UN Women toolkit to end violence

Transcript

UN Women is hoping its new toolkit for ending violence against women in the Pacific will help local governments, community groups and anyone who wants to take action over the issue.

The Pacific has the worst record of domestic violence in the world with recent figures showing two out of every three women in the Pacific will have experienced violence from an intimate partner in their lifetime.

UN Women Pacific Representative, Aleta Miller, says the Ending Violence Against Women Toolkit was developed in response to calls for help from groups and individuals around the region.

ALETA MILLER: Well UN Women in the Pacific we run the Pacific fund to end violence against women. This is funded by the Australian government. So in terms of where the tool kit originated, its actually come as a response from the organisations who we work with in the Pacific on ending violence. So we work with a range of grantees who are funded through the Pacific fund and they are working in a number of countries across the Pacific on our various initiatives to end violence against women. And they have given us feed back over the last couple of years about the need for very applied practical tools that they can use in their context. In terms of how to do best practice work on ending violence.

KOROI HAWKINS: So what is this, is it an instructional manual, a project manual?

AM: It is a really cool booklet with a narrative with an actual story that plays through the booklet of a fictional place and a fictional character, a woman, who is trying to work to end violence in her community. So it's very engaging it is very accessible to the reader. It's not one of those boring things, academic style at all. And what it does is it takes you through all the different thinking processes and planning processes that you have to go through, to run a good project in your community. So it helps you work out what is the problem. You know how do you plan a strategy of an intervention. Whether it is you want to end violence or respond to violence for example. It talks you through how to write a proposal, how to get funding, how to think about planning the implementation and how to go through and actually implement the activities that you are thinking of doing. It is very, very, very applied and it's the first guide of its kind written for the Pacific.

KH: And what is your target audience here?

AM: Target audience is organisations, small and large. So civil society, community based organisations, non-governmental organisations but also some governments. So it is quite a broad range, but people practitioners, who are looking to do something in there communities and want to make sure that what they are doing is robust. Is a strong intervention, grounded in the evidence. So we don't need to make this all up, we can actually apply what we already know from work in the Pacific. What work has been done and what lessons do we already know that practitioners in the Pacific can use as a jumping off point for their work.

KH: Turning to the issue itself. What is the situation with domestic violence in the Pacific?

AM: It's pretty bad, so in women's lifetimes, in the lifetimes of women and girls in the Pacific two out of three women and girls will have an experience of violence with an intimate partner. So this is about twice the rate of the global average. So its bad, its the worst in the world. So what is really important in responding, is that we have solutions coming from the Pacific. That work here, that are applied to our context. So this resource has come from the grantees. They have given us ideas, they have asked, they have given us requests and that is why this has been developed in this way for this part of the world.