Public Speaking, Workshops, & Writing on Gender Issues
It's a time of upheaval. Centuries-old ideas about men and women are shaken to their foundations. And in their place? Much confusion, much distrust.Posted in Uncategorized.
I looked around the meeting hall, full of energy, full of some courageous women and men working in dangerous and challenging circumstances, and others, just like myself, who simply believed we could make a difference in the world. We had gathered from eighty countries, 450 men and women, together with one objective: to improve the capacity of NGOs, governments, UN bodies, and others to engage men and boys in achieving gender equality. As many people more had to be turned away because of lack of space.
Discussions focused on innovative approaches for engaging men to be more involved as fathers; as caregivers and nurturers; in work to end violence against women; in promoting men’s health and the impact of men’s ill-health on women, including through reducing the spread of HIV/AIDS; in the rights of men of different sexual orientations and the celebration of differences among men; to promote workplace safety and reduce dangerous behaviour among men and boys; and simply, to engage men and boys to support, in their own families, their own lives, their own communities and their own nations, full gender equality and equity.
What struck me most? I think, for example, of images from the Asia/Pacific region. Of the men and women, several in their twenties, from seven different South Pacific island-states, including Fiji and Papua New Guinea.
I think of my colleagues from India. some of whom spoke of their organization which, in one state of India alone, has over 3000 members from university professors to men working in brickyards, one of the most wretched of Indian industries where people are sometimes kept in near-slavery and women aren’t even addressed by their name. (In that case, the laborer started organizing and forced the brickworks to give women, for the first time, a latrine and to address them by name. Small victories, but ones that would make a difference in these women’s lives.) Or, my old friend, filmmaker Rahul Roy, who has teamed up with other artists to create a travelling seminar on men and masculinity that has visited university campuses across South Asia.
I think of my colleagues from Pakistan who told of their courageous work training police officers, providing services to women, and developing the White Ribbon Campaign amidst the rise of religious fundamentalism. (The White Ribbon Campaign is an effort to engage men and boys in ending violence against women.)
Or was it the man who helped organize the concert in Afghanistan that brought back to the country a famous male singer now living in exile? Under threat, he performed a women’s-only concert and, in another event, spoke to young men about how they must share domestic work.
Or perhaps it was my colleague from Cambodia who lived though the Killing Fields and went on to start a White Ribbon Campaign that has trained dozens of students to take this educational work into their villages and communities?
Or the photographs shown to me by a Nepalese woman picturing government leaders in Bhutan, one of the most isolated countries in the world, wearing White Ribbons and speaking about men’s violence against women.
Or those from Sri Lanka, Indonesia, the Philippines, Bangladesh, all doing amazing work in often-challenging and sometimes-dangerous circumstances.
But this was a worldwide event, so their stories were magnified by words from friends and colleagues across Africa, Latin America, Europe, and North America. Work by colleagues in the United Nations, in international NGOs, in various levels of government, in many, many local organizations.
It was people doing big, dramatic things. And it was the two men from the Netherlands who set up a kitchen table. What was this? Well, it seems the minister of equality in Holland has said that the problem of gender inequality is now solved in Holland and that all that needs to be done is for husbands and wives to work out the details around the kitchen table. So these two decided the best response to this absurd assertion was to take it at face value. Now, they go to events, set up their mock kitchen table (complete with cookies and coffee) and invite people to come and sit with them and speak about gender quality and violence against women in Holland.
What really struck me the most, though, was the simple fact that the very idea of engaging men and boys to promote gender equality was an idea dismissed for many years but, now, is being embraced and defined in thousands of different ways all over the world.
The First Global Symposium on Engaging Men and Boys on Achieving Gender Equality was held in Rio de Janeiro from March 30 to April 3, 2009. The final declaration of the conference, The Rio Statement, can be found at: www.engagingmen2009.org/24
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On campuses throughout North America, there are groups of male students who are speaking out against dating violence and in support of gender equality. It’s not always an easy job. For one thing, they up against a ton of fear. Of what? Fear among most guys of not being one of the guys.
They also face a lot of challenges, particularly how to have an impact on their campus. After all, they’re putting the time and effort into these groups not to pat themselves on the back, but to make a real difference in a culture that still celebrates violence, on campuses where parties might be titled “Bros & hos,” and where campus women still don’t feel safe but have to look out for each other at parties and at bars. To be successful, they need to find positive ways to get out their message to reach the guys around them.
