International Expert Speaks on Gender Inequality and Humanitarian Work

In October, Zorica Skakun, from Oxfam GB in Syria, led two workshops on various aspects of violence against women for students of the ‘Population and Development’ Master’s programme. During the workshops, Ms Skakun gave an overview of international frameworks, mandates, and programmes aimed to end violence against women (VAW) and help survivors in various settings, including conflict zones and refugee camps. The students were also offered a group exercise where they brainstormed and presented ideas for pre-project problem analysis and activities to combat VAW in Syria.

Humanitarian Work: Overcoming Obstacles

Currently Ms Skakun is working as gender advisor and her role is to help Oxfam teams to distribute humanitarian aid in an equitable way because beneficiaries do not necessarily have equal access to resources. The level of decision-making power within the community is also unequal. Thus, humanitarian response is needed to be intentionally designed to overcome differential vulnerabilities and lack of capacities of women and men.

‘I work mostly indirectly through our first responders which are Oxfam teams in Syria. I help them do better service through training, capacity building, supporting them to do better community needs assessment.’ The questions about “how is community surviving the war” are too general, it is necessary to understand how every individual with all his or her abilities is surviving to adopt that to the context.

As Ms Skakun notes, the job is very difficult and requires not only technical competence, but also abilities to cope with living abroad with different climate and food, away from your family. It is also extremely demanding.  So it is not a job for the whole life, because that is hardly possible. ‘But I want to emphasize that this job is a privilege, because you are on a mission to support other people, save someone’s life and specially to address the inequality which is my passion. It is more a mission than a job and it compensates all the difficulties.’

As for the difficulties encountered, first of all, it is resistance on many levels: from communities, from professionals to accept quality standards, and so on. ‘What we seek for in Oxfam is agency and leadership capacity in the community for change and transformation of discriminatory practice that violates human rights. Removing obstacles and finding this valuable potential for change are the most difficult parts, but it is the essence of our work at the same time.’ Finding agency for changing the society to be more just and inclusive is very difficult, especially in the humanitarian context because people’s lives are destroyed. At the same time, it is more rewarding because during crises the potential for change will generate redrafting the social context after the crises.

Gender Inequality and Violence against Women

Gender inequality is a historical thing. It did not happen just yesterday. It is the way our society is organized, in patriarchal way, where women have traditionally secondary role. Generally speaking, men are usually in charge of public sphere which is outside, and women are in charge of private sphere, which is inside. But since mid-20th century there is a solid international legal framework aimed to combat inequality and criminalize violence against women. Though almost all countries in the world are obligated to assert the accountability for inequality, still the situation is complicated because it is driven by various underlying causes such as poverty, impunity towards crime, corruption, lack of accountability of a country, and so on.

In order to create change not only individual changes are needed, but also in social norms and laws. To build your influencing power you need to create allies in as many places as you can. These are the government, civil society, including social media, business sector, community leaders, and the most important part of the whole story - women’s movement and women’s rights activists.

All these entities can help women deal with consequences of domestic violence. It is important to note that violence against women is captured only in cases that are reported, and it is only the top of the iceberg. It is the most pervasive violation of human rights and, at the same time, the least documented. A woman would often choose not to report because the stigma that she can go through as a consequence of reporting her case is very strong.

Encouraging women to trust the communities is a complex issue. There are lots of factors influencing trust such as awareness of women’s rights, support of community, economic independence, safety, and so on, which will encourage the woman to report the violence cases or not. Building trust is important, but it requires a lot of time and working with everyone because everyone plays a role.

The Role of Media

There exists a major gap between the image of women’s rights created by social media and the real condition of women in countries. Media is in service to sustain stereotypes about women and men to attract more scandals, which doesn’t necessarily address the problem. Women are mostly shown as victims, as passive observers. Similarly, during the war when media reports on humanitarian crisis, you rarely see human sufferings, because media is used as part of propaganda for different foreign interests.

Media has a huge power and when it is misused, it is dangerous. What we are trying to do is also to work with media, so they will not only have a more ethical approach to their work to protect women’s rights, but also serve as leaders in designing different images and discourses by prioritizing certain topics over the others.

Women activists are working with media to ensure that it translates violence against women as something that women are not guilty for. A lot of effort was made to address this problem and more steps are needed to be done in this direction to create a safe world with equal rights for women.  

Prepared by Anna Lubnina, second year student of the Master's programme ‘Population and Development’

November 09, 2018