for example currently in East India see the very high level of sexual gender-based violence and especially the intensity of the violence that goes together which is crimes where is this actually coming from why are the levels so high we know sexual and gender-based violence as a weapon of war is not new it has been I believe there since humanity existed and started having wars but what we currently see happening in Eastern DRC seems unfortunately to take this to a new level we all know from the news articles and reporting on this issue this is by several armed groups it's both irregular armed groups but it's also by regular armed groups in the countries another example is for example Uganda where we have the LRA the Lord Resistance Army when they use sexual and gender-based violence in that context it's very organized and they really use it in a very systematic way a second role is man as witnesses often fathers husbands brothers other male family members are forced to watch when a woman in the family are raped this is really partly with an intention to break down the social fabric which often leads of course to tremendous trauma however to this group of people in current programming that or that is out there there is very if no attention at all there is no trauma counseling or other services available in the vast majority of cases which can lead us to question of could this potentially lead to future violence we know from what we know of domestic violence that often this is a vicious circle people have suffered this as kids might have a high propensity of being perpetrators in the future a third role is as family members of survivors it's very often difficult in the local context when a survivor of sexual and gender-based violence tries to go back home to her family and to her community there is tremendous stigma around this and there is very often rejection even more so when there are children who are born out of rape this increases this this goes together partly also with the issue of masculinity with one of the primary role of the man as a protector of his family which in this cases he feels he has obviously failed a fourth one is as a victim we know from reports in PRC that this is currently on the raise this carries with it tremendous social trauma trauma and it's often seen of kind of the ultimate humiliation of what can be done to a man so needless to say there are even much less forthcoming to look for services than female victims and in addition there are very few services who kind of tailor to this group the services that are available often want to help this group but also often don't know how to do this because you need a different approach of course and you need different skills of service provides to tailor to this group fifth of all as agents of change this is very key when we think about prevention several groups that should be taught about our military the police community leaders but also for example huge in these type of calm context that we talk about there is often kind of a breakdown of traditional community structure and traditional values so on the other hand this kind of opens up an opportunity to challenge and change traditional gender roles among others especially related to the police and military UNDP and UNFPA have been doing quite a bit of work on on this subject so where in general do we stand on these issues addressing male issues on sexual and gender-based fines in post-conflict countries in sub-Saharan Africa is it is very new it's a new area and we are all together researchers and practitioners trying to understand better and how we can address this there is increasingly research around this topic the knowledge that we have so far comes much more from the field of domestic violence and also from the field of health services how do we involve men be HIV AIDS reproductive health etc an organization that has been very active in this is men engage but we have much less knowledge about how does this work actually in conflict areas a couple of people are looking into this among others the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative who tried to understand in DRC where what are the different groups of perpetrators where is this coming from what are some challenges at the operational level we start to see more and more research we do not know yet how to address this at the operational level we don't know yet what is working there are very few initiatives when I started thinking about this and started looking together with my colleagues like what has been out there who's currently working on this in practice on the ground we could find almost no examples one that I want to name is woman for woman who have immense leadership program in Eastern DRC which was like one of the only programs that we could find to try to address this so when we want to try to address this first of all I think together with practitioners we have to learn what work we kind of have to learn by doing together second of all we have to keep in mind we work in extremely challenging environments where there are very very many demands and limited resources available so we kind of sometimes have competing for resources one issue that is also a challenge is this topic can be very controversial and is sometimes also used in a negative way that is definitely not meant to be why we bring this to the table when I was in the DRC during my last mission a couple of people in government have picked up on yes we have to look at male issues of sexual and gender-based violence but they use it now more when they talk about this as you know why are you focusing on the woman and yes we poor men are also victims now the people who say this are not victims themselves they more try to use this as an excuse of why there's such high levels of violence so we have to be very careful and I will make it short one other issue that I want to highlight linked to the controversy around this when we involve men in this issue this is to the benefit of both the men themselves but also the woman both groups will benefit about this just very quickly a couple of issues or things we are currently doing on this issue at the World Bank as for many other partners this is very new to us we are currently working together with the International Rescue Committee in Eastern DRC on a gender-based violence program it's a very small program the majority is funded by our colleagues from USA link to that program we started to do also research to talk to perpetrators and to understand where this is coming from in some times it's very organized in other times not needless to say for those of you who are familiar with Eastern DRC there many many diverse groups and so they're organized very very different another issue we're looking into is trauma counseling and does it have an impact if you actually provide trauma counseling to men who either have witnesses or also family members and in a couple of countries we want to look at some small initiatives of ongoing programs who work around this issue and would like to include men in these different roles in their operational programming that we kind of help them to develop tools and learn about this together and I hope I didn't go too much over my time Kathleen thank you thanks Pia Mark Summers thanks Kathleen I just made a note a couple of notes from just to support some things that Pia just said one of them is this issue of that she talks about that in Eastern DRC is the sexual violence is too is gone to another level I think that there I think it's pretty clear in modern history at the very least we've never seen anything like this and that something I wrote about about this issue is that it's it's actually sexual terrorism it's the main way that war is practiced in eastern Congo and it is a thorough emergency this is a place that the casualties are now according to IRC over 5.4 million people in this war and a lot of them it seems to me have run away from this rape and fled have fled into the forests and starved to death so I just wanted to put that and the other thing is is that I think masculinity and conflict seems to put these two ideas I think it's a little bit more serious than that and I just made a note to myself when Pia was talking that actually I think the the the real the primary issue is emasculation