They also face practical challenges such as how to work in partnership with women’s groups and how to deal with turnover from one year to the next.
It’s in this spirit that I’ve agreed to volunteer as part of the organizing team for next autumn’s very first, national conference in the United States of campus-based men’s gender equality and anti-violence groups. It’ll be a chance for pro-feminist men to meet together, share resources., trade their best ideas, discuss strategies, and simply find out what’s happening on other campuses.
It’s going be November 6-7, 2009 at St. John’s University, in Collegeville, Minnesota.
For more information, click here.
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Once again, at the beginning of a new year, we are treated to variations of the familiar newspaper cartoon: Father Time is rumpled and wrinkled, emaciated and exhausted from his year on planet earth. We know he’s been done in not by a natural process of aging, but by the human processes of our age. We know he has suffered greatly: through wars, genocide, human-produced environmental disasters, starvation, horrible working conditions or no work at all, violence in our homes and communities, homelessness, the denial of a range of fundamental human rights, and vicious, hateful fundamentalism of every religious stripe.
But, just on time, in comes the new, represented as a cheerful, wide-eyed, plump baby. We know, of course, that in twelve months, this delightful child will be the grizzled Father Time, prematurely weary and wasted from his one year amidst the humans of the world.
I don’t think this baby is ever explicitly portrayed as a male; that is, there’s no obvious sign of the one thing that every male has to offer the planet. But since at the end of the year he’ll be represented as Father Time, the facts are clear even if the cartoonists are not entirely frank with us.
And here lies the problem. And here is my question.
Might it be that the reason for this poor baby’s fate is that only males are seen as embodying the human journey? From baby to old-beyond-belief, it still seems to be males who we use to represent the human spirit. Might this happen to reflect the disproportionate control by males over the institutions of humanity: our governments, corporations, militaries, media, religions, educational institutions, and, in many parts of the world, our families?
It seems to me that generations of newspaper cartoonists (who, I assume, are primarily male), have captured in their usual clever way, a fundamental truth that some women have enunciated even more clearly over the past 150 years: That if we have a world where one half of the species has disproportionate power — over the other half, over social resources, over ideas, over nature, and, in elaborate structures of hierarchy, over each other - then we’re in for big problems.
Perhaps it’s time that we whisper a hint into the plump baby’s ear: “This year, listen to the women.”
This year, embrace equality. Embrace an ethos that prizes the arrival of each new child on the planet, that sees none of them as expendable in war, none of them who doesn’t deserve safe water, healthy food, education, and health care. Embrace an ethos that tells us we must work together, as women and men, to end all forms of violence: violence by men against women, violence by men and women against children, violence among men and, yes, to the extent that it occurs, violence among women. Embrace an ethos that tells us that if we’re normally able to risk so much for wars that bring such misery, mightn’t we start risking more for peace?
Embrace an ethos that tells us that this is the only planet we’ve got and that the quest, likely less than ten thousand years old, of men to dominate and control Mother Nature (in the same manner those men were busy trying to dominate and control women), is quickly leading us to ruin.
I’m not saying that all women embrace such values nor that the substitution of women for men in positions of power would save Father (or Mother) Time from his (or her) premature fate. We only need to remember to miserable rule of Margaret Thatcher to remind us of that. I don’t believe that women are inherently better than men nor that each woman embodies wisdom and truth. After all, part of Father Time’s 2008 weariness comes from having to listen to the nasty blather coming from Sarah Palin.
But I do believe, as feminist scholars and activists have been teaching us, that the social and economic and political models of the past millennia that are predicated on the power, ability, and necessity of small numbers of men to rule the world and great numbers of men to rule their families, has led not only to some forms of tremendous achievement, but also to tremendous misery. It now threatens the very planet we, and all forms of life, depend on. It has led us to the brink.
Don’t forget to whisper: “Listen to the women.”
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There are many deep shadows along the cobbled streets of Riga. Shadows not only from the low sun on these short days of early winter, but the ones that cut much deeper from the years of Nazi and Soviet occupation.
