Raising Awareness, Mobilizing Change: Focusing Community Attention on Gender Based Violence

In keeping with Nonviolent Peaceforce's (NP) guiding principles, the team in Northern Bahr el Ghazal (NBeG) have Gender-Based Violence (GBV) awareness-raising activities that are community led. The primacy of local actors is a guiding principle of NP because lasting peace can only come from local actors facilitating and developing their own solutions to their problems. An important first step in local actors facilitating and developing their own solutions is raising their awareness so they can identify and address the causes of the violence in their own communities. Accordingly, NP's NBeG team develops the capacity of their community partners to lead GBV awareness campaigns. 

NP’s NBeG team’s Youth Protection Team (YPT), made up of youths recruited from the community, held a GBV awareness performance in Aweil East on April 26, 2019. NP’s NBeG team has dedicated a great deal of time to nurturing their YPT's level of visibility in the community, ability to conduct outreach, and effectiveness in communicating sensitive topics. Through the NBeG team’s efforts, the YPT gained such a level of legitimacy that the YPT was requested by Guengkou Primary School’s administrators perform skits to raise awareness about GBV. YPT presented skits on forced marriage, sexual exploitation, the importance of educating both boys and girls, and how to respond a GBV incident. The NBeG team was on hand at the performance in case the GBV-related messages the skits conveyed to the pupils, teachers and community needed clarification and to participate in the questions and answer session. The performance was attended by 545 community members, (27 men, 7 women, 211 boys, and 300 girls). 

The GBV awareness performance is an example of how adhering NP's principle of the primacy of local actors empowers the community members to take full ownership of their security and protection. By recruiting local youths to be part of the YPT, NP's NBeG team created a group that the community would listen to and trust. The NBeG team then helped the YPT deepen their understanding of GBV which established the YPT as sources of information in the eyes of the community. Those actions led directly to the school administrators requesting a performance by the YPT. It was at that moment the community took ownership of their own protection and became active partners in creating a more secure future.