Gender-based violence remains one of the most common human rights abuses in the world.

In Nigeria, at least one in every three women is likely to have been beaten or abused in her lifetime.

WIDC succeeded in organizing workshops in communities at the beginning. However, once some of the workshop participants began putting the learned ideas into practice, we experienced serious opposition to our work from the male authorities in the communities where we were working. The men did not like these changes that were occurring in the lives of their women and girls with whom we were working. To curb this ‘revolt’—as they saw it—they prevented their wives and daughters from attending the WIDC workshops. As a result, WIDC had serious difficulty in securing participants for workshops.

So we built a network of males who were interested in our work. My husband and two sons joined our work, and they were able to convince their friends also to join our cause. My husband became an empowerment workshop trainer. He began organizing the workshop for men to re-orientate their views about women. These workshops are helping men in our communities to take more responsibility for their actions and to develop higher self-esteem in them. The men who are going through the empowerment workshops are beginning to see their wives and female counterparts as partners rather than subordinates.

Read the full article on combating gender-based violence by Busayo Obisakin at GlobalGiving.