Those shadows are mine to see for I think of my Grandmother on these streets when she was but eight or ten. Was this a building she stared at? A sidewalk she walked along? Were these stones the remains of the synagogue her family attended? Anna Zabezhinsky left around 1905, after one of the periodic pogroms against Jews, when her family had raised enough money for one boat passage. Only sixteen years old, she waved goodbye to her mother and father as her ship slipped away from the dock and into the Baltic Sea never to see them again. Most of her cousins, her aunts and her uncles were not so lucky: Were they among those herded into the Great Synagogue on July 4, 1941, to be burned alive? Into yet another synagogue to suffer the identical fate? Brought to a forest on the outskirts of the city and mowed down in waves of machine gun fire? Or were they among those who survived these massacres only to be deported to the extermination camps? I expect we shall never know.
But I am not in Riga for these shadows, nor the shadows of the Stalinist years, but yet others. They are the shadows of a terror that greets far too many women in Latvia when they come home at night. It is a country where the issue of violence against women is barely spoken about; where police can “arrest” a man who is beating his wife for three hours when they must let him go, presumably to return home; where a woman is murdered every twelve days; where men have decamped in at least 30% of the households; and where one of the fruits of their new capitalist economy is a flourishing sex industry: on one cab ride, it took the driver only thirty seconds to ask if I “wanted a girl.” He later claimed that eighty percent of his foreign male passengers ask for prostitutes for that is why they have come here. There are organized tours from England; bachelor parties are apparently a specialty.
There are not many people working on these issues: a few women in government offices, a handful of brave women who are running crisis centers or shelters, a few men and women who have tried to get education efforts off the ground. But until recently, they tell me, their efforts haven’t gotten far.
Now there are European Community funds which for the first time will help them study the extent of the problem. There are fresh demands for better laws. Another new initiative has been a White Ribbon Campaign started by the Equality Office of the Ministry of Labour. Their first action was a huge banner in downtown Riga. They organized for some prominent athletes to outline their hand on the banner as a statement that “this hand will not be used for violence.” Within a week, on every free bit of cloth, there was a handprint: 1000 in all. Not a bad start for a country where the issue has been treated with silence.
While in Riga, I gave a talk at the university, met with colleagues to hear about their work and share ideas, and led a training workshop for a small group that included social workers, counselors, teachers, government employees, and activists. At the end, I listened to their plans with delight.
And on my last morning, in the hour before I left for my plane, I walked quickly across town in a drizzle and found a broken-down building where, a hundred years ago, my young grandmother and her siblings had lived. I looked up at the windows where she must have stared out at their world.
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In the end it was the boys.
I was in Parma, the sixth of ten cities during my two weeks in Italy, itself the fourth and final country on this speaking trip. The events in Italy were starting to blur: the eighteen workshops for teachers or students, the ten speeches and press conferences, interviews on top of interviews, and discussions with some incredible women and men.
A woman’s organization in Florence had decided to start the White Ribbon Campaign in Italy and it quickly spread across the country. At least 28 local governments signed on and launched local campaigns; the Prime Minister wore a ribbon as did members of Inter Milan and other premier football teams, rock bands, basketball teams, and at least one stately academic procession at the university in Bologna, the oldest and one of the largest in the world.
So, there I was in Parma. Organizers had decided to pack over 200 male students into a large room in the basement of a technical school. They had been selected from a couple of pretty tough schools where there’d been a lot of violence. Last year, in fact, two young men murdered their former girlfriends.
It was a normal group of young men: noisy and excited to be out of class for the morning. Before the group arrived, I had done a quick training with a group who had volunteered to facilitate smaller group discussions, although given our numbers, there would be twenty-five guys in each group. For the next two hours, we went back and forth, between my talking in the whole group or hearing what they had to say, and a couple of discussions in the smaller groups. We talked about our ideas of masculinity and femininity, about inequality, and our acceptance of violence against women. As I told stories about how no man can live up to the expectations of masculinity and about our attitudes towards women, the room grew hushed. Then in their small groups, they figured out how all this linked to violence against women.
I knew from other workshops they would make the connections. What got me, though, was one incredible moment near the end. On a paper flipchart, we had written some of the words they associated with manhood: strong, macho, no emotions, athletic, well-equipped, gets lots of sex, and so forth. I held up this sheet of paper and said these were ideas that had been around for several thousand years. They had brought a lot of suffering to women. They brought rewards to men, but in the end, brought us a lot of problems too. I said if they were bad for women and were impossible for men to achieve, then all we needed to do was get rid of them. With a flourish I crunched the paper in a giant ball and threw it away. And to my surprise and delight, two hundred young men broke into a huge cheer and clapping that went on and on.
