SPEAKER: Violence against women is on the news every day.
It's happening at the workplace, on the streets and people's homes.
And if you pay attention, it might be at your own workplace,
in your own home.
Now, politicians like to talk about what can be done for survivors.
Particularly, they like to talk about their empathy for the survivors
and also what they can learn from their daughter or wife or sister.
But there is another part to this story,
and that is how men and boys can change
their behaviours and become activists to end violence against women.
And that is the part of my research.
The question of how do men and boys become agents for change
to stop violence against women in their own community?
The fundamental question of how do people change?
SPEAKER: And to do this, I collaborated with Oxfam Great Britain to look
at their case studies in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Timor-Leste.
Through there, we can end Violence Against Women campaign.
The campaign works very closely with local activists and the community.
And they are simply ordinary men and women, shopkeepers,
students, lawyers, journalists.
And through these training, these education,
they learn about what is domestic violence.
What does it mean for the community?
What are its impact?
And then also, what can people in your own community do to stop it?
And it's amazing to see how this take place at a daily level from
a simple conversation about whether or how the children are doing.
You also learn about what is domestic violence
or that beating your wife is actually a crime.
SPEAKER: Now, not all of the story I tell you a nice ones.
And one case related to me, a 12 year old girl decided to
go to her cousin's wedding without telling her friends.
Now, no matter where we are, parents will naturally be furious
and the girl might receive a punishment such as being grounded.
What the father did was to pick up a stick
and beat the girl to death in front of her mother.
The man was arrested.
However, the mother was forced to forgive him.
This was because he is the sole income earner in the family
and the woman and her children are reliant on him for survival.
She was also heavily pressured by the community because
what he did constituted the so-called honor killing,
the patriarchal concept that a woman can be killed or a girl could
be killed because somehow she had dishonored her own family.
SPEAKER: Now, imagine, as a mother, seeing your daughter being
beaten to death and having to pardon the murderer,
all because of financial reasons and community pressure.
There is another story which offers us more inspiration.
And that is a wealthy landlord in Pakistan
who during a land dispute killed someone.
Now the family, the victim's family said to him,
"If you give us your daughter to marry into our family,
we can forgive you and you won't have to go to jail.
We we'll drop the case." Instead of accepting this
offer and use his daughter as a settlement,
he rejected it and he went to jail.
Now, prisons in Pakistan is very different from those in Australia.
The landlord did not tell me much about what
happened or what the prison was like,
except that it was a very different environment from what he was used
to and that he used that time to reflect on his life and what he did.
SPEAKER: When he was released, he began to work with Oxfam to change this
cultural practice of using daughters to settle disputes.
Now, the people in the village were shocked.
They said to him, "What's happened to you?
You've changed." And indeed,
this is a man who was born to a life of privilege and wealth.
He was accustomed for other people to do his bidding.
He never had a bow to anyone.
And yet, from that life of wealth and privilege
and using violence to dominate,
he rejected that past life.
And he decided to use his influence for the good of his community.
There is another story, a non-government organisation director.
Now he grew up witnessing family violence
of his father beating his mother.
One instance, he said, "I remember seeing my
father beating my mother with a brick."
When this director became a young man,
he confronted his father and he said to him,
"If you touch my mother again, I will kill you."
SPEAKER: This young man then went on to university
and he found other students and academics
who share the same values and beliefs about women's rights and feminism.
And he became a local champion of women's
rights and founded a non-government
organisation that support girls education and women's empowerment.
Now, you might be asking me by now, "well, this is all very inspiring,
but how do we get to that point?
How how do we do it?" Well,
we can do that by instilling into our society
and community and the neighborhoods
and intolerance to violence against women.
And I know, and I know that it can be a very
frightening and intimidating experience
to stand up against someone or stand up
against a dominant, valuable practice.
Feel like you're the only voice in the majority of opposition to you.
SPEAKER: But, let me give you an example to think about.
say, one day you're walking on the beach.
It's a nice day and you're alone, there's nobody around.
You had a beach to yourself.
Suddenly you heard a cry.
And in the sea you could see someone struggling
and drowning and crying out for help.
What would you do?
Would you try to find a lifeguard?
Try to find other people to help?
If you can swim, maybe you might even try to
jump in and rescue the person yourself.
But what you probably won't do is to walk
away and do nothing or even worse,
take a photo and put it on social media.
It immoral not to act, to save a drowning person,
just the same as it's immoral not to act when you witness
or know someone is a survivor of violence against women.
SPEAKER: Now, think back to the landlord and the NGO director.
The landlord who had the chance to get away from jail sentence
rejected that offer and went to prison instead.
The NGO director who grew up in a family violence situation
where his father was using violence against its own mother,
and he that father was viewed through
the prism of fear of violence and rage.
He could have been complicit.
Instead, he stood up against his father,
and in that moment he not only saved himself as well as his mother,
but he also became a figure of hope and inspiration,
as well as a model for other men to become better than themselves,
to become better than what their family or their society tell him,
"this is what you can be.
This is the life you can have." He rejected that.
To act or to live a life of regret because you did nothing.
These are our choices as we face the challenges of the century.