Men attend workshop to stop violence against women

TWENTY-seven male participants in Lae took part in the second regional advocacy training for men on eliminating violence against women.
The participants came from law enforcement agencies, welfare and various non-governmental organisations.
The four-day workshop began on Monday and was organised by the Consecutive Implementing Monitoring Council and New Zealand funded Compass project.
The training is being facilitated by the commissioner of the Fiji women crisis centre and human rights activist Shamima Ali and will end today.
The focus of the training was to develop skills amongst a core group of men to respond sensitively to issues of violence against women in their area of work.
Mrs Ali said the training was important to promote gender equality and also an important step to solving violence against women.
She said the whole objective of the training was to get the participants to recognise gender relations and its link to violence against women, the root causes of violence against women, examining their own attitudes, beliefs and making a commitment to ending violence against women.
Topics that were part of the discussion of the workshop included gender awareness, domestic violence, rape and sexual assault, how religion and culture perpetuate violence against women.
During the training the participants also took part in discussing men’s role and how they will use the knowledge they had acquired to advocate in their field of work.