Living for Tomorrow: Mobilising Gender Issues

Reports and documents published within the project (pdf):

 

By Jill Lewis

Understandings of gender inequality and of cultural beliefs about gender differences were explored as a potential energymobilising focus around which sexual health and safety could become more relevant and engaging for young people.

Though recent globalised media imagination has centred on the terrible impact of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa, the 2001 UNAIDS report identified current fastest increase in HIV infections in former Soviet Union / Eastern Europe (over 250,000 new infections in 2001). Living for Tomorrow’s action was based in Estonia, where pre-conditions receptive to the spread of HIV were clearly identified. Estonia is now going into 2002 with one of the highest HIV increase rates in the world (2001 alone revealed over 187 times the number of new infections registered each year until 1999).

The project’s gender issues intersected with a newly independent country’s complexities of transition away from collapsed Soviet systems and infrastructures and into new interactions with the West. The project designed interactive, capacity building workshops where young adults, men and women, collaboratively learned to examine gender norms and expectations in their culture that might lead to damaging and risk sexual relationships between men and women. Participatory learning processes created a climate of engagement and openness that enabled participants to think more critically about gender while learning about HIV concerns and sexual risk behaviours. A "core group" volunteered to create youth workshops with a group of teenager volunteers – who in turn were invited to implement initiatives based on their own involvement. They produced a booklet for young people about gender and sexual safety. The project designed a questionnaire to trace ways young people perceive gender ’working’ in their society, and gathered feedback about commonly held attitudes and beliefs about sexual relationships between men and women. A bibliography of resources and sources useful for exploring the project’s ideas was assembled.

Intersecting political issues

HIV prevention and sexual safety do not exist in an insulated compartment of health and sexual knowledge acquisition. The project’s focus on gender had to engage with other disabling polarisations and blockages to collaborative exchange – here the intense ethnic/national tensions residual from the Soviet era. Aiming to enable changes in gendered, risk sexual behaviour involved looking at notions of difference, beliefs about self and other, the problematic "naturalising" of identity differences and the social, cultural and historical factors shaping them. The project drew on local and regional resources and gender research, but centred active learning methods, drama techniques, participant agency and possibilities for initiatives to be taken over by the participants themselves. Respect, listening, democratic processes in organising, actively embodying ideas (rather than just abstractly arguing about them) – were consciously connected to the gender discussions, locating HIV and sexual safety in wider contexts of process.

Focusing on gender

Most participants had never engaged with critical exploration of gender before – so this had to be made inviting, challenging and compelling. The resonance of terms like "gender equality" are not self-evident – since the concept resonates into different cultural and personal histories, and goes against unconsciously acquired beliefs about "intrinsic, natural" gender differences. In Estonia "emancipation of women" or "equality for men and women" were associated with the ideology of a Soviet past (either a "solved problem" or a "imposed solution"), negative stereo-types of Western feminism (hysterical exaggeration or the spoiled – and envied – housewife image). The post-Soviet situation left a vivid desire for "gender roles" that the Soviet system disallowed by making women go to work and censoring media promotion of femininities of frail, sexy, dependent women.

The project did not approach gender, as often still done by international initiatives, as a simplified synonym for ‘with special attention to women’s issues’. Participatory work allowed the participants to explore their own, daily-life assumptions about masculinity and femininity, so that gender understanding became relevant to their own situations, while the research input gave access to data about gender issues both in Estonia and in international sexual health discussions. To frame HIV prevention with gender awareness the project needed to:

• build an understanding that gendersystems implicate both men and women, are social and cultural, change and are therefore changeable
• implement an educational practicethat engaged participants in explorations of how gender is socially constructed and embodied
• facilitate awareness of different ways gender issues affect the HIV/AIDS epidemic
• enable critical reflection on participants’ own assumptions about how sexual behaviours are gendered, and about possible problematic sexual consequences of "gender norms" for young women and men
• link these gender issues to an under-standing of the urgency for young peoples’ efforts to stem the spread of HIV among young people.

These "from the West" collaborations

Though "gender issues" in HIV prevention work are unresolved everywhere and Living for Tomorrow could have been usefully activated in any national context, new Nordic/Baltic collaborations led the NIKK project to be implemented in Estonia. The cross-cultural dimensions of this gender-focused work therefore came into vivid focus, and highlighted the complexities of this kind of collaboration.

There were advantages to a project fertilised by external input - Western resources and frameworks of theory, experiences within democratic norms of engaging with political issues, education and organising. The Nordic Council of Ministers’ backing for the project upped its legitimate, official status in addressing gender – not a main priority in a period of transition, where it is mostly men setting political agendas and grassroots movements are new and fragile. An outsider could be bolder (more forgiven or welcomed) in initiating discussion of problems, disturbing the established borders of norms – like ethnic polarisations and gender beliefs. This was the first youth initiative to work with both Russian and Estonian youth in Estonia – and did so against the odds of resistance that haunted it, even as it progressed.

But there were issues about bridging differences, discrepancies in power. The collaborative terrain had to straddle dilemmas of "importing" and "imposing" ideas (that people might tolerate but not really engage with) – so the listening and transforming or amending of ideas as things progressed became crucial. The idea of building partnerships within which participants could assume their own agency meant confronting issues of money and power, Western privileges, arrogance or blindness: issues of control and letting go. Post-Soviet inexperience of sharing information or working collaboratively, the habits of hierarchical working and ceding authority to those with power (which, coming from the West, one had) needed to be actively addressed. The project wanted to disturb inequalities (gender, ethnic) but risked embodying new images of East-West inequalities. Even its funding possibilities risked dysfunctional inflation – funding things in ways that would be impossible to sustain within real resources available beyond the end of the project.