or the threat of emasculation and what are the threats of that what are the the results of that so I wanted to start this with a very brief story about because it involves Pia and Maria Peter Juven and I were asked by Maria at first and then Pia joined in to do this research on youth in in Central Africa and you know we put together this methodology which I'll talk a little bit about in a moment to to we wanted to do the same methodology in both countries with the same sample of youth Peter in and Burundi and myself with youth in Burundi and so we you know we put together the methods and we sent it to Pia Maria and Maria said look you know I don't see here masculinity you know where are you going to have masculinity I mean is it gonna come out and so when I went out in the field with my team the first week I'm thinking in the back of my mind boy we better find masculinity you know I got to tell something to Maria and so I start question number three is what's the situation of youth and youth this is in rural Rwanda and and immediately people start talking about roofing roof tiles I'm thinking what okay so they and then even female youth they're saying well you know the situation here on about roof tiles is very serious and I'm thinking what what are you talking about so the second week I you know there's four of us doing interviews I decided to go to roofing class and start to find out from people what's this deal about roofing so then after this I emailed Maria after I came back from the field the second week to email her and just said really there's nothing to worry about the main issue the main finding from the research with youth in Rwanda was masculinity or and the inability of the real difficulty that male youth are we're having in in becoming men and the cascading problems that that arose because of this and directly impacted the lives of female youth and in fact the whole society so the main recommendation which I'll get back to in a few minutes that I'll be sharing is this that in many contexts including Rwanda in order to help female youth effectively you must help help male youth first now this is a clear finding or this this derives directly from the research that took place with youth in Rwanda so I want to just mention a little bit about the research methods again Peter Juven's book on Rwandan a Burundian youth is out it's called life after violence a people's story of Burundi and the the book on me a Rwandan youth is just about done and it's it's called 200 Frank's masculinity urbanization and the world of Rwandan youth what we did in this research was to sort of the overall approach was to find out from youth what were their priorities perspectives and concerns and then to craft policy recommendations based on those now I have to just say not just in Rwanda but most definitely including Rwanda this is a radical approach you do not ask undereducated young people about anything you tell them what to do as they as many elites would say and in the government you know you have to give you have to bring them development you have to tell them what to do they don't have education you know the implication is they're not very bright and they're stubborn and they're resisting becoming developed so this was a really a radical idea and I want to point out that officials in the government were very supportive of it so what did we find actually there's a there's a phrase what elites use in both countries is you know when they get information there's a saying that you know we inform the population which is basically educated people taking telling the the massive uneducated majority of what they need to know about so we had open-ended qualitative questions in both countries and we used the same 20 questions and then added and subtracted as we moved along in both countries and we did a sampling procedure so we were basically asking the same questions to the same sample of youth in Rwandan Burundi what was so striking was how dramatically different the situations of youth were and how and at the outset counterintuitive these findings were so what did we find well before I get to what we found out for one particularly interesting question a little background on the two countries very brief Rwanda right now is that is it's renowned right now is for economic growth in governance and it has a very high kind of sparkling reputation as a model of development I should like to point out that it also had a reputation as a model of development before the genocide and it's also it's pretty darn stable okay let's look at Burundi right now before the elections pretty touch and go down there so the idea of actually with a lot of Rwandan government officials the idea that this was a regional study involving these two countries didn't go over very well you know that to compare Rwanda to Burundi right now was not something that that was particularly appealing because the impression is is that that's early post war really struggling to get onto its feet whereas Rwanda you know has these ambitions I don't know if you know this to become a middle-income country in about 20 years or maybe maybe 10 can't remember vision 2020 has a blueprint for how they're gonna get there and that's really their objective so we might assume therefore that Rwandan youth not Burundian youth would prioritize education to prepare to participate in Rwanda's new knowledge-based economy it's going to have IT be the hub for the for the region and so forth we found the opposite to be true so what was the question the question six and our questionnaires for youth in both countries was the following do you have a plan for improving your situation asking youth and rural and urban youth in both countries virtually every Burundian youth highlighted education in their plans you know it's like what's your plan okay first I'm going to secondary school or my plan is this is male and female youth a vocational school now if you think about this you look around there aren't any secondary schools there aren't any vocational schools or there is it's very hard to get in but that's their plan education and then they're going to be entrepreneurs okay meanwhile in Rwanda where they're they're in the process of doubling the access to secondary education where they have a plan for really expanding access to vocational education almost no Rwandan youth even mentioned education in their plans almost never it was it was startling to the extent that I had to add some questions on education to find out what was going on well it turns out that most Rwandan youth wouldn't go to a secondary school if it was right next to their house education we learned is it's not that it's not valued it's just it cannot be the priority because of the pressures on youth to become adults the predominant priority is to achieve adulthood male youth must build a house and get married before becoming men and and they reported that there was a very strong chance that this would never occur but as many of them said we have no choice but to try we heard many times we have no choice or I have no choice in short many male youth leave primary school or wait till they complete primary school to start working to save money for a house which they may never complete what about female youth if there is no men if there's no male youth ready to marry then they there is no way that they can become women socially recognizes women it's impossible and the reason is is quite simple that it's dependent womanhood is dependent on manhood not just in Rwanda but in many many societies across the globe so what's going on here here's a quote from an executive secretary because you know I'm asking these questions and you know this is pretty like basic Rwandan 101 for people living there so an executive secretary of a rural sector is a very powerful man in this area summed it up as follow he said look you can't become a man without building a house to be a woman you have to marry if a woman produces children without a husband then she's a prostitute and if she reaches 28 year old 28 years old without getting married then she will be rejected by youth society she will become an old lady and not a woman now the issue of waiting until you're 28 and talking to men particularly youth in the area was like 28 nobody's gonna marry a 28 year old