Gender-based Violence: Finding Succour From Survivors In Kaduna Communities

Women-led dialogue circles in Maiduguri, Nigeria, have drawn over 1,000 gang members into conversation about peace, persuading some to renounce violence and become community advocates.

In St. Paul, one of Minnesota’s collective approaches to solutions in action — dubbed The Blueprint for Safety — is a foundation of laws that adapt to the proliferation of domestic violence in the state and successful efforts of marrying the advocate community with the criminal justice system.

The salishi (local arbitration) system operated by women's collectives in West Bengal successfully resolves about 74% of domestic violence and family disputes through community-based mediation. This has resulted in the encouragement of people following legal routes.

The Lagos State Domestic and Sexual Violence Agency (DSVA) provides comprehensive survivor support services including legal aid, medical care, shelters, and prevention programs, successfully building public trust and securing 140+ convictions while reaching 6.3 million people through awareness campaigns, though significant gaps remain between the 8,692 reported cases and actual access to justice and support services.

Local activists are joining together to protest the potential closure of Southwest Memorial Hospital’s birthing center, advocating and organizing to ensure the hospital stays open and locals can access the care they need in rural areas.

This Ability is a non-profit in Kenya specializing in supporting those facing gender-based violence, particularly with disabilities, with myriad resources. The organization developed a network of on-call women called "Mama Siri" who field emergency and informative calls on a toll-free number. Since 2020, their hotlines have received more than 4,500 calls.

Between 2019 and 2020, Nature Kenya's EU-funded REBUILD project supplied certified, salinity-tolerant rice seeds to farmers in Ozi, Kenya, who leveraged natural tidal irrigation to nearly double farmer participation and increase processed rice production from 51,284 kg to 79,625 kg.

Home Free is a small, transitional-housing program for women who served long prison sentences for crimes against or on behalf of their abusers. A population long neglected, the women are part of a community recovering from the trauma of prison and the trauma that put them there. Giving them autonomy, in ways typical re-entry programs do not, is key to their recovery. “Home Free is the culmination of a decades-long struggle by women to be seen and supported by a system that has condemned and ignored them.”

The Violence Against Women Act was billed as a way to make a patriarchal society, and policing profession in particular, take domestic violence more seriously. It encouraged policies making arrest of alleged abusers mandatory, even to the point of punishing victims who refused to cooperate in prosecutions. This has backfired on many victims, especially women of color who distrust police and their punitive approaches to solving family problems. The law also prioritizes punitive approaches in its awarding of federal grants, thus denying victim aid to women who do not wish to cooperate with arrests.

In the Kutupalong Refugee Camp in Bangladesh, Rohingya women are overcoming the societal restraints that bound them at home in Myanmar and becoming leaders and change-makers in their community. Despite resistance from the men, hundreds of women in the camp banded together to form a group called Shanti Mohila. This allowed them to push for more peace and justice and issues like domestic violence, and they even received support from Legal Action Worldwide to prosecute crimes against the Rohingya people.