What does it look like when someone finds a way to change the world?

Before joining ICRW (The International Center for Research on Women) in Washington, USA, Mr. Barker served 10 years as founding executive director of Instituto Promundo, a Brazilian non-governmental organization that works to promote gender equality and reduce violence against children, youth and women. Throughout his career, he has undertaken research and program development on men, violence, health and conflict across a number of international settings that include Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Gary Barker pioneered ground-breaking work with young people, in particular disaffected young men, to promote gender equality and prevent violence.

We had the pleasure to interview Gary  during conference MAN2012: New Balkan Boy in Belgrade.

Hello Gary, extensive work experience. Can you tell us how it all started?

Well, my father was a social worker, which is largely women profession. I never questioned that care work was men work. I grow up in Texas, where you have a lot of stereotypes with guns, track and Taft guys. As a child, violence was part of a boy’s life, in school and in the neighbourhood. I witnessed an incident where a young man was shot right in front of me in the high school cafeteria. The school dealt with it very badly: they barely even talked about it. Girls were crying, boys had two kind of reaction either “Wow look that!” or just silent and didn’t say anything. No discussion at all about how we felt. We just went to our class. No space at all to express our feelings about that tragedy. And I remember thinking, ‘Wait a minute, there is something not right about this. How come we don’t even have a space to talk about this?’

Then early in my career I worked on adolescent reproductive health and rights, which is mostly a women’s field. There was a lot ‘Aren’t men horrible?’ and also about the things men do that leave young women vulnerable. So I started thinking “Wait, I am a man too!”. There has to be other men who are thinking “Can we do something to transform these ways of thinking about what it is to be a man.” That was the beginning of my quest.

When I saw “Bowling for Columbine” it was difficult to understad how liberal they are about guns and not considerinng guns as violence. And when Michael Moore made a comparison with Canada and Europe he figured that there is a totally different statistics there about violence. Is that a problem of society and how they treated men?

Yes! Boys have guns. Right? Many boys are socialized to think “This is a part of package to become a real man”. You learn to drive, you learn to use a gun. It’s like old western mentality. And, in another hand, we don’t make enough space to talk with young men in school. So, that is a whole package of masculinity. Every society has their own way how to treat young boys. Sometime that is right, sometime it is not. And sometimes, we find a new way to deal with prejudice and stereotypes in society.

How does it look like to work with young men? How many times is needed in practice to make a change in their behavior?

It’s no recipe with 4 pills, 2 injections and 1 vaccine and you will be ok. This is more flexible. It can’t be one campaign in school, one poster on a wall. It’s got to be something that is done more continuously. I think, if we do group education well, if we put in school curriculum with well trained teachers and if we have youth lead groups in school that have some continuity then we can see some change. We found if you can have nice cycle of 3-4 months of workshops with some activities on community level, if other people talk about that in schools, at the work place and talk about that in health sector, you can see changes in few months. If you talk just one time, put up one poster, men get defensive, keep doing what they like. And also, it’s depends if man is ready to change.

If you learn something new and then go home and your mothers and fathers say “Ah it is ridiculous what you are learning at school.” or if your peers say “What kind of stupid stuff they are telling you at school?”, we don’t have a progress. It’s about reaching to make critical mass, enough people who say it’s time to change! Men can take care about children, about partners, women are not sexual subjects.

And, it needs to be cool! We found in IMAGES data when we ask women if men participated more in house work and care giving, they report that they are happier, that their sex life is better. So, for men that is: Wait a minute! Things are better if we do these things.

How to make a leap from stories of individual change into public policy?

Safe house, posters, everyday talking about that is just a part. There is a few examples in Brazil where we work with boys and girls about domestic violence as a part of school curriculum and that’s going together with trained police, specialized police and social workers who receive women who were victims of violence and  also receive boys and men who been victims of sexual violence. So, all together prevention part of education, youth culture, health sector, media campaign, government who will support can be that package for good public policy. Or we can see then that we have a good chance for quality public policy. Children need to be part of prevention program, not just women. That is also important economic support to the poorest families. When you are in a poor family problems show up.

And the biggest gap I’ll say, that is pretty common across the country, is awesome policy on paper. In Brazil on paper it looks like Sweden but implementations makes a huge gap.

In our society we have a problem to explain what it means to work with boys on gender equality. Women organizations often don’t realize how important it is to work with young men on these issues. If you work in gender equality area you need to have women in team because, for society, that is equality. As an expert, can you tell us what is the most important contribution of working with young boys on gender quality issues?

First, one of the risks we can get in this work is that we shouldn’t separate work with young men from work with women. What we are trying to say is there are moments when we need to work with young boys, give them a space to question tighter, to share ideas. We run a risk if we set up like: there is NGO’s who work with women here and other NGO’s that work with men there, we run a risk to continue to compete each other. So one of the biggest inputs for me is that work with young men has to be done together with women’s rights work. It’s not too much noise being made on behalf of women, its noise that needs to make with men and women, together. So, the biggest contribution I can see is that this generation of young boys basically be part of one that say “It is not either women or men let’s try to find how to do it together.” If we are women’s right organization and there is no space for young men, it’s old fashioned. We don’t divide world that way anymore. We are in work place together, in parliament together, family relationship, sexual relationship it doesn’t make sense to keep men’s work there and women’s work here.

What is the connection between young men in USA, Brazil and Serbia? What are the universal things that connect them?

Yes, there are few things. First, if you don’t work you don’t have a stabile income. One common aspect for all different culture and nations can be men’s who feel economic stress are extremely vulnerable and they feel lost. If I’m not provider who am I?

International Men and Gender Equality Survey (IMAGES) is a comprehensive household questionnaire on men’s attitudes and practices– along with women’s opinions and reports of men’s practices– topics related to gender equality. From 2009 to 2010, household surveys were administered to more than 8,000 men and 3,500 women ages 18 to 59 in Brazil, Chile, Croatia, India, Mexico and Rwanda etc. Topics included health practices, parenting, relationship dynamics, sexual behavior and use of violence. If we look at IMAGES, is there possibility to make a parallel between young men, for example in India, Croatia and Mexico?

All these countries are different among themselves. In some countries men are more accepting gender equality. There is a country where you have more or less care work.  Then countries were usage of condoms is low, HIV testing also. Few things are quite common like violence against women. That seems to me as universal topics for all of them.

What is your inspiration to look forward, to activate and change people around you?

Young men who we started to work with 10 years ago, and changes that they made. They are good fathers, sexual partners, and adult men now. And, when you find a group of people who believe in change, we believe we can make world better. That is the most important!

By Marina Ugrinić