Learning from programming to end violence against women and girls living with disabilities
Interview with Anna Alaszewski, Programme Specialist, Violence against Women and Girls with Disabilities and Intersectionality, UN Trust Fund
In 2018, the UN Trust Fund to End Violence against Women (UN Trust Fund) launched a Special Funding Window for projects working to prevent and end violence against women and girls living with disabilities (WGWD). We are now conducting a synthesis review to identify key lessons learned by the 22 grantee organizations that have received grants from the initiative.
We talked about the review with Anna Alaszewski, who is speaking at the 2022 Sexual Violence Research Initiative (SVRI) Forum.
What are some of the main lessons emerging from the review?
The review is ongoing and due to be finalized later this year, though some common lessons are already emerging.
Firstly, meaningful participation is a cornerstone of many of the projects, with women and girls living with disabilities playing an active role as trainers, community mobilizers and activists advocating for change at community and national levels. Women and girls living with disabilities are often positioned as non-participants, which fuels patterns of self-stigma, discrimination and violence. Their meaningful participation therefore emerged as both a process and a truly impactful dimension of project programming. It also enabled a shift from a charity mindset around passive victims to a different ‘optic’ of contributing agents of change. Participation can be lifechanging if careful thought, consultation, time and resources are put into this.
Secondly, this review shows how important it is to work with wide institutional systems and duty bearers to create sustainable progress. Grantees were effective in capacitating, catalyzing, and collaborating with wider institutional systems and formal duty bearers, in some cases, contributing to ground-breaking legal change.
Also emerging is the success of basic primary prevention approaches in reducing rates of violence. Violence and discrimination against women and girls living with disabilities often remains normalized yet many grantees effectively challenged assumptions that this violence is inevitable. Basic activities, such as awareness raising with family members, training service providers around attitudes, and sensitizing women and girls living with disabilities on their rights had a tremendous impact on their experiences of violence and exclusion.
Finally, although the COVID-19 crisis brought about increased risks of violence by women and girls living with disabilities and those working to support their rights, many grantee partners were able to utilize their experiences of working in challenging and unpredictable circumstances and use their capacity for adaptation to pivot effectively, and make their programmes stronger in the end, in some cases even securing additional funding.
Can you give us a couple of examples where UN Trust Fund grantees have applied these lessons?
In Argentina, FUSA capitalized on existing positive political momentum around increasing access to sexual and reproductive health to make progress on specific issues that WGDW faced. By engaging and forming strategic alliances with health professionals, government health and youth departments, and national training schools, FUSA successfully advocated for changes in legislation around surgical contraception and bodily integrity for WGWD.
In Cambodia, ADD International worked with seven local women’s and disability networks to achieve attitudinal and behavioural changes with family caregivers, community members and institutional service providers to tackle underlying drivers of violence. Far fewer WGWD now feel excluded from services by their family, community, service providers or themselves: the project evaluation shows that experiences of violence by WGWD sampled had reduced from 70% (at baseline) to 27%.
How can the review inform donors?
Donors should recognize the leading role played by civil society and women’s rights organizations (CSOs/WROs) as well as their specific expertise and practice-based knowledge, and recognize them as invaluable assets to efforts to prevent and address all forms of violence against women and girls living with disabilities.
The COVID-19 crisis has highlighted the importance of flexible funding and the need to support the organizational resilience of CSOs/WROs in times of crises and beyond. The types of adaptations made by our grantees can have longer-term resonance for all intersectional work on gender and disability in particular. Our grantees showed us, concretely, that it is indeed possible to build back better if we resource them adequately in a timely way, and value their practice-based experience and knowledge.
In addition, it is important to increase the capacities of CSOs/WROs while elevating their ownership and encouraging synergies between them, to support their incredible work on the ground.
Learn more about the UN Trust Fund’s work to support CSOs/WROs working to end violence against WGWD in another interview with Anna Alaszewski here.