woman after 24 or 25 that's it now the window of opportunity for a female youth is 21 to about 20 maybe let's say 25 you got four years to get married and this is in a country where according to statistics after the genocide for every hundred women there's 88 men so 12% are going to be old ladies and never be married because there's nobody to marry and polygamy is big vigorously put down so what we found is that Rwandan youth are extraordinarily risk a verse and are driven by severe adulthood pressures while whereas in Burundi they're very optimistic and have a strong sense of becoming independent entrepreneurs the threat of failure of being a failed youth unable to become a male adult wasn't a big deal there it's a different kind of society a different kind of government a different kind of culture so the final thoughts is you know the research tells us that a key post war policy question is the following are youth able to become adults and what happens if they can't become adults education may or not may or may not play a role so if you go go back to this recommendation that I gave at the beginning that in many contexts in order to help female youth effectively you must help male youth first where you have a situation where attaining womenhood is dependent on male youth a first attaining manhood then helping male youth build a house and being able to marry is going to help female youth as well so what what this indicates is that in countries like Burundi and East Timor where it's easier to attain adulthood the sectoral approach that people have you know most donors have in agencies on education on health on things like that might work but in places like Rwanda and believe me there's a lot of countries like Rwanda Liberia Sierra Leone come to mind where the issues the values of education unemployment might be very high however for a lot of youth male youth in order to become a man it's access to land that matters more and housing housing housing housing was the main recommendation for Rwanda no question about it I'll leave it there thank you very much good afternoon everyone thank you Kathleen first of all for organizing this event and thank you for the invitation I'm going to speak a little bit about the institutional environment of incorporating men and masculinity issues in the gender agenda and specifically what has happened in the World Bank since we published this book the other half of gender back in 2006 in terms of policy and programming on the policy side the current policy on gender at the World Bank dates back to 2003 and it is broad and inclusive of both men and gender so it moved beyond the previous successor the previous policy which focused on on women and it refers only to gender and when you look at the best practice note it refers always to men and women girls boys female and male issues so while it doesn't address men and masculinity issues per se it also doesn't address female issues per se and it also doesn't address conflict it's it's rather a neutral policy and and allows for for some interpretation but it isn't inclusive as I said in terms of both men and women in terms of practice the gender community in the bank has not focused at all on on male gender issues since probably less so even since the publication of the book although I don't think that's a coincidence that it isn't a coincidence it's not a coincidence in fact there has been a move to a more narrow approach to to gender and a focus on on women's economic empowerment this is just this is more reflects the strategic choice of the current leaders in in the bank as opposed to a policy change in itself and it reflects I think a view that this is the bank's comparative advantage and this and women's economic empowerment is the the priority there is actually an ongoing evaluation by the bank now of the bank's gender policy and there has been some criticism of this of this narrow focus although their the criticism doesn't include the fact that it's the policies the work has not addressed male gender issues outside the gender community however the the situation is is somewhat more positive he spoke about the work that we have done in the Africa region within the context of social development fragility and and post-conflict this work started some time ago as as as Mark referred to what we started back on Burundi and Rwanda some some time ago however it it became more prominent during the the time of the multi-country demobilization reintegration program in the Great Lakes region when we developed a specific gender program to look at at that perspective within the context of demobilizing ex-combatants and and that has now led to a larger program a multi-million dollar program on gender and conflict that has a specific theme of masculinity so this is this is quite an important advance in the Africa region outside the Africa region in particular in the Latin America and the Caribbean where urban youth violence is a concern this is men in masculinity has also come up and it is being dealt with in the context of urban development programs more broadly in the bank the energy and drive on where some energy I've seen it perhaps not the drive has on male and masculinity has come within the social development department and a specific unit that has been set up on conflict violence and and youth so they are looking at men and masculinity in the context of that work which is mostly analytical but but also some support on on operations as well now in thinking about our client countries and where the demand has come from if there is a demand at all it is not coming again from the gender community but we have seen some interest from our country clients particularly those that are in a post-conflict phase and that are dealing with young idol men and when there are concerns that this could that there's potentially a pool of a future young fighters and the risk of future future conflict when our Congolese officials from the Republic of Congo came to us looking to design a demobilization reintegration program one of the specific issues that they asked us to address was idol youth and this came up in has come up in Central Africa Republic more recently Pia was commenting to me in Uganda there are concerns about unemployed youth and also in West Africa Sierra Leone Liberia so there is some demand for this issue not specifically on men and masculinity but certainly looking at the issues faced by by young men so in thinking back and looking at the bank I went back to the book which I hadn't opened up in some years but in the last couple of paragraphs we predicted that the the initiative on men and masculinity would not come from the gender community it would come from from these other groups such as the security sector conflict and social development areas and this has indeed turned out to be the case in in the World Bank now why is this why hasn't this been been embraced by the the gender community I'm not speaking specifically now about the World Bank but generally what we have observed among eight agencies and the bank and other organizations there still seems to be a view that women's gender issues are more important and that women have have faced the greatest disadvantages and therefore their needs need to be first before addressing the needs of looking at male gender issues those are secondary even though the evidence shows that ultimately men must be brought into this into into the work because gender of course is relational and also this this view assumes a zero-sum game so in fact my view is is that if you look at if you have a broader perspective on gender it actually brings in groups that otherwise would not be interested in these issues I think there's still a fear that bringing in men is sort of letting in the enemy and there's still a lot of mistrust and fear that that men will then control men will dominate the agenda there is this is understandable but this is something that we we have to face as well at the level of top management we have to face the fact that gender is not a top issue I mean people's jobs do not depend on whether they will address gender issues or not so smaller symbolic activities focused on women tend to be easier and less messy than dealing with these broader broader societal gender issues another another point which I think