The Association of Men Against Violence:

By Ruben Reyes
Puntos de Encuentro
http://www.puntos.org.ni/

Presented at the Conference “Working with Men to End Gender-based Violence: An Interchange for Global Action” The Rockefeller Study and Conference Centre Bellagio Italy, October 8-12, 2001

Background In Nicaragua we live in a culture of Machismo. Within this culture most of us men grow up to believe that we are superior to women and that we deserve more. A part of this culture of machismo is men being violent to their partners. Men who batter their wives are a very common thing to see. Some studies have shown that in Nicaragua one out of every three women has been beaten by her partner at least once in her lifetime. Now, this violence against women is not only an interesting statistic to me; I’ve experienced violence in my own life. You see, I remember my father striking my mother with his belt when I was an 11-year-old boy.

I now realize that my father was not abusive because he was a bad guy, he was only a regular man who did what he was expected to do. My dad’s a farm worker and my mom’s a housewife, they were poorly educated, and together they had seven children. So my dad didn’t have the same opportunities to get an education and to improve his life as I have had. I say that he did only what he was expected to do because in Nicaragua, working class men are supposed to punish women when they don’t conform to their expectations.

However, family and gender violence affects not only the working class, but also the middle and the upper classes. This happens even in the so-called “best families”. Also, some of the men who are in my group, “Men against Violence”, have had experiences quite similar to mine. Some others have been abusers themselves. We all share a common upbringing as men, and we all learned that men should dominate women. We also learned that a man should not take “no” from a woman as an answer, that if we try hard enough, then eventually that “no” will change into a “yes”. We also learned that the household’s tasks are women’s main responsibility, and that if we ever do it, it would be because we want to be nice to them, not because it’s our responsibility. In brief, we all learned that if a man doesn’t dominate his woman, then his woman dominates him. And if it appears that his woman dominates him, then he’s no longer a man. Therefore, within the culture of machismo there’s no room for equality, only for domination.

Within the culture of machismo we men expect women to be faithful to us, but we don’t feel obliged to reciprocate. We feel terrified only by the idea that a woman might cheat on us. A man’s not supposed to tolerate such daring behavior by a woman. In Nicaragua, a man who cheats on his wife could even get applause from other men, and women’s most common reaction is: “Well, he’s a man, that’s what men do”. By contrast, everyone rejects a woman who cheats on her husband. Then, it follows that a man would expect his wife or his partner to be faithful to him, but he will not be faithful to her. What happens if a woman has an affair? Her husband would feel that his dignity as a man has been hurt and he’d feel betrayed; therefore, he’d think he has the right to punish her.

Within this machismo culture that I have roughly described, I’d say I was a sexual abuser myself. I sexually molested my cousin when we were both about 14 years old. I also learned to sexually harass girls at school. I did realize at some point that it was wrong, and I punished myself for what I did. Let me tell you that dealing with feelings of guilt has been quite a struggle for me. It has been a long process to learn to forgive myself and to focus on positive change.

Gender violence has a lot to do with the fact that men have privileges that women don’t have, and also with the fact that we really believe that we deserve those privileges. You know, I witnessed this lack of justice when I was a boy, because I knew that my father was having affairs, and I never saw my mother taking her belt off to strike him.

Gender violence is also related to men’s lack of ability to express their feelings in a nonviolent manner. Within the machismo culture we all learn that a man should not cry or feel scared. A man should be strong like a rock and should he ever feel something, he can only feel mad and he should destroy whatever or whomever he’s mad at. As you can imagine, in a country that has been through several wars and several natural disasters, people have been through a lot of pain. And if they can’t express their feelings in healthy manner, then they might start to behave in a violent way. The fact that men are taught not to show their feelings of pain is a very dangerous thing.

**How did the men’s group get started?**

How is it then that a group of men came together to challenge the culture of machismo and violence? Well, the Sandinista revolution gave us the opportunity to work in the struggle for social justice side by side with women, and some of us learned to work in partnership with women. We also learned to listen to women, and they have taught us that gender violence is a power issue embedded within the machismo culture. Thus, we realized that in order to build egalitarian and fair relationships we had to tackle our culture of machismo.

A few of us men who have been working together with women as partners in non-governmental organizations have learned to admire them and to listen to them. So when these women encouraged us to talk to other men about this issue, we listened to them carefully.

I can talk to you about Puntos de Encuentro, one of the first feminist organizations to start working with men on gender issues. At Puntos, they even hired a professional to start running workshops with men on gender issues. My friend Oswaldo was one of the first professionals to start running workshops with men on these issues. Like Puntos de Encuentro, other organizations became interested in getting men involved in this issue. For instance, CANTERA, a popular education center, started a series of workshops for men on gender issues. Another friend of mine, Patricio Welsh, was at the forefront of this project. It was shortly after that when we spoke about starting a men’s group to exchange ideas on gender issues and violence. We thought we had to start dealing with our own issues of machismo and violence before we could start talking to other men about it.

