The FOMEN Project (Focus On MEN) started in 2019 and includes an interdisciplinary team across Austria, Croatia, Germany, Greece, Italy, and Spain. The project has focused on gender sensitivity and prevention of gender-based violence using intersectional approaches addressing the needs of men with international family histories (migrants and refugees).
The project included participatory groups with men, and capacity building programs for practitioners, and included the development of quality standards and tools.
Professor Marianne Hester and Dr Emma Williamson, from the Centre for Gender and Violence Research, have been involved throughout the project, sharing their knowledge from previous projects concerned with perpetrator interventions as well as work with displaced communities in the UK and elsewhere.
The underlying aim of the project, which will be addressed in the final conference on 27th October 2021, is the strengthening of social inclusion and raising awareness of institutions and practitioners around antiracist and violence preventive perspectives in addressing gender equality in Europe.
The final conference is an opportunity to hear from the project partners about the development and implementation of the intervention across different partner countries.
The conference also engages in the wider policy context in which the project operated with speakers including Christa Jakobsson (Policy Officer in the gender equality unit of the Directorate-General for Justice and Consumers of the European Commission).
The conference offers an opportunity to discuss and engage with others around the workshop themes of:
- Preventing and addressing gender-based violence with a culturally sensitive approach
- Promoting diverse and caring masculinities in social and intimate relationships
- How policies and public sphere narratives on migration and asylum impact on gender-based violence perceptions and prevention
- Language and body language and the work with men with migrant backgrounds
Finally, the conference includes a screening of the filmed poem: ‘A Father’s Heart’, which was written and produced as part of the GCRF displacement and gender based violence project at the University.