is important to mention is that we don't have a strong invisible constituency on male gender issues internal or external I mean it's basically not existent when it comes to men and it's unlikely to happen if you think for example have a head of government lobbying for women's issues a female head of government lobbying for women's issues this would be seemed quite normal but it would be unthinkable unimaginable that a male head of state would be lobbying for male gender issues it's just it's not going to happen so that that then leads to to less lesser demand and and less a need to less need to respond to these kinds of issues I should say that it's not true that there hasn't been advances not inside the bank but outside the bank and other organizations taking on male gender issues I know my colleagues for example in UNIFEM has there is a dedicated unit to on men but interestingly it tends to be marginalized within the gender with within UNIFEM in much the same way that UNIFEM tends to be marginalized within the UN agency family so it's it's an interesting observation what do we learn in terms of the in terms of the future I think that it's still going to be difficult to bring in you know that the diehard gender community that have been you know fighting long and hard for for for women's rights the the evolution of within the World Bank and aid agencies has meant that that there there there is an inclination towards women's issues and there will be a resistance still to address these these male issues I think that the change and the the energy will come from the mid-level bureaucrats who are working on issues such as conflict and violence and HIV AIDS and etc that that see that there is really a male perspective in in these issues and I think that it will be sort of a more organic growth of this of this or interest taken in this issue and less less ideological on a practical side I just wanted to reiterate what Pia said earlier that while there is a recognition and hopefully growing recognition of the importance of the issue of male gender issues there is still very much a need now to to actually learn about what we can do in practice and that is that is something that the Africa region is going to be working on in the in the near future of practitioners guideline based on the experiences that are that are emerging now so I'll end here thank you thank you Maria as some of you may have questions or comments and want to organize yourself I'm going to take the lead here in beginning with the questions I would be interested in all of you responding it seems to me that we do talk a great deal about institutions and primarily from perhaps an aid perspective when when we look at women's issues and in this context context the issue of masculinity but I would really appreciate if you could comment on these agents of change I think Pia out loud outlined five different ways to look at the masculinity issue and in particular religious leaders one of the things in Africa for sure and we see it now in Uganda around issues of homosexuality and fairly extreme case of calling for the death penalty can you speak to it from you came at this particular topic in in perfectly different ways but I'd like to see where the religious leadership comes into this in terms of agents of change for the better for the worse and what part of the story might need to be grappled with here thank you and then if you could let me know by a show of hand Ryan will help in getting the yes how can we bring in religious leaders and Kathleen as you rightly pointed out there's currently a very hot debate in Uganda around homosexuality going to asking for the death penalty I think I read yesterday or the day before yesterday an article about is that currently the president last common sense so I wouldn't always say in general bring in the religious leaders but I know for example in in DRC in Eastern DRC they try to bring them in because they often in the community are seen as leaders in the community so if you can work with with these type of leaders and true damn help change attitudes you can reach a lot these people can often have a very strong voice in the communities so I think if you're able to bring them in you can have a very big impact of course sometimes this goes to extremism and they might preach certain views that we definitely would not support I just want to give a small example this is by now four to five years ago in Sierra Leone and how this can be done I taught in an innovative way I went to church in Sierra Leone in Freetown it was a Protestant church and priests talked about HIV AIDS and how you have to protect yourself and how you have to use a condom and had a wooden penis and used how to use a condom now that probably had a much bigger impact than many of the other efforts currently going on in the city so I think there can be a very good size of it and we also have to be very cautious sometimes yeah I just reflect a little bit on experience that in from Argentina when I worked in in Latin America in the Caribbean there was a study that the World Bank conducted on social capital and it revealed that in fact the church as an institution was not perhaps not surprisingly but I think that it was even surprising to the researchers how how much the society was depending on on churches for a whole range of support and it was so I in that case obviously one cannot ignore the the influence of the church as an institution and as Pia said they can be extremely influential if you can bring them on board so it's a question of how you approach gender issues in the in the case of Argentina we we actually had a project that was in funded by the World Bank that focused on on gender from a family perspective and that was a very effective approach obviously not looking at the family from a conventional perspective but looking at how gender roles were influencing different family members from different perspectives and from there we could we could introduce male gender issues thank you I'm gonna comment on Africa and religion because it's something that's and particularly Christianity because it's something that I've done research on and I just three quick points if you go into a poor and this would actually apply to the first point would definitely apply to Muslims as well as Christians in sub-Saharan Africa if you go into a city poor area and and and generally the rule of thumb that is you know well not it's not a rule of thumb we know that cities expand dramatically during and after wars nobody know and it has any idea how big Kinshasa is Juba went from 70,000 people during the war when it was a garrison town to the estimates are over a million people in in Juba in southern Sudan free town in doubled at least tripled so did Pristina by the way in in Kosovo after the after the war what does this tell us when you go into these poor neighborhoods as I have many times basically the only people working with poor youth are religious groups there isn't anybody else and they do have there's a there's an idea that youth programming must be holistic you better believe it's holistic in a Pentecostal church they have the assignments for you to do every single day if you're a Pentecostal youth there isn't anybody else in these areas that are targeting or in fact viewing youth in a positive way in these extraordinarily poor and fluid areas and these churches and mosques I mean they pop up very quickly as soon as there's a new peri-urban neighborhood there's a mosque there's a church that's being it's going up a couple of other points though I mean and I'm talking now traditionally in terms of a culture generally is that it's very conservative so traditionally you know the idea of homosexuality is just is just an impossibility it cannot be admitted it cannot be realized it's very common for church leaders to say we do not have homosexuality here and there is a strong belief that if you do it you're going to it's it's immediate damnation and you're going to be thrown out of society that's quite common as a perspective and the another part of this traditional approach is that is that female youth and and women but particularly female youth have extraordinarily subordinate roles in society and I would say from my research with in war and post-war societies in the past 20 