To better understand the nature and availability of counselling services for gender-based violence, a survey involving a self-assessment questionnaire was conducted to map counselling service providers across 14 Pacific Island countries. This was followed up with 47 key stakeholder interviews and nine focus group discussions. In-country consultations were also conducted in Fiji and Vanuatu. Fiji was selected because it has a wide range of counselling services and Vanuatu was selected as it provided an opportunity to review a model for delivering services across a dispersed island group.
This short paper draws on research undertaken in the Autonomous Region of Bougainville in 2015. It specifically explored the relationship
between women’s economic empowerment and violence
against women through in-depth qualitative interviews.
Interviewees included business women in the urban context
of Arawa (Kieta District) and rural women involved in informal
marketing and alluvial mining (Panguna District) and in
informal marketing and cocoa farming (Tinputz District).
The Bougainville Do No Harm research confirms that women do not always gain greater empowerment when they bring money into the household because their access to economic resources does not automatically give them control over those resources. Neither is violence towards them reduced. Bringing economic resources into the household may in fact heighten tensions over the expenditure of the resources.
This volume critically interrogates the relation between gender violence and human rights as Fiji, Papua New Guinea nad Vanuatu and their communities and citizens engage with, appropriate, modify and at times resist human rights principles and their implications for gender violence. It is grounded in extensive anthropological, historical and legal research.
Chapter titles are:
- Villages, Violence and Atonement in Fiji.
- ‘Lost in Translation’: Gender Violence, Human Rights and Women’s Capabilities in Fiji.
The research demonstrated that, in general, women’s increased involvement in community financial management and income generation has not necessarily led to a redistribution of caring work or other unpaid household and community responsibilities.
This monograph describes an approach to farmer learning and agricultural extension known as the ‘Family Teams’ approach used in a project to improve the uptake and impact of training and small business development for women smallholder food crop producers in three regions of Papua New Guinea. The Family Teams approach enables farming families to explore issues of gender and culture within families, seeking to encourage more effective, sustainable and gender-equitable farming and business practices.
The case studies of coalitions in Fiji, Kiribati, Papua New Guinea and Tonga highlight four influential factors in the formation and functioning of coalitions:
Formative events: What brought people together to ‘do something’ in a concerted way? For example, the torture and death of a woman in a sorcery-related violence incident generated the impetus for the formation of the Papua New Guinea coalition examined in this study. Whether formative events are locally or externally driven appears to mould the future shape of a coalition and how it functions.
Findings from participatory action research undertaken with family and sexual violence service providers, advocates, businesses, and their employees in Papua New Guinea strongly indicate that workplace strategies should be modified to reflect cultural and other contextual specificities. In particular, workplace strategies should reflect local understandings about what constitutes family and sexual violence; who may perpetrate it and who may be victimised by family and sexual violence; and what supports are available to victims of family and sexual violence.
This short paper details a pilot project using mobile phones to record and report data about accusations of witchcraft at funerals. The pilot is part of a growing body of work that uses mobile phones to collect and record data in environments that are otherwise difficult to reach, and for a wide range of purposes, including health, education, agriculture and development. The project also shares important features with conflict-mapping programs which use mobiles phones to track and map outbreaks of violence.
This paper draws explicit links between witchcraft and sorcery practices and beliefs in Melanesia, and poor development outcomes. It notes four distinct categories of impact:
- The prevalence of these beliefs and practices mean that many are unwilling to engage fully in the cash economy or to exploit their particular skills or opportunities to the maximum, so as to avoid becoming a target of an attack by a sorcerer or witch motivated by envy.
For this research, 12 young Bougainvillean women were trained in research methods. Six teams of two women then undertook research in six districts, covering the three regions of Bougainville (North, Central and South). The teams conducted 52 individual interviews and 49 group discussions. Field researchers participated in an initial analysis workshop and the lead researcher was mentored as a co-author of the research report.
The issue of sorcery and witchcraft-related accusations and violence in Papua New Guinea is receiving increasing attention domestically and internationally. A growing body of literature is also focusing on the issue, providing non-government organisations, donor agencies, and the Papua New Guinea government with an evidence base for addressing the problem in locally appropriate ways. Little of the literature, however, deliberates upon the perpetrators of these violent attacks.
This short paper reports on planned research in Fiji, the first country in the Pacific to pilot a measure of poverty at an individual level from a gender perspective.
This short paper reflects on the experiences of 38 young, educated women in Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. It finds that:
- Young women in Melanesia are subject to intimate forms of control. However educated and able they may be, family members continue to exert or seek to exert control over their behaviour and choices.
The study unearthed a large amount of information about the delivery of adult literacy programs in rural communities, as well as finding some significant gaps in available information.
There is some incongruity between how adult literacy programs are typically described and perceived in Solomon Islands and the reality on the ground.
There is a wealth of knowledge amongst several key actors in the sector that could be harnessed more effectively to improve the delivery of adult literacy programs.
The project aims to add content to the international legal principle of due diligence in the context of state responsibility to end violence against women. It seeks to create compliance indicators that are concrete and measurable across regions. The project examines four questions:
- What is generally understood to be the content of the due diligence principle - by governments, civil society advocates, and international legal scholars and experts working on violence against women?
This review looks at major trends in spending (comparing women and men), the chief barriers to women having more income and control of their finances, and the key opportunities for programs to address economic empowerment of women at household and community levels.
This short paper looks at how the terms ‘sorcery’ and ‘witchcraft’ are frequently fused or used interchangeably, and are rarely conceptually distinguished. This blurring of the two occurs not only in popular accounts in the media but is widely reproduced by NGOs, donor organisations, and government institutions. A new acronym has even been coined SRK (‘sorcery-related killing’) that perpetuates the definitional lack of clarity, since it uses one term, sorcery, to refer to both sorcery and witchcraft.
This literature review identifies assumptions underpinning key questions relating to the appropriateness of donor assistance to activities and programs designed to support democratic governance in East Timor, Fiji, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu. The extract commences with a discussion of some underpinning themes and then moves to particular issues relating to the promotion of women into political leadership. The review concludes with a full bibliography of sources used.
Lessons from the UNFPA’s process of conducting researching violence against women in Kiribati and Solomon Islands included:
- There is overwhelming evidence that the studies in the Solomon Islands and Kiribati were generally been carried out appropriately and effectively.
- There is an overriding sense of achievement, all field workers came back safely and intact, a phenomenal job was done and an enormous amount of data was collected with high response rates and disclosure rates.