The Gender Lens: Rethinking violence

Snippets of background for this training course:

• There is absolutely NO country in the world that has achieved full gender equality. 
• Gender-based violence (GBV) is deeply connected to unequal power relations and harmful gender norms that shape how societies perceive gender roles and relationships. These norms often normalize control, dominance, and violence, particularly against women and girls.
• Violence against women (and children) is considered normal by large sections of societies worldwide.
• Harmful gender expectations can also discourage men and boys from expressing emotions or seeking support, which contributes to cycles of violence, silence, and stigma around victimization.
• Double standards (different for men and women) in society are often accepted as normal and lead to violence oftentimes.
• Representation in media, politics, and business is disproportionally dominated by men. These are often fields in which women face a lot of violence, and are generationally discouraged from working in these areas. Especially in politics and business, besides being dominated by men, these are also fields that hold the most power (social, structural, financial). 
• Gender based violence is often portrayed in the media as not important enough, or as a coincidence/isolated event, rather than as a systemic issue happening on a large scale all over the world. In addition to this, survivors are also criticized and blamed for being abused both in popular culture and in the media - which feeds misogynistic attitudes. 
• Often people with feminist values lack confidence or strong competencies to engage in meaningful conversations on these topics. 
• Gender-based violence takes many forms, including physical, psychological, sexual, economic, spiritual, social, cyberviolence and verbal. These forms of violence can occur in homes, schools, workplaces, communities, and online spaces.

In this training, we wish to explore comprehensively and more deeply the following. 

• Gender-based violence as a concept (what it is, types of GBV, myths, misconceptions, prevalence, power structures etc.) 
• Practical Sessions for conveying gender equality messages in our personal and professional lives (debating/communicating, designing gender equality strategies at the organization level, facilitating sessions on these topics, online campaigning, personal strategies and action plans etc.)

The learning process will be guided and facilitated by an experienced A.R.T. Fusion team: 

Antonia Pîslariu, Monica Tudorache and Victoria Carasava. 

All of them are designing and bringing to life powerful feminist projects using theatre, movies, non-formal learning, research and other approaches/methods. Through their work, they bring more feminist values into people's lives, challenge narratives and status quo, empower young women or change patriarchal and biased systemic aspects. They are deeply passionate about gender equality, constantly learning and practising it in personal and professional contexts and have a strong desire to live in a feminist world.