years easily the most disadvantaged and at-risk population to generalize is female youth and there is a fee for urban female youth in particular there I don't know if there's a population in these post-war countries that is more invisible than these people and their situations are extraordinarily desperate and there is in Kigali right now there is a female youth emergency in those in Kigali for the poor female youth no question about it thank you mark we're going to begin our questions from the audience discussion if you could identify yourself and organization affiliation thank you hi my name is Tina Tinda I'm a diversity advisor in human resources at Inter-American Development Bank I just started in May last year before that I was gender advisor at the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and I served in peacekeeping operations in the form Yugoslavia and Cambodia among other things and I want to thank you all for the wisdom that you're sharing and I think in this room there are many others who have a lot of knowledge about gender issues and I would like to challenge all of us to use this knowledge and to look at this opportunity now that the UN is establishing a new gender equality entity I have read for some years many documents produced on that and I have seen absolutely no reference to any requirement according to UN policy to have 50% men and 50% women work in that entity just like when the UN merged their security services of all the agency then I am on that note also I asked for half men and half women to serve because you have an opportunity but it turned out that most of the men who were working in the different security departments were expecting not only to stay on but also to get a promotion so for a woman like me who's working the gender route internationally I might be looking for a wonderful promotion if I wanted to try to apply for that new gender equality entity but I also know that men and women are in this together and also the UN recruits from the world so nobody can tell us that they are not qualified men all especially from developing countries and who would be able to get posts there so I think this is really really important at this point also I've since nobody asked me to study this in detail I took on myself a couple years ago to study how much UN special representatives report on women's role in peace building in their work and you know that they have to file regular reports to the Security Council and you are also familiar with the resolution 1325 on women peace women peace and conflict and and that they are actually obliged to report but you know it's not really enforced and so I did an internet search and I matched the name of each special representative with 1325 and then I checked the first 10 hits and I found that in 96% of the hits that person the special representative or the deputy had not actually mentioned 1325 himself or herself there are actually six women among the 66 representatives and I'm sorry to go on here but I did a very cheeky study and it has been published in an article that I wrote for the refugee survey quarterly and it is just dreadful results because there is an assumption that everybody's able to speak about gender but as as Maria said it's not really a requirement when when people are hired at top levels and how they address this so I just want to challenge all of us and would love to hear your views and how we can now at this crucial moment make a campaign so that men will have their rightful place in that new entity thank you very much thank you I'm going to take two more questions and then have the panelists respond I think the second one was right here and the third one here and then I have we might need to take a line just accuse so I can keep it all straight all right please if you'd stand and introduce yourself because it is on webcam and it will help Savira Kureishi I work as an independent gender consultant thank you to all the speakers for some very thought-provoking ideas and information that you've shared two quick questions my first question is for Maria and I guess it continues from the previous question I guess what we're talking about is we've been looking at at gender at a point in time when we went from sort of with to get in all of that and so the focus was still on leveling the playing field and bringing up the side that was sort of way down we now and I guess the key to what you said was the relational aspect and you mentioned that in the World Bank the focus is on economic empowerment working on issues of economic empowerment I find that using that argument the relational argument is a very strong one because even when we talk of economic issues unless you have all of those factors the feminine masculine the female male factors in place you have the care economy which is predominantly women this not counted etc etc and then visibility of women if we can bring in the male issues in terms of again leveling the playing field from a relational context I just wondered whether that can be kind of recognizing how economic empowerment will always be a very strong focus no matter what and my second question is for any of the speakers when you talked about rape as a weapon of war in times of conflict I just wondered if you have any data information or any kind of research done to see whether there is any difference from a psychological perspective of using rape as a weapon whether in times of war or in times of peace and whether how that differs in terms of the psychological background of the perpetrator thank you very much if you could pass it forward thank you stand up it would be helpful for the audience my name is Ruth the seer I've written on issues of women in weapon systems and I'm particularly interested in one of Maria's comments about what would it look like if heads of states addressed male gender issues what are you identifying as male gender issues and what would that look like for you what are the issues that you want to see identified that are currently not identified thank you why don't we give the panel a chance to answer these questions and then I will look for the next three one two three if you could see yes first Sabia's question on women's economic empowerment and wasn't it a strong argument to bring in the relational side of things I do agree that it is a strong argument I think that we have a particular situation at the World Bank right now which makes it very closed to to outside constituencies ever since some president Wolfenson left there hasn't been much discussion on on gender issues in the way that we had during his his tenure at at the bank and this is also reflected in the way some of the some issues such as gender are being dealt with so we have at the moment quite a closed group of people working on gender issues so even though this is a strong argument it's just not being brought up and it's not being brought up internally it's not being brought up externally so I do agree with you that it is important and this is the argument that we make in in the book but but alas the situation that bank is in at the moment in terms of of what are the male gender issues well we raise a number of them in the book and of course Pia and and and Mark talked about specifically sexual violence and men's rules in that and how men are also affected by by violent conflict and Mark talks about about youths and young men and how they are also disempowered because of the gender roles that the roles that they are expected to play in society but there are other issues as well I mean in the number of many countries actually already in the world including in Latin America but also in some countries in Africa you do see disparities in education now influencing to to men's disadvantage rather than or to boys disadvantage rather than to girls there is also how men are affected by HIV AIDS so it goes it's it's health it's education it's conflict it's a range of issues now as I said I don't expect these issues to be raised by by male leaders but but they certainly do exist and they are important they can be very important if you trace for example the the roots of of conflict in countries such as Liberia and Sierra Leone and Mark makes the argument in Rwanda it goes back to men's severe sense of disempowerment because of the expectations