TRAINING: Teaching WISE Women and WISE Men

“Have you ever seen a woman who was properly dressed and they raped that woman anyway?” Oretha T. Lah, a legal advocate and gender trainer, asked a group of about twenty men last month at a community center in Kakata, an hour outside of Monrovia, the capital of Liberia.

The men agreed that this had happened, but weren't quite ready to say that how women dress isn't a cause of rape.

Slowly, though, they're beginning to accept this idea and other ideas – that women shouldn't be beaten and have rights, and that women's rights need male advocates.

Through a sensitization group called WISE Men, Norwegian Refugee Council staff are changing attitudes and teach men these things and more.

WISE Men is a counterpart of NRC's previously established WISE Women groups. Both groups take community leaders and spend a couple of days a month for about six months teaching them about SGBV and gender rights. So far, 225 women advocates have participated in training and now serve as a first point of contact for many victims of SGBV. More women are being trained, and now men are being trained as well.

“They don't even know rape is a crime,” says Lah, the leader of the WISE Men group. But men aren't the only one who don't know a lot about rights.

Nancy Tolbert, a 44-year-old participant in a WISE Women group that took place in Bensonville in May of this year explained, “even if a man beat us, we bear it because we never knew it was our right not to be beat.”

Now, Tolbert says, she knows this. And that changes everything.