Gender Based Violence Awareness Raising
The new toolkit for raising awareness on gender based violence in conflict-affected Syrian communities was launched at the Topkapı Sarayı restaurant in Gaziantep, Turkey, on Friday. This marked the start of 16 Days of Activism to tackle violence against women and girls in Syria.
The toolkit – Hearing and Being Voices in Syria: Working Together to Raise Awareness on GBV – was developed by Factive’s consultant Dean Laplonge for the GBV Sub-Cluster in June this year. It provides comprehensive programs for raising awareness about GBV with women, men, adolescent girls and adolescent boys in Syria. Each program aims to deliver seven key GBV messages to the target audiences using a total of 84 participatory activities spread across 21 sessions in each program.
The seven key GBV messages are:
- Key Message A: The root cause of GBV is gender inequality
- Key Message B: Knowledge of and access to GBV services can save lives
- Key Message C: Mutual support can help prevent GBV and ensure good responses to GBV
- Message D: Child marriage is a form of GBV
- Key Message E: Domestic violence is a form of GBV
- Key Message F: It is not shameful to discuss sexuality and sexual violence
- Key message G: Virginity testing is a form of GBV
Dean delivered the first train-the-trainer course this week in Gaziantep for representatives of some of the Sub-cluster organizations.
He will be working closely with UNFPA and Global Communities to continue this training this coming week, and to assist with developing an inter-agency roll-out plan to promote consistent and effective delivery of the messages throughout Syria.