There have been many fine moments in Italy, many terrific groups, many handshakes and words of thanks from boys or teachers that told me the work was going well. Talks with terrific women who have been working for years against incredible odds to raise awareness about these issues, and a handful of men in various cities who were stepping up to their side. And of course, being Italy, there was great food and at least a few moments here and there when I could walk along cobbled streets or stare at Renaissance frescos on the vaulted ceiling of an old church.
But in the end, it was those boys who I will long remember..
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This city rises up the hillsides on both sides of the Bosporus, the wide channel from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, the divide between Europe and Asia. It is a city of domed mosques and pencil minarets, of the old bazaar and new shops selling Boss and Channel, of rambling old streets jammed with buses and cars and straight, new boulevards jammed with buses and cars, of the peoples and fashions of two continents. It is the largest city of a country which now, for the first time, is taking seriously the issue of violence against women.
Until two years ago, a small number of women’s organizations remained quite isolated. Beyond their work, violence against women simply wasn’t talked about or, when it was, the language was often one of approval: it was seen as natural and acceptable for a man to hit his wife. Each year men killed women - a wife, a sister, a daughter - supposedly to preserve the ‘honor’ of his family.
The work of these women finally paid off when Hurriyet, the countries major newspaper and also owner of CNN Turkey, joined with the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), to launch a national campaign against this violence. Articles started appearing in newspapers and stories on TV. With the aid of the UNFPA, the army launched an incredible training program for all recruits. Each new soldier would spend a full day of basic training focusing on issues around reproductive health, family planning, safe sex, respect for women, and ending violence against women. Because every Turkish man does compulsory service, in time, every man in Turkey will go through this program: last year alone, 400,000 men did just that. Finally, just this fall, the president (from a moderate Islamic party that won the last national election in this secular country) signed a discussion paper that recognized the severity of the problem and the need for more effective action to bring it to an end.
I was in Istanbul for the second conference sponsored by Hurriyet, CNN, and the UNFPA. Speakers, including the governor of the Istanbul region, talked about the problem; in workshops, we explored solutions. My own role was to give the keynote address and to lead a day-and-a-half workshop on developing effective strategies to address and involve men and boys.
For me, one of the pleasures of the work was to see the progress that has been made in the past year since I last visited Turkey and to catch up with colleagues there. Another was the presence of members of White Ribbon Campaigns from Canada, Pakistan, Austria, and Norway as well as from an organization in the Netherlands that does some similar work. These men gave presentations on their campaigns. In a future blog, I’ll talk more about some of what they are doing.
Off, now, to Riga, Latvia.
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It’s a small city of 200,000, known as the home of sherry and a centre for flamenco. It’s also a wonderful example of how a city government can promote initiatives to transform the roles of men and support work among men to end violence against women. Seven years ago the city started the Men for Equality Program, a unit of the city’s health and equality department. The program now employs three men full time. (In proportion to the population, that would be like having 40 city staff in Toronto focused on promoting gender equality among men and boys.)
A focus of its work is the ongoing effort to end domestic violence. This was one of the first cities in Spain to use the symbol of the white ribbon. Posters in bus shelters proclaim that men should “show their faces” and speak out against the violence. The posters say this must be a 365 days-a-year effort. Men For Equality also works in schools and is in the process of creating new resources, including a board game for boys. Next week they’re hosting a student art exhibit called “Men in the Process of Change.”
The Program also works to promote more active involvement by fathers. This is an area where European countries are taking real leadership. A combination of more extensive father’s leave, combined with education and new social services, is creating a new norm among young men. Aside from the obvious benefits to children and mothers, this is part of the process of transforming masculinity through the celebration and promotion of nurturing roles. It also is part of a long-term strategy to end violence against women: research tells us that the involvement of caring men in parenting means the raising of a generation of boys who associate manhood with emotional closeness and a generation of girls who will expect nothing less from the men in their lives than someone who shows love and respect.
I’m in Jerez, my first city in a month-long speaking tour in Europe. While here, I led a half-day workshop for social workers, government staff, youth workers and staff from local women’s programs; the workshop focused on the causes of men’s violence and how local organizations can develop more effective strategies to work with men and boys to end the violence. I took part in a lively press conference with the mayor and, in the evening, gave a public talk.
Two events over, 31 to go. Today, I’m on my way to Istanbul . . . More to come.
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Canada’s leading paper, The Globe and Mail, has featured my “Red Light, Yellow Light, Green Light Program.” This is a new leadership program for managers to help them manage anti-harassment policy with confidence.
