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| NGO PROFILE: Viva Rio, Brazil |
Experts recognise that promoting women’s involvement in the design and implementation of initiatives to reduce armed violence can provide a fuller picture of human security impacts, and can improve chances for achieving success. Here, IANSA WN spotlights the range of creative and effective strategies to inform and inspire our members’ work around the world.
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| Survival of the fittest?
Brazil may still be a macho country, but women are taking the lead at reducing debilitating levels of gun violence
(Rio de Janeiro) -- More than 100 Brazilians die every day by guns, most of them young men from poor communities. In Rio de Janeiro, young men are more likely to be killed by firearms than all other external causes of death combined, including traffic accidents, illness, and other kinds of injuries. “Men have taken gun violence to a level that is completely out of control,” says Rubem Cesar Fernandes, Director of the Rio-based anti-violence NGO Viva Rio.
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Empowering mothers, sisters, girlfriends, wives and cousins of violent men to promote their choices and use their skills to prevent gun violence is the aim of Viva Rio’s women’s campaign “Choose Gun Free! Its Your Weapon or Me,” launched in May 2001.(1) |
A volunteer who had been kidnapped and held at gun point coordinated the initial activities. As the campaign reaches the three-year mark, its achievements are formidable: tens of thousands of women, many of them organised in victims’ support groups, marched in the streets and successfully advocated for tighter gun laws at the state level in Rio in August 2001, and at the national level in December 2003 for the Disarmament Statute.
The success of the women’s campaign has brought new opportunities and challenges for Viva Rio. In recognition of the important contribution of women to violence prevention, the organisation is re-evaluating existing projects and developing new ones with gender-specific content.
Fighting for Peace in Rio’s Violent Favelas
Viva Rio’s Fight for Peace project has taken violence prevention in the notoriously gun-infested favelas to a surprising new place: the boxing ring. Because it uses a typically “male” sport (boxing) to counter a problem associated with “violent masculinity” (gun violence), the project originally only included boys. (2) But, says Luke Dowdney, coordinator of the project, “Girls are directly and indirectly involved in the gun violence epidemic, although their role is less clearly documented. We think they should be part of the solution, too.”
And they have, since February of 2003, when girls interested in joining the project – as well as boys who were already involved – began pressuring project organizers to make the boxing club co-ed. All participating athletes are between twelve and twenty-five years of age, and come from the same favela where the club is located, Maré, a de-facto war zone between two rival drug factions in Rio’s Northern Zone, far from the postcard backdrop of Copacabana and Ipanema beaches.
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Photo: Viva Rio |
| “There was a really high demand when we opened the club to girls. This has brought positive changes to the project because it is no longer so full of testosterone,” jokes Leriana Figueiredo, Social Coordinator of the Fight for Peace project. In less than six months, twenty of the boxing academy’s sixty slots were filled by women and girls. The project combines professional boxing lessons in a state-of-the-art academy with citizenship classes and group discussions with a social worker. Topics range from anger management to building self-esteem to sexually transmitted diseases. The objective is to help kids channel the violence that is part of their everyday lives and to offer alternatives that prevent them from getting involved in the heavily armed drug gangs that run their neighborhood.
According to Manuela, 17, “I joined the boxing club because I didn’t want to hang around in the streets. Boxing helps us to feel more calm – its not just boys who feel anger! In the project we get to meet new people, go places outside the favela. Normally we wouldn’t have those chances.”
Figueiredo, who organises citizenship classes and teaches conflict resolution techniques, holds that the participation of girls has really changed the nature of group discussions. Topics that before were off-limits or uncomfortable in an all-male setting, like adolescent pregnancies and violence against women, are now much more open and productive.
Girls in the boxing club are quite candid about the women and girls’ roles in armed violence in favela communities.(3) Many girls like to go out with armed drug traffickers to feel “less poor,” they say, even though they are expected to play a support role in hiding and carrying both drugs and guns, as well as serving as a contact ‘outside’ should the trafficker go to jail. Some girls do engage directly in drug trafficking – “the gerente de boca [drug sales point manager, an armed function] here is a woman,” according to the girls – but in general, women are considered “too wild or too emotional” by the upper ranks in the organised armed groups to handle weapons.
A recent news report confirmed that the numbers of young women involved in organised armed violence is cause for concern: youth detention facilities in São Paulo registered a 106.4% increase among female inmates between Febrary of 2001 and 2004. Although young men are still the majority of those in youth detention facilities, the numbers in this group increased by 49.3%, or less than half that of girls. The main difference, according to the article, appears to be in drug trafficking: 19.7% of the girls in 2003 were imprisoned on charges relating to this offense. Among boys, this percentage was 11.8%. (4)
Girls train separately from the boys, but they do spar with gloves in the ring. Their first competition was scheduled to occur mid-April but had to be cancelled at the last minute for lack of female competitors trained to fight with them.
By Jessica Galeria
For more information: www.vivario.org.br
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| (1) According to official health states compiled by ISER/Viva Rio, about 40,000 people a year are killed by firearms in Brazil. In Rio de Janeiro in 2001, 65% of external deaths among young men 15-29 years of age were gun-related.
(2)
For more information about the Fight for Peace (in Portuguese, Luta pela Paz ) project, see www.lutapelapaz.org.br
(3)
All quotes from focus group 21 January with Fight for Peace girls aged 14-23. Specific attributions that would identify the speaker have been deliberately left out.
(4) Folha de São Paulo, 21 March, 2004.
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