that society places on them I'm not saying that that's the only reason that conflict erupted in these countries but it is a factor and it's an important one any other panels sure I'm going to start with the question of rape as a weapon of war that you asked and we we start to look into these issues I think you might also want to look for example at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative who really are looking already for longer time at this is in the context of DRC what is kind of the psychological thinking of perpetrators in this context but just kind of in general your your question the difference you know in war of in peace I think in general in peace we see a lot of sexual and gender-based fines as I briefly mentioned earlier in the context of domestic violence so you starting point is often very very different while the sexual and gender-based fines that that we focus on today it is usually in the vast majority of cases outsiders who then rape women but who are not directly personally linked and then issues of peer pressure often the especially irregular forces they are actually forced to to rape woman so you know you starting point also from a psychological point of view is very different when we look at a situation in war of peace and peace for example some data from Eastern DRC on average a woman who is raped is raped by four to five men at the same time to give you you kind of an idea of the very different starting point I just briefly would like maybe not respond but to give a brief comment on Tina and this is not a World Bank perspective but my personal perspective I definitely believed a positive discrimination you know when you say for example 50 50% in some cases is very useful however I also think that sometimes this is pushed too far and actually can be a disadvantage for a woman that sometimes then people might start thinking you have a promotion or a certain job because you were a woman and not because you're the best qualified candidate in our institution at the time being if you're male and you're white it extremely hard to get promoted even if you're the best qualified candidate and again this is my personal opinion so I think it can be very good but if we push it too far I actually think it can be a disadvantage of professional woman thank you just with the two issues about asking for the mention of a paradigm shift and this sort of trying to move this gender issues forward it seems to me that I don't I wonder if we can get there without understanding two things number one that in most societies masculinity is far more fragile than femininity in terms of the a man without a job is threatened as a man quite often and so this issue of showing that you're a man is is a common trait in these sorts of situations I remember hearing from a woman's leader in Mozambique that she had to start creating income generation programs for men in the communities where she was working because in doing in working in very poor communities where most men where unemployment is very high for men and women that you know women for the income generating they were doing chickens and selling eggs and chickens in these different places and they get they pay get paid on the last Friday of the month for their projects and she said every Monday women would come back with with bruises some of them were in the hospital every single Monday afterwards and so as a way to address that she started creating income generation programming for men as well they had to be separate and but she did that as a way to help empower women and that really made a quite a big influence on me this was something that she learned I think this issue of hegemonic masculinity is which is in the conclusion of that that Marianian Bannon wrote in the the other half of gender is extraordinarily important because what it really points out as opposed to seeing men as the enemy as she as as is common which Maria mentioned it really highlights the point that it's a small number of very powerful men who dominate society and are and and that a lot of men and women are involved in humiliating poor men and you know the problem is not that they're being humiliated I mean I think this issue of one of the most important issues is not just economic issues for men or housing or land it's also this issue that violence as a response to feeling emasculated is a thoroughly unacceptable yet in order to get there you have to recognize that these people are emasculated so I think those two ideas are quite important I don't want to just mention briefly about this issue of trauma during wars and after wars there's a book called mine fields in their hearts by Roberta it's edited by Bennett Simon and Roberta Apfel the introduction is extraordinarily good and it it highlights this particular issue and what it says is that when you have just to simplify when you have a situation let's say a woman who's raped when she grows up in a situation that anticipates expects order stability peace then when she's raped she's really thrown and the and the trauma can be quite severe and it as we know it can last an entire life in a war zone they're talking about children but I think you can you know you can assume this more broadly in societies there is no expectation that life is fair stable peaceful and so forth and so when rape happens trauma quite often is not as powerful according to the authors and it's it's not to excuse it in any way but it does say that the extent of trauma because of this orientation can be less thank you I have the woman in purple skews your second third and the gentleman in the back fourth and then I'll take the next round your next time thank you could you please stand up sure I'm Elaine Zuckerman of Gender Action formerly worked in the World Bank and in the IDB and formerly served on a gender and conflict working group here at USIP I have two questions one is addressed to Maria and it's regarding your mention of a new or revisit of the gender and development policy I'm dying to know what the new contours might be of it whether it will explicitly address male and women men and women and masculinity and femininity roles you know any hints you can give us about it would be welcome and also I'd like to point out that since the current World Bank gender development policy has been in effect I have been on a continuous advocacy campaign to get a very pernicious footnote in it removed which says that this policy does not apply to policy-based loans because about 50% of the bank loans last year were policy-based or sector-wide what you know which also falls under policy-based so I was wondering if that hasn't been a topic of discussion of the new gender policy if you could get it onto the agenda and maybe achieve that so that all bank investments in fact address gender issues not just those that are not policy-based loans so and also I'd like to point out that both the African Development Bank and the forthcoming IDB gender policy do cover policy-based loans that is they're part of the gender arena so those are models for you secondly I have a question that belongs to my colleague Diana Arango who could not attend who used to work at UNHCR I think with Tina and also she worked for other UN agencies UNFPA and UNIFAM her question is that she feels these UN agencies UNHCR UNFPA UNIFAM for example have made tremendous strides in working with men to address gender-based violence in particular and she wonders whether the World Bank formally collaborates with these UN agencies on gender-based violence in conflict thanks thank you Elaine the next question and that was for both Maria and Pia all right thank you Elaine right behind you Ryan the woman in the yes hi my name is Sarah scotch and I work with Honovan Congo we started in 2003 to try to get aid to to survivors of mass rape in Sudkibu in eastern Congo so my questions for Mark Summers is really interested to hear about your findings in Rwanda and what came to mind for me was that you know you want to work with people where you are where they are rather and listen to them but instead of focusing maybe on helping male youth build houses what I was hearing was that they're they're all involved in a what's essentially a very destructive construction of masculinity femininity and adulthood and maybe it would be