For Capacity Building recruitment, it was clear that ‘health professionals’ were not always the best people to involve. Evident curiosity about this unfamiliar "gender" focus, keenness to work creatively with young people, a good listening capacity and signs of openness to non-didactic, less hierarchical methods of working had to override on-paper credentials. The project needed people who were excited about creating new approaches rather than people who self-identified as "experts" or eyed another chance of Western links and funding. It had to navigate suspicion and forms of territorialness, typical in situations of limited resources that militate against generosity and inclusiveness and foster individual, competitive imperatives to escape of the pessimism and impossibilities of daily social reality.

The very challenge of how to build effective partnerships was right at the top of the project’s agendas all the time. It was important that international input was framed realistically by the real concerns and issues people faced. It was important that participants in Estonia did not try to please or satisfy the out-sider’s agenda, if harbouring ambivalences or tensions. So criticism, argument, disagreement, dialogue and openness, and two-way caring support became crucial within the collaboration. This took time, energy and commitment beyond the frame of any usual academic work and beyond the demands of a working daily life for all involved. Progress needed to be reinforced, ground covered more than once, confidence strengthened, energies nourished, trust built. It was not a simple question of "bringing people on board a NIKK project" – but of creating something new out of the encounter that the project made possible.

Building research with implementation

Given the spread of HIV globally and the absence of cure, research urgently needs to be wedded to implementation of prevention. While exploring gender issues, transferring skills in design, evaluation strategies and educational techniques, Living for Tomorrow wanted to bring research into more active circulation within prevention education. The project gathered data about young people’s attitudes and beliefs regarding gender difference in their society and in sexual behaviours. This questionnaire was revised with sexual health educators and researchers from 8 countries as a cross-culturally adaptable research and educational tool – and has since inspired initiatives in several other lands.

Feedback perceptions and assumptions of Russian and Estonian teenagers is analysed in the Challenging Gender Issues report. The large majority of them had not had a sexual partner, yet were articulate about what men and women "are" in their society, what kinds of different sexual behaviours can be expected from men and from women. The ideas about gender the young people harbour (when performing their ‘gendered’ sexual selves and interpreting their opposite-sex partners) illustrated how they see heterosexual sex through the conventions of gender difference that society offers them – that "naturalise" risk behaviours. The young people's responses opened a door for exploring and debating why the conscious questioning of gender norms, how society organises and imagines men and women, needs to be an integral part of safer sex and HIV education. The absence of critical discussions of gender leaves young people entering heterosexual sexual relations with a map of gendered behaviours and norms that embody notions of gender inequality and difference they consider "natural" and inevitable - rather than socially shaped and changeable.

Gender issues on the move

Living for Tomorrow demonstrated that an active, critical gender-focus for HIV education can achieve dynamic engagement from young people. The teenagers saw through a process of booklet production that they proudly launched in Tallinn and internationally. The young adults in the project took the work independent of NIKK midstream, founded their own NGO Living for Tomorrow, that continues to thrive, and went on to train new cohorts of enthusiastic teenagers, many of whom volunteer both for the NGO and the Estonian AIDS Centre. The NGO ran audience workshops with touring Russian theatre performances and have mounted their own Capacity Building to establish a new NGO branch.

The NIKK initiative linked the project to national, regional and international initiatives related to gender research, gender democracy concerns and HIV prevention initiatives. The young people and NGO traveled abroad and in Estonia to promote its ideas and give account of its work processes. The final group evaluation day recorded evidence of great personal impact of participants’ involvement.

One project Report makes available processes of the project development, the challenges of the work, detailing methods and strategy, to resource others interested in developing gender issues in sexual safety initiatives. Another Report demonstrates from its research data the urgency of pushing the gender issues deeper in HIV prevention work with young people. The beautiful booklet on gender and sexual safety, simultaneously in English, Estonian and Russian, made by teenagers for teenagers, is in active circulation. (3)

In June 2001, the United Nations General Assembly Special Session on HIV/AIDS received a UNAIDS commissioned report that profiled Living for Tomorrow as a best practice gender project (4). That UN meeting set a goal to reduce HIV infection among 15–24-year-olds by 25% in the most affected countries by 2005. For this goal to be met, key aspects of Living for Tomorrow, that its Estonian participants themselves listed at the end of the project, could be of use for more effective HIV awareness and prevention education:

• the crucial significance of questioning GENDER at the heart of sexual safety awareness
• the importance of linking theory with practice – developing an informed understanding of what influences real life
• a commitment to working with differences among people, creating possibilities for people growing and changing
• the importance of giving the initiative to Young People so they see they can make a difference if they engage with these issues.

Notes:

UNAIDS / WHO: AIDS epidemic update December 2001, Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and World Health Organization (WHO), UNAIDS/01.74E – WHO/CDS/CSR/NCS/2001.2, UNAIDS Geneva For reports and publications from the Living for Tomorrow project: see page 42 and also the project's website: http://www.nikk.uio.no/forskningsprojekt/livingfortomorrow/

First published in NIKK magasin 3 2001 ©  NIKK