This full-day, half-day, or two-day program goes beyond traditional training that focuses on straightforward lists of the “red light” behaviours of what constitutes harassment. The key to the program, and to effective workplace leadership, is understanding the “yellow light” zone where managers must help staff learn to proceed with caution. This yellow light zone mirrors real life workplace realities. The program offers concrete tips for managers to intervene early and educationally to prevent harassment and to create a positive and productive work environment.
The program can be tailored for both managers and for all staff in both the public and private sectors.
For more information, visit www.connectingwithdiversity.com or http://www.michaelkaufman.com/work/corporate.html
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There is a collection of brothels at the side of the highway an hour outside of Agra. Young women, some really just girls, stand at the roadside doorways, hoping their make up and smiles will bring in the $3 customers. In the poorest neighbourhoods of the cities, sex might cost thirty cents or a buck.
Animal images: Along the two-lane highway, unhappy black bears, leashed and muzzled, are prodded by their trainers to stand on their hind legs to perform for tourists. It is against the law in Rajasthan, so the trainers congregate just across the state border in Uttar Pradesh. In Rajasthan, though, it is the camels, stately, huge-hoofed beasts, their necks and flanks painted with black circles and geometric patterns, pulling two-wheeled carts, the driver sometimes standing, sometimes sitting, heaped with sacks of grain, or stone, or wood. On a narrow road, through farmland where millet is growing in the dry soil, the road is clogged by herds of sheep tended by shepherds with red cloth loosely wrapped upon their heads, the ends dangling down their backs or wrapped across their faces against the dust. Black water buffalo, horns tightly curled on their foreheads like the hair of a 1920’s Hollywood starlet, lounge in yards, on the roadside, at the edges of the few pools left from the rainy season. Bands of monkeys scamper along the wall of a fort and the Taj Mahal. Wart hogs rustle in garbage. Packs of scrawny dogs trot past with suspicion and self-importance. Peacocks strut over a rocky hillside. An elephant thumps along the roadway, its driver perched high upon its neck. And of course the cows, white or black, with big humps on their shoulders, sacred, owned by no one, saunter across busy city streets or loll in the concrete medians of Delhi. As a lover of cows (in a different sense, of course, than Betty is a devoted lover of cattle) I can appreciate this sense of the holy.
There is a collection of brothels at the side of the highway an hour outside of Agra. Young women, some really just girls, stand at the roadside doorways, hoping their make up and smiles will bring in the $3 customers. In the poorest neighbourhoods of the cities, sex might cost thirty cents or a buck. At the workshop I led, there were women and men who work to rescue girls from these brothels on nighttime raids in, say, Calcutta . . . that is, if the police who accompany them haven’t tipped off the madames and if they can find the girls hidden behind false walls and attics. One such woman who runs an agency of 120 people and regularly goes on such missions - she is tiny, suspicious and slow to warm - finally confides that it is no longer possible for her to have a normal relationship.
The highway: Imagine the main road between a city of 2.3 million and 1.3 million, between Jaipur and Agra. It is two lanes with no paved shoulder, and is shared by cars, tractors, transport trucks (some gaudily decorated, others decorated only with dents and rust), oil tankers, farm trucks, camel carts, bicycles, buses, minivans, scooters, goats, dogs, motorcycles, water buffalo, pedestrians, oxen carts, and occasional three-wheel trucks with an exposed engine and steering wheel column. Every vehicle spills over with goods and people. Passing is not a linear process (as in, you watch, you wait, you pass) for when a car or bus is passing a lumbering truck which is about to pass a bicycle which is preparing to pass a camel cart, you can see it isn’t so much a matter of passing as of using the available road space. The terrifying moment you might have once in a blue moon on a country road in Canada when a passer is coming at you head on, occurs every minute, as vehicles wrench in and out, except here rarely does your heart leap for it is just how people drive. (I lie: once or twice our driver has to yank onto the shoulder and come to a quick stop to avoid the bus or truck that misses us by inches, but even this is devoid of drama.) On the shoulders, men or women squat to pass the time, we saw people lying fast asleep two feet from the traffic, an arm slung over their eyes to block the sun. Children walk to school, women carry improbable bundles of brush on their heads. The road is lined with eucalyptus trees, the countryside is perfectly flat, low mountains in the distance. It is farm country. Fields of yellow-blossomed canola and newly-planted rice patties are dotted with trees that provide the laborers with occasional shade. Women in beige skirts and fuschia or orange scarfs squat to weed or till the soil.
