'Mostly Women's Issues' - Gender Differences in Community Responses to a Large-scale NGO Programme to Prevent Violence against Women in Urban India

"Despite the potential to contribute empirically to the debate on men's role to prevent VAW [violence against women], studies of NGO [non-governmental organisation] and community programmes have rarely analysed gender differences in action to address VAW."

Policymakers, practitioners, and scholars increasingly recognise full community participation as necessary to ending violence against women (VAW). Action to address VAW as a form of collective action includes both primary prevention activities (such as awareness-raising campaigns) and secondary prevention activities (such as bystander action in response to witnessing violence). This paper describes a grounded theory study of community action to address VAW in a large-scale community programme in informal settlements in Mumbai, India, implemented by a non-governmental organisation (NGO) called SNEHA (Society for Nutrition, Education and Health Action). The main research question is: How does gender affect participation in community action to address VAW?

The paper begins by discussing prior studies of action to address VAW. Clues to gendered differences can be found by comparing studies that have analysed either men or women's participation in action to address VAW. Women's participation in NGO and community action to address VAW has often been seen as a means of female empowerment. Meanwhile, concerns have been raised around male allies supplanting women's voices or leadership, men being cast as "saviours" or "protectors" of women, or men co-opting resources meant for female activists or survivors.

A detailed exploration of SNEHA's violence prevention programme follows. (See also Related Summaries, below.) In brief, the  programme covers over 50,000 households and provides services to over 2,000 survivors of violence annually in informal settlements in Mumbai, India. The NGO has a pro-feminist ideology in which women are seen as active agents in transforming their own and fellow community members' lives, and men are potential feminist allies capable of questioning their own privilege and challenging gender injustice.

As part of the violence prevention programme, community engagement teams facilitate group meetings and community campaigns with women, men, and adolescents, which aim to raise critical consciousness in participants by encouraging reflection and critique of gender roles, gender inequality, and VAW. Training sessions for volunteers aim to develop their understanding of VAW and develop their capabilities for action. Training sessions for male and female volunteers overlap in content, but differ in emphasis. Many group members, volunteers, and community members living in SNEHA's programme areas have been observed to be highly engaged in addressing VAW, often initiating or leading individual or collective action on their own in response to incidents of violence. 

The study involved 27 focus group discussions and 31 semi-structured interviews with 77 women and 36 men, as well as with 9 NGO staff. The research team supplemented qualitative data with quantitative monitoring data on referrals to NGO counselling centres. Data collection took place from 2021 to 2022 across two large informal settlements in Mumbai.

In brief, the study found that male participants in the NGO programme not only reported violence to the NGO at lower rates but took less intensive action to support survivors. When they did engage, they more often defended perpetrators or asked survivors to accommodate them than female participants. These differences could be explained by differences in (i) affective response to VAW (male participants tended to engage with the issue of VAW at a depersonalised level), (ii) perceived stake in addressing VAW (male respondents for the most part did not see efforts to address VAW as something of direct benefit to themselves), (iii) sense of empowerment from taking action (unlike men, women often said that they felt more knowledgeable, confident, and independent from participating in efforts to address VAW), and (iv) perceived NGO support for self among women compared to men. Differences were evident even between male and female participants who had taken part in NGO activities for years.

The researchers theorise that these differences ultimately stem from men and women's structurally different position in a gender unequal society. At root, gender inequality shapes social structures and social norms in this context: Women face risks of gender-based domestic and public violence, restrictive gender norms limit women's mobility and ability to socially interact with non-kin men, and men are generally privileged in private and public institutions. At the same time, past evidence indicates that SNEHA's efforts at raising consciousness activities do make many programme participants and their neighbourhoods more aware of women's rights and more committed to stopping VAW. The researchers hypothesise that the interaction between SNEHA's efforts to raise consciousness and the social and cultural context produce differential effects on male and female programme participants that overall favour women's rather than men's community action to address VAW.

Based on the findings, the researchers identify key motivational barriers to address to improve the effectiveness of programmes to prevent VAW. Given the greater barriers to men's community action compared to women's community action, it may be useful to recognise the value of prevention programmes with differing levels of male engagement, including women-only programmes and programmes in which male community participants play a secondary role and are not expected to be as active as female participants. Furthermore, whole-of-society efforts to address VAW involving policies targeting institutions and systems at multiple levels, from media and politics to education and employment, could tackle the structural barriers that perpetuate gender inequality, including inequalities in community participation between men and women, in the first place.