It was in July 1993 when a few men from non-governmental organizations along with a few other men first got together as a group of men addressing the issue of gender violence. There were seven of us, and we decided to start sharing experiences and discussing the issues. At the very beginning we were doing a lot of talking and we were learning from one another’s experiences. Within a short time we realized that unlearning violence and machismo and pursuing equality and justice in our relationships with women wouldn’t be an easy task, that it would be a struggle within ourselves. A few months later it also became obvious to us that it was not enough just to focus on ourselves. While personal change was indeed important, the issues of machismo and domestic violence were also issues of social power, and as such we had to address them with other men as well--we had to tackle the culture of machismo and violence. So we started to go public. We invited people to have an open public debate with us. In our first public statement our main message was: “Violence also impoverishes men’s lives.” From this moment on we started combining personal sharing and discussions with public presentations and political activism.

Working with Campesinos and the campaign against violence In 1995 there was a general strike in Managua that turned out to be very significant for us: some campesinos (farm workers) were clamoring for their title deeds to their land. An organization working on rural development started to do workshops with the campesinos on different agricultural issues. Since one of our colleagues in the men’s group against violence was also a member of that organization working on rural development, he suggested that we should also do workshops against domestic violence. So we started doing workshops there. They were an unexpected and amazing success; the campesinos took the discussion on these issues really well. Then we thought that since these campesinos were already there (and they were there for about three months), that we had a good opportunity to organize the first national meeting of men against violence.

The meeting had a good turn out, about a hundred men showed up. We shared our personal experiences and our plans to work against domestic violence. As a result of this meeting, a few more men’s groups got organized, most of them in the rural areas.

In 1998 the devastation caused by Hurricane Mitch pushed men to violent behaviour as family tensions and frustrations increased in the face of disaster. In response, Puntos de Encuentro and the Men’s Group against Violence working closely with 250 other organisations, developed a massive campaign in 1999 targeting men in the seven worst hit cities. The campaign included national and local media ads over a five months period, posters, pamphlets, educational materials, and training for activists. The two central campaign messages were: 1) Men are capable of avoiding violent behavior, and 2) Violence against women hinders reconstruction of community life and the entire country.

Beginning of the Association of Men Against Violence As a follow up to that campaign against violence we brought together all the groups and individual men interested in this topic for a national meeting in May 2000. As a result of this meeting, we founded a larger organization that we call the “Association of Men against Violence--AMAV”. Our main purpose was to be able to reach out to other men. We started out with a membership of 53 men from different departamentos of Nicaragua (there are 17 Departamentos, or regions in the country). Also, men from several departamentos of Nicaragua became members of the board of directors. In the first meeting that we had with these 53 men, we all agreed that we wanted to start doing workshops with men mostly in the rural areas and in the poor barrios of Managua. We wanted to start sharing the benefits and the commitment of changing our lives with the most disadvantaged men. In fact, some of us who started the first group of men in Managua came either from the poor barrios or from the rural areas.

So far we have conducted around 30 workshops with the campesinos and 15 workshops and 30 talks with youth in the poor barrios. In addition, last November we had our first White Ribbon Campaign. This year we had a National Meeting of men against violence and we invited all the men who had been to our workshops. We expected as many as 100 men, as it was the largest number that had come in previous years. We were shocked when 280 men showed up. Not all of them had been to our workshops before; for some of them this was the first time to discuss these issues with other men. Some of them even expressed their fears that if we stop dominating women, then they will start dominating us. Other men offered their own testimonies of living with a woman who is feminist, what a challenge to their lives that had been, that they were learning other ways of being men, and that they and their partners were growing and improving their lives together. Thus, this exchange of experiences proved to be a very enriching experience for everyone. It was a fun experience, too; we had a lot of singing, a lot of poetry, and a lot of play-performances.

A look into the future In terms of the future, let me tell you that at the beginning we wanted to have a continuously enlarging organization, but this has now changed. Our first idea was that this association should have as many men as possible in its membership. Then we realized that growing too big could create legal problems for us, as we would always need the same people to come to the assembly meetings (at least half of them), and it is always hard to get that many people together. We realized that the Asociacion is not really an organization that should keep on growing; that we had to keep it as small as possible. It is better for us to focus outside of our organization, rather than on the inside, and this way we can contribute to the enlargement of the men’s movement. This means getting more men involved in different ways. We see the campaign against violence as one way to get many men involved all around the country. As well, we are holding national meetings as often as every two years; and we are also trying to find other ways to keep men engaged and to get more men involved. We feel happy that two more men’s groups have got organized in the rural areas. We mean to provide support for these groups as part of our mission. For instance, our plan is to develop some materials that they can use in their work.

Another piece of our work that we’re trying to develop is a program for batterers. We have just started a pilot project this year and we are trying to set an evaluation system that will allow us to measure the efficacy and efficiency of this program. We should have some results in a year from now.

Is this organization the best way to do this job? We still wonder. Because, as we grow, we’re becoming more institutionalized and we might become only one more NGO doing educational work with men, and this is a risk that we mean to avoid. This is why we’ re trying to keep the Asociacion as small as possible and at the same time we’re trying to support other initiatives elsewhere.

We feel proud about what we have accomplished so far, and we know there is a lot more to do. These small accomplishments make us feel that it is worthwhile to keep on trying.