helpful in a place with like Rwanda with such a developed civil society to try an alternative approach like a national youth initiative of reflection groups for young you know for female youth for male youth to start looking at what their constructions of adulthood and gender are and whether they're helpful and in the room we have Joe Vest from Men Can Stop Rape which is a group here that does something similar to that here in the United States we have Gary Barker over here who has whose organization has had groups in Brazil South Africa and India correct me if you have others but these programs and models of this kind of programming and reflection do exist and they have been proven to be very effective so love to hear what you have to say great thank you very much I'm aware that we are really are have so many very knowledgeable people in this room and that this is just the tip of the iceberg and I will promise to follow up with more seminars so that we can hear from all of you this great deal of exchange that still needs to happen I'm Nadine Mildice I'm a school teacher and what I'm hearing it was a very interesting panel what I'm hearing a specific item was putting men first which is something that's code for getting money flowing and what I'd like the panel to address is how will you keep the monetary resources flowing equitably and I don't mean to be lighthearted about this at all but we'll build each guy a house and then the ladies will get to do get out with them you know for economic stability but I'm most interested in hearing how you would keep those resources equitable thank you and finally good afternoon my name is Santa Manderlini I am not from the Caesarean awareness network which says on the list I've had a Caesarean but I don't know anything about Caesareans sorry just just to clarify I work with UNDP I just I just noticed it I work with UNDP currently on a project looking at what's going on with men in crisis settings not necessarily hot conflict but post-conflict and other fragile settings and what I'm and my previous work as many of you know is looking at the role of women is in peace building again not looking necessarily as women in terms of having from a rights-based approach but looking at it in terms of we need to do better peace building women are stakeholders and potential agents of change so we should recognize that role and I think of the question of men in the same way that we should be looking at men in terms of the context of crisis and understanding how do we resolve this problem and I'm coming up with two sort of big picture issues one is that one of the challenges that we have is that we're dealing with development agencies and people who are development practitioners who don't know crisis very well and feel uncomfortable dealing with crisis conflict political change and transition which is feeding into the development setting and so step back from dealing with these issues the second is that so much of what we're seeing in terms of places that are affected by crisis are resulting from the structural adjustment policies of our friends at the IMF and I don't know whether the World Bank was involved in it as well but but 30 years of structural adjustment and and lack of social welfare has created a vacuum in which a lot of this crisis and conflict is thriving and it's not just the churches that are active it's actually gangs and all the other bad guys that are drawing the guy these young men in using gender identity issues and masculinity issues so so the question for me is how are you in this in this discussion of gender where we see gender is a nice little project that we have how are how are these bigger issues being dealt with because it really goes to the heart of development practice and the recognition that we're dealing with crisis or fragile fragility in most of the places that we're working with now two more questions for the second time because I know that there are so many interesting comments here that also want to be made I think you were next and the gentleman far in the back go ahead thank you so much for giving me this opportunity my question is did you identify yourself sorry my name is Neemad Ahmadi I'm working with save that for coalition and formally I did work with Oxfam Great Britain and Intermediate Technology Development Group which is practical action now mainly in capacity building and women empowerment my question is related to the way we are or there's so many other people that are working in this area communicating the the issues like the language that is used is there is any way that we can use it so that will make men both men and women take more responsibility in addressing gender issues like always when people talk about gender as many people mentioned that this goes to people mind that it's women issues but in many different cases it's not only it's the community issues for me it is it's our community issues what affecting women is affecting both men and women and youth as well and in a conflict situation the other question is during the conflict situation as currently in therefore for example changing in roles women were expected to be protected by the male member of their families or their communities but that is not the case currently when the rape being used as weapon of war and most of women that are devastated and then when addressing the issues people are not thinking of both men and women that are victimized men feel that they were unable and they are helpless not they they weren't able to protect their families in term of doing trauma counseling intervention people targeting women but not targeting is there any ways of bringing both men and women I know that if we are also advocating for bringing men in some cases may not be helpful because of the already unequal opportunities that are exist but at least ways of strengthening the weaknesses that exist for both men and women so that we can address and then the other issue is with attitude change like working on the area of attitude change for both men and women so that people can be able to address these issues. Thank you and one last question in the back and then I'm going to allow the panel to combine their answers and also their summary comments. Yes, my name is Jesse Bernstein and I'm a refugee advocate with Human Rights First I formerly worked with UNHCR in the Balkans as well as with different humanitarian and human rights organizations in Central and East Africa and I wanted to talk about homosexuality I have to say frankly I was surprised that none of the panelists in their initial remarks raised the issue of homosexuality not just as an issue but as a primary obstacle to addressing men and women who endure SGBV. I know from my work in Uganda that when men when Congolese refugee men approached the police after being raped one of their responses from from the police was men can't be raped and if a male has been raped it's because he wanted it assuming that he is gay so obviously that has massive implications and prevents people from from responding and from trying to address their crimes as we know the issue isn't isn't limited unfortunately to Uganda 80 countries in the world criminalize same-sex practice and even those countries that don't there's pervasive homophobia so I just like to highlight this and one resource which is really helpful is a documentary called gender against men produced by the refugee law project and it really really highlights this problem it's quite controversial but it goes some way in highlighting the challenges of men who have experienced SGBV in Central Africa. Thank you very much I'm going to now ask the panelists to keep your remarks to the point and we will you have each about two minutes to try well I it's an impossible task I know and as I said I will make sure that we have a follow-up session because we haven't heard from even half of the people who raised their hands and we need to have more discussions on this so maybe in the order in which you first presented Pia then Mark and then Maria. Sure I was already getting used to being able to think about my responses while Maria was talking. We're all ready to go so I'm just going to answer a few of them in the benefit of time. Are we working together with the UN agencies? I think the question came from