Every ten or twenty kilometers along this highway is a village, not the quiet villages of the country roads, but noisy trading outposts, strewn with garbage, with hole-in-the-wall stores selling cloth, tires, thread, hose, car parts, brick, cooking oil, plastic jugs, and tin pails. Women sit in the dirt with children, waiting for an eventual ride. Carts are piled with bananas, carrots, potatoes, and greens. Between villages, you don’t drive long without passing restaurants, houses, broken-down shops, artisans carving sandstone in one stretch, laborers making bricks in another. Overall, everything is unkept, broken-down, rubbled, dirty, scrambled. In all the cities, along all the roadways, in the villages, what is so disheartening is not so-much the poverty (as in lack of things), but the sheer squalor. The edges of foetid ponds and streams serve as outdoor toilets. Everywhere there are foundations either of buildings planned or buildings past, everywhere is litter on a mammoth scale.
But there are school boys in robin-egg blue shirts, school girls in robin-egg blue tunics over beige skirts or slacks, sitting outside in front of blackboards covered with math problems. Women cover their heads with shawls that wrap their upper half: saffron, turquoise, canary, emerald, pumpkin, ruby, jade or the Rajasthani red, which is a deep red, cranberry but so much more intense that it both dazzles and soothes.
And the people. What can one say as a tourist, for everything is conditioned by the fact that in one day we can spend what someone makes in a month or a year. In the tourist areas everyone has something to sell or some plea to beg. But at my workshop with men and women from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Nepal, I was greeted with enormous warmth. There is a gentleness to people - and you do feel this on the street - that flies in the face of so much that should beat them down and turn them bitter.
The workshop went very well. It is a region where levels of violence against women is staggering, where girls are so unwanted that selected abortion and infanticide leaves the boy/girl ratio 10:9 in some towns and villages. Luckily, it is also a region where a lot of dedicated people are working against too much history and too little resources to fight for equality. At the end of the workshop plans were hatched to start white ribbon campaigns. (It’s already off the ground in a few areas of India, in Sri Lanka and, so I was told, this week in Kathmandu a white ribbon banner stretched across a busy road.) The workshop sponsors, the UN agency UNIFEM and Save the Children decided to devote some staff to organize a South Asian campaign to complement the local plans. (The jazziest is to send a white ribbon and names of Nepalese men opposed to violence to the top of Mt. Everest.)
And now we’re at our final stop in Jaipur, the pink city. Like all the cities, the streets are a madhouse of pedestrians, vendors, drivers, bicyclists, and animals all vying for a bit of space. There is a crazy energy but, except for the ever-present danger from the traffic, no particular feeling of danger.
We’re staying at a spectacular oasis outside of town and it is taking considerable willpower to return to the real India and leave these manicured gardens, chattering monkeys and parrots, and our room with a glass-walled bathroom that looks onto a tiny private garden that has a wide black bowl filled with bright orange marigold petals. Did I just write something about streams and ponds being used as outdoor toilets? Then again, the contradictions are not only our own. India has announced is will land a craft on the moon in the next three years and spends billions on its nuclear weapons and military. This hotel versus the India of hundreds of millions of people is indeed an obscene contrast, but then again, in a globalized world, it is the obscene contrast those of us pampered North Americans and Europeans who consume, what is it, 50? 70%? of the worlds’ resources actually live with every day, although we’re able to pretend we do not. I am not trying to justify our wonderful hotel, just reflect.
And, finally, it is marriage season here. Most marriages, even among the urban middle class are arranged. The Times of India has a weekly section where parents place ads in hopes of hitching up their kids. Everywhere you go, there are marriage pavilions and men threading marigolds into ceremonial chains; at night, Hindi pop music throbs across town. We saw one small wedding procession, the groom leading his wife by a rope tied around his waist and clutched in her hand. She will go and live with his family, sometimes with horrible results. Good luck, good luck to her. Oh, let’s be more generous. Good luck to them both.
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Finally! A resource about dating violence and healthy relationships that really engages young men. Sure, it talks about the problems, but most important, it takes a positive approach to helping men make the right choices to create good relationships. Serious yet entertaining, intelligent yet accessible, challenging yet fun, this booklet will make a real difference in the lives of students.