Reframe: Envisioning a World without GBV - A Pan Asian Summit

"Sharing of lessons, best practices and challenges help us reframe our advocacy agenda in order to accelerate progress. Such collective agenda setting will help formalise concrete guidance for prevention and redressal services that should be available to all vulnerable to violence."

Structural, gender-based power differentials place women and girls at risk for multiple forms of violence. Globally, 1 in 3 women experience violence at least once in their lifetime. This number is higher in Asia: as many as two-thirds of women in many countries in the region. In response to an identified need to align efforts and resources at a regional level, Breakthrough India in partnership with Asian Pacific Resource and Research Centre for Women (ARROW), MenEngage Alliance South Asia (MEASA), Swayam, UN Women, and Wellspring Philanthropic Foundation, organised the Pan Asia Summit from March 2-4 2022. This report highlights the key challenges, learnings, recommendations, strategies, tools, and insights that emerged.

The 3-day virtual Summit engaged over 250 speakers and featured over 60 sessions, drawing 1,076 people, of whom 82% were from Asian countries. (The report includes an agenda with the names of all participating organisations and individuals in case a reader wishes to connect for more details.) Together, attendees sought to:

• Develop specific areas of advocacy on prevention and redressal services for gender-based violence (GBV), based on regional sharing and best practices;
• Formulate a future agenda in the Asian context, including priorities and strategies for achieving and measuring progress on the GBV-related Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) targets and Action Coalition on Gender-based Violence commitments; and
• Strengthen existing partnerships and identify new partnerships and forums to advance priorities in the region, keeping prevention of GBV as the broad focus.

The report begins with a snapshot of all the plenaries and sub-regional discussions held at the Summit. For example, the opening plenary set the tone for all the conversations that were to follow. The first half of this plenary focused on the need to engage key stakeholders and to advance agenda-setting needs across the Asia region on GBV. The second half unpacked various dimensions of addressing GBV from the perspective of civil society organisations (CSOs) and people working in communities, including feminist leadership and agency, gender-inclusive programming, the role of media and popular culture, and the role of technology.

The conversations at the Summit were categorised under five broad themes, which correspond to the organisation of the main body of this report. Each chapter/theme features a series of challenges, learnings, and recommendations. The five themes are:

1. Creating an enabling environment and building allies: Preventing GBV and GBD [gender-based discrimination] - Insights are organised according to these categories:
   • Strengthening response mechanisms to address GBV and GBD - e.g., GBV and GBD "are disrupted through ecosystems and environments of empowerment that have to be strategically, consciously, and creatively curated and nurtured."
   • Inclusion of LGBTQIA+ [lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer/questioning, intersex, asexual] in existing frameworks
   • Addressing GBV and GBD in the workforce
   • Addressing the connection between land and GBV
   • Harnessing the power of arts and popular culture to challenge gender norms - e.g., "Art for social change is not only an innovative medium of spreading awareness on GBV/GBD but also to amplify marginalised voices, especially voices of women survivors of violence."
2. Building agency and leadership for preventing GBV and GBD - Insights are organised according to these categories:
   • Expanding our understanding of agency and leadership
   • Building youth leadership
   • Building leadership of men and boys to address GBD and GBV
   • Building agency and leadership of women and girls - e.g., "Community radio is a medium of, for and by people. It is a hyperlocal medium which reaches people in their own language and the content is tied up with their own local culture. Seeking modern applications for real transformation (SMART) in India has been working with a group of community radios to address violence against women and the approach has proven to be effective."
   • Women's agency and leadership in peacebuilding initiatives - e.g., "In Bangladesh, through an initiative called Women Peace Cafes, female students of educational institutions are being trained to be peace builders. The network enables students to take action to address the socioeconomic situations around them."
3. Covid-19 and beyond: Re-strategising to prevent GBV, strengthening adolescents, youth and communities - Insights are organised according to these categories:
   • Impact of Covid-19 on women and girls
   • Impact of Covid-19 on work with men and boys
   • Community leadership in addressing GBV - e.g., "Breakthrough India works with adolescents to build their agency and leadership so that they are able to negotiate for their rights and challenge oppressive gender norms...This has resulted in multiple stories of adolescents not only fighting for their own rights but coming together to fight for their peers and to bring about larger changes in their communities. This is what also enabled them to take leadership during the pandemic and support their communities by reporting and taking action (while following precautions) to address issues like domestic violence [DV], early marriage and shortage of essential supplies."
4. Collaborating and co-creating: Collective actions for agenda setting within the region - Insights are organised according to these categories:
   • Examples of collaboration and co-creation
   • Building collaboration and solidarity between movements for work on systems change agenda - e.g., "An intersectional and transformative approach needs to be central to all the work we do....We need to build interlinkages of this work with other movements and realise that gender does not necessarily have to be our entry point to achieve our end goal."
   • Regionalisation of the GEF [Global Environment Facility] process
   • Some other learnings shared - e.g., "It was pointed out by multiple sessions at the Summit that unless we change the dialogue, the narrative around DV, we will not be able to shift the root causes of DV. For instance, most of our work is focussed on identifying red flags in relationships and ways to help survivors. We need to move beyond this and talk about what healthy relationships look like."
5. The internet of social change - Insights are organised according to these categories:
   • Addressing GBV and GBD in the digital space
   • Internet and digital media as an empowering space - e.g., "The online conversation around important ideas - for example, consent - often gets defined in very limited ways, causing sometimes more violence or at least distress....A politics of pleasure will be fruitful in offering an alternative to the existing discourse that leads to violence and is a perspective that should be employed to build meaningful and impactful digital content on sexuality and gender, keeping in mind the internet's co-creation potential.

The closing plenary, which synthesised the best practices discussed over the 3 days, led to a feminist action plan to end GBV in the Asia region that involves steps including:

• Develop comprehensive plans to address GBV, and ensure conceptual clarity of GBV.
• Target programmes to address the different contexts of different women and their varying vulnerabilities.
• Address the exclusion of community organisations that are by and for women with intersecting identities who face compounded violence, from mainstream GBV service providers.
• Mobilise public opinion to address GBV in a way that is not limited to individual cases.
• Create connections between issues, work areas, stakeholders, and movements, to advance all forms of equality, particularly for historically marginalised communities.
• Centre perspectives and leadership in the Global South.
• Focus on and add to existing initiatives that are focused on preventing violence and transforming patriarchal masculinities.
• End GBV by preventing it in the first place (addressing root and structural causes) - start early in life by working with families and children to promote gender equality and respectful relationships.
• Work on movement building and sustainability by building and strengthening intersectional, youth-affirmative, feminist leadership in gender equality spaces as well as participation in multilateral spaces.
• Mobilise multi-sectoral support to bolster feminist civil society in the region, such as by convening spaces like this Summit for global and regional solidarity building.
• Ensure the independence of media channels so they can truly play their role, and support the existence of feminist media so the voices of marginalised communities can be represented.
• Push state agencies and organisations to commit to gender-disaggregated data.
• Demand that the work we do is adequately resourced, and visualise feminist constituencies that are not on the table when it comes to resourcing.
• Build multi sectoral buy-in by the global philanthropic community to adhere to feminist funding principles.

Editor's note: Below is a brief video recap of the Summit.