over there. First I want to mention this issue for the World Bank and now I'm talking especially on sexual and gender-based violence is very new for us too. We barely started working on this about a year ago and yes we have outreach from the beginning to our UN colleagues although I think we could do a better job on that if we would have more time but that is definitely in the planning for the coming years to keep a close collaboration with our colleagues from the UN. The question of putting men first does that mean the resources you you know basically the competition of resources I would like to turn this around I don't think it is a competition of resources I don't think or I don't think we should think about it it's either one or the other but that it's really in the mutual benefit of both men and women when you work on gender that you work on male gender issues and on female gender issues and I also don't believe that we need separate programs it's not we will have a program for women and separately we have a program for men I believe some of the best programming is where you do address gender issues of men and women inside of the bed of the same program that you can get the furthest. On the question from from Sanam how are you dealing with the bigger issues I think maybe I'm not going to try to even respond to the IMF structural adjustment over the last 30 years and the impact that has currently in the developing world we might leave that for a different debate I absolutely agree with you that many the problem to work on these issues is that many people don't understand working in conflict context and what that actually means and the impact of that. Currently how this is being dealt with in the World Bank we we have recognized this as an institution over the last couple of years and conflict and post-conflict is one of the six key strategic areas from our current president so do we need to learn much more also inside of our institution and with the agencies we work with absolutely but I think we are on a better track there than before and then just Nima absolutely agree that we should work on the language and the suggestions that you made were extremely relevant and I could also second the last comment that was made on the video gender against man from the refugee law project from among others Chris it's an extremely interesting movie yes it is controversial but it's definitely worth watching I just wanted to say one more if I may issue we organized on the male side of gender-based violence in Sub-Saharan Africa in conflict slash post-conflict context a workshop last year in June which was a collaborated effort of the World Bank ICRW and men and gage together with Gary Barker who is one of the co-authors of a report of that workshop which we we probably will bring out in the coming months so that might be a good source of information for people who want to learn more about this but on the research research as well as operational questions thank you I'm just gonna cherry pick three questions given my time limitation the first is on that Sarah mentioned about about Rwanda and getting involved in the construction of masculinity and adulthood that strikes me as social engineering I'm uncomfortable with it the Rwandan government has demonstrated many times that it is not the with regarding working through civil society there's a comment that it's well-developed we actually did a study or some research into youth groups in Rwanda and found that it's almost entirely a facade that these are unemployed male youth that are very well-intentioned their reach and their ability to work across the class line the class divide which is mammoth in Rwanda is is doesn't seem to be working well at all and it's not for not of trying for most of them it's just very hard to do what that means that this idea of a reflection group my sense is thinking is that it's going to feature elite educated Rwandan youth and because they are so suspect their credibility is so narrow and suspect with the marginalized youth majority I didn't I don't think it will work what I think might work and what seems to be working very well are soap operas on the radio about these issues boy do they make an impact on on youth all over the country that's a that that way works as opposed to doing sort of re you know relying on this extraordinary degree of of social hierarchy that take that exists in a place like Rwanda at the second issue about structural adjustment I just wanted to mention Sonam that there was a study that connected the imposition or the beginning of structural adjustment policies which means that you the removal of subsidies for food cutting back a lot of government jobs and the study was in northern Nigeria and what this this research found is that structural adjustment in policies validated youth violence because if you're going to lose your job and now food's really expensive then you don't have a choice so go right ahead it's okay to be to join these gangs and and take it and what they found was that these traditional youth associations many often became many times became criminal just to clarify Elaine there is not an ongoing revision of the gender policy it's in it the independent evaluation group of the World Bank is reviewing the policy in the application of the policy just to be clear on that in terms of the the question about the equitable resources I just wanted to emphasize what he is saying it is not a question of taking resources away from from women and giving them to men I think that if we the experience has shown in in in our in the bank that when you start to talk about male gender issues you can bring other constituents in that you otherwise would not bring so it actually allows you to talk about gender issues in in new context and it actually can increase the the the kinds of resources that are going to to gender issues and in looking at male gender issues then female gender issues come up as well so so I just wanted to emphasize that point Pete already referred to the structural adjustment policies question this is a big big question I think one that that would be beyond what we can take on at this point even though I agree I think it is coming up for example though in discussions about unemployed youth for example and what has led to the circumstances in which youth find themselves in in that situation I just wanted to end about on this question about how to make gender more inclusive the question of the language I I believe that indirectly in a way if we talk about gender still there's there's gender has been so tainted the word has almost been so tainted that gender is almost always equated with women but when we worked on on gender issues in in agriculture and rural development we were we were able to talk about the circumstances the roles that men and women were playing the circumstances that that rural families were in and we would then be able to bring in both men and women in a more neutral place it was less loaded similarly when it mentioned again that the issue of unemployed youth we can talk about gender issues in that context we're not talking about women's equality when talking about gender equality we're talking about issues that are of real concern so it's more indirect but I think it can have more impact and I think that it can lead to ultimately at the the attitudinal changes that that we're looking for I just wanted to mention one other thing I had noted in my in my presentation that we didn't expect male leaders to be talking about men masculinity etc but it is interesting that they are bringing up the the issues that affect men so so that's so that that is very positive and I don't want to go on about the the youth issues but it is one that is coming up over and over again because it is a concern and in doing so we can open the door to looking at the gender issues that that lead to the unemployed youth male youth okay thank you very much obviously this has been a rich session with many more questions I wish that you would join me in thanking our panelists today they clearly they had their work cut out for them and I did ask if they could stay a little longer and if you have questions or more comments that we can move this to an informal kind of session thank you very much for coming we'll see you next time