Rethinking Power Program Focus

There are many stories we could tell about the situation of violence Haitian women are facing after the earthquake, both in camps and communities. Too often they are stories of destroyed dignity and freedom that comes from daily fear of violence. Even before the earthquake, it was estimated that 1 in 3 women in Haiti experienced some form of violence against them in their lives, such as rape, domestic violence, or sexual harassment.  Numbers have risen in the wake of the disaster, and a recent study showed 1 in 7 households had someone living there who had experienced sexual violence just in the past year since the earthquake.

But this article is not about that horror, it is about hope. Beyond Borders has long specialized in rethinking power relationships, between adults and children, Haitians and non-Haitians, rich and poor, organizations and communities. Since June 2010 in the Haitian city of Jacmel and surrounding areas, Rethinking Power has been mobilizing Haitian communities to prevent violence against women and girls and the spread of HIV/AIDS through asking all segments of a community to re-examine the power imbalance between women and men and to come up with their own solutions. 

A SASA! Team attends a training session at the Limye Lavi office in Jacmel, Haiti.

We ask both male and female volunteers, called community activists, to work through their own existing networks of family and friends, and start asking questions about power, violence against women, and HIV. We engage community leaders, religious leaders, health workers, women’s organizations, journalists, and other important groups in a process of reflection that gets them thinking about what they can do, in their roles, to support nonviolence and a balance of power between women and men. Our engagement is strategic, following a behavior change methodology called SASA!, started in Uganda and being carefully adapted by the Rethinking Power team to fit Haitian community strengths and realities. Change does not happen overnight, but the response has been astounding.

Every day, people the SASA! Team has engaged with stop by the office with new reflections and ideas. They see the incredible barrier to development and the damage to the community caused by domestic and sexual violence, and the amazing advantages balanced power between women and men can provide to women, men, children, families, and the entire community. 

We have many creative ways to start community discussion about these issues. One is an exercise called The Power Paper, which always seems to provoke wisdom and reflection about how each of us uses our power, and what power should look like. In The Power Paper, group members quietly reflect on a series of questions about positive and negative uses of power, their image of power, times in their lives when they have held or lacked power, and other thought-provoking reflection questions. Participants are then invited to stand in small groups of 4, each holding a corner of a large sheet of flip chart paper with one hand. The facilitator explains that they are to imagine that all of their personal power lies in that paper, being held by themselves and three other group members. At the count of three, they are told, they can each take their power. Facilitators watch carefully as some group members become aggressive and take more than their share of the power paper, and others remain calm. Most groups tear their papers apart in some variety of mild scuffle, and some group members receive tiny shreds of power while others take almost the whole sheet. However, in each community activist selection session, at least one small group of four did not tear their paper—they whispered to each other and collectively decided to keep their power together. 

SASA! Team members participate in the International Women’s Day march in Haiti to raise awareness of violence against women and girls.

The large-group discussion that follows the paper tearing in each workshop leads to incredible reflections about the differences in our theories and our practice related to power sharing in households, relationships, between men and women in the community, and the country as a whole. It led one man to confess his bad behavior toward women in his life, and to ask the group to help him change. As one young woman explained with tears in her eyes, “as soon as you said that you would count to 3 and for us to take our power, I started shaking and begged my group to keep our paper together. It became really important to me that we didn’t tear the paper—that we kept our power together. Because that paper is our homes—and that paper is Haiti.”

As Beyond Borders has long known, if you create the space for Haitians to be together in a room and ask the right questions, wisdom will come out that can guide change. Rethinking Power and the SASA! methodology work from that perspective. However, power balance between women and men takes the long-term engagement of each of us—as we continue to spark reflection in Haiti, we want each reader of this article to be a part of the the movement to end violence against women and girls, and ask yourself this question: What can I do today to help to balance power between women and men in my life?