Lana Wells works with international agencies to change the conversation about violence against women
By Don McSwiney, Faculty of Social Work
January 5, 2017
In a perfect world, domestic violence wouldn’t happen; it would simply be stopped from occurring in the first place. This is the deceptively simple idea behind Shift: The Project to End Domestic Violence that the University of Calgary's Lana Wells recently shared with a number of international organizations focused on dealing with the issue on a global level.
“My research isn’t focused on the crisis response area of domestic violence,” says Wells, a professor in the Faculty of Social Work who holds the Brenda Strafford Chair in the Prevention of Domestic Violence. “I work in trying to figure out how we can stop violence from happening in the first place.
"That is why the violence prevention strategy I am leading focuses on engaging men and boys as violence preventers. We want to support them to become allies in the anti-violence movement, to become violence disruptors in their own worlds — whether that's around sexism or disrupting and stopping violence within their peer groups, workplace and settings where they play, worship and socialize. We want to support men and boys with the skills to do that.”
This not-so-simple idea, of shifting the focus to prevention by including men and boys as allies and violence disruptors, has become more accepted in recent years here in Alberta, across Canada and internationally. In fact, the creator of Shift — Lana Wells — recently returned from a trip to Switzerland, where Shift's basic approach is gaining traction.
Advice on quick wins for preventing domestic violence provided to international audience
Wells was invited by the Permanent Mission of Canada for a second time, and travelled to Berne and Geneva to lead workshops and participate in a number of international panels, including Preventing Violence Against Women: Engaging Men and Boys, Building Alliances. The panel was part of the international 16 Days of Activism against Gender Violence. Wells’s message to the audience was that engaging men and boys in violence prevention opens an important window of opportunity that governments should support.
“Events like the panel raise awareness that the majority of men are not violent — although many are complicit. Non-violent healthy men can serve as role models for the disruption of violence and promotion of gender equality.” Her advice to the audience was that promoting and investing in positive father involvement, which includes positive parenting, involved parenting, and having a respectful, equitable and non-abusive relationship with the mother or co-parent may provide a quick win in preventing violence against women.
Discussions held on developing a toolkit for government policy to prevent violence against women
While in Geneva, Wells had discussions with UN Women to sponsor the design of a toolkit that could support governments around the world to develop comprehensive strategies to engage men and boys in violence prevention.
“We are hoping to partner with UN Women to create tools that governments and policy makers can use to embed in their violence against women prevention plans. I feel this is a major piece currently missing in the international context and believe this would add considerable value to advancing gender equality and stopping violence against women globally,” she says.
Dr. Barrie Strafford, the philanthropist who, along with the Alberta government, provided the initial funding for the Brenda Strafford Chair, had a favourite Gloria Steinem quote he would carry in his briefcase: “We are still standing on the bank of the river, rescuing people who are drowning,” Steinem famously told the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco in 2002. “We have not gone to the head of the river to keep them from falling in. That is the 21st century task.”
Wells focuses on increasing gender equality through working with men and boys
In that light, it seems clear that Wells’s work with the United Nations is a strong attempt to intervene at the head of Steinem’s metaphorical river on an international scale. Shift’s purpose is to enhance the capacity of policy-makers, systems leaders, clinicians, service providers and the community at large to significantly reduce the rates of domestic violence and violence against women — which leads back to why Wells's focus has been on increasing gender equality through working with men and boys.
“We need healthy non-violent men and boys as allies, leaders, partners and violence disruptors,” she says. “We need to promote healthy, non-violent masculinities as the norm. Men and boys must be part of the solution to stop violence against women.”