To see means to overcome. Or how communities prevent domestic and gender-based violence in the face of war

“Never judge a person unless you walk in their shoes.” Well, who hasn’t heard this saying? And if you try to wear shoes? To the participants forum-theatre “Violence has various consequences. Losing roles – we prevent manifestations” and trainings from Zaporizhzhia city territorial community it succeeded briefly.

According to the coordinator of the project, during the theater forum, young people basically tried to explain the basics: what is domestic conflict? What is domestic violence?

The participants had to suggest how to change the behavior of one or another character in the scene in order to avoid conflict or even violence. During the performance, the focus was not only on the partners’ relationship, but also on the parents’ reactions to the child. They did not forget to emphasize that men can also experience violence.

Trainings were held not only for young people, but also for families. For many participants, the very participation in these trainings became an opportunity to analyze their family system under a different focus and, in the future, start to change it.

Veronika Shostak says that it was very important for us that both partners took part in the trainings, namely husband and wife:

During the training, almost 15% of the participants said that they suffered from domestic violence in a previous relationship and it is important for them to protect themselves from it in a new relationship.

More than 150,000 internally displaced persons live in the city of Zaporizhia. As part of the project, we managed to establish communication with community representatives and leaders from Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Donetsk, and Luhansk regions and together with them develop different approaches to solving the problem of domestic violence, develop certain activities and measures to prevent this phenomenon in the community.

In addition to trainings, the Zaporizhia community created a chatbot “Zaporizhia – a city without violence”. It works in various applications, including Telegram, Facebook, Messenger and Viber:

With the help of a chatbot, it became possible to:

The community actively implements these projects despite the fact that Zaporizhzhia is a front-line city. And the way young people (and not only them) are interested in the measures shows that the issue of preventing and countering violence is always timely. More than 300 people took part in the events held within the project. More than 600,000 people were attracted through the information campaign. The team continues to work in this direction. Today, 2 applications for participation in grant projects have been submitted. A number of events are being developed: from September, meetings with students of professional (vocational and technical) education institutions, students of higher education institutions are planned. Information brochures will be distributed at all events. A working group was created in the community, which will continue to take care of activities on the topic of violence prevention.

All three communities have their own experience in this war. All communities are different – with different mentality, history, social challenges. However, the experience of the projects’ success suggests that most people will not tolerate domestic and gender-based violence if they have enough information and support.

These three projects, as well as projects from 62 other initiative teams, are implemented within the framework of the UNFPA program to combat and prevent gender-based violence, which is carried out with the financial support of the governments of Great Britain, Canada, the USAID Bureau of Humanitarian Assistance (BHA), and in cooperation with NGO “Innovative Social Solutions”. The opinions, views and recommendations expressed in this initiative do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of UNFPA or partners.