Sonke Gender Justice: Exploring the links between gender, violence, and HIV through digital stories.

The Sonke Gender Justice Network works with men, women, youth, and children in the South African Development Countries (SADC) region to achieve gender equality, prevent gender based violence, and reduce the spread of HIV and the impact of AIDS. Sonke employs various social change strategies to promote a healthy, equitable society, ranging from individual skill building and community education, to organizational development, community mobilization, and policy advocacy.

Since 2007, Silence Speaks has been coordinating digital storytelling workshops with Sonke in Johannesburg and Cape Town, South Africa. In these workshops, youth and adults are exploring how past life experiences have supported their personal commitments to taking a stand against violence and exposing its connection to HIV and AIDS. Stereotyped representations of men, women, and gender-based violence abound in global popular media. The Sonke digital stories present an alternative vision that emphasizes the importance of reflection, hope, and a commitment to social change. Some of the stories are raw testimonials about survival; others challenge misperceptions about men and masculinity and offer examples of the role both men and women play in confronting gender inequality and other forms of injustice. The sessions include a full participatory process in which storytellers write and edit their own stories, with support from facilitators.

A collection of stories that mix English with the first languages of storytellers (including subtitles where necessary), and an accompanying facilitators’ guide are emerging as crucial tools in Sonke’s work. Sonke and its many partners are screening stories with careful facilitation across Southern Africa as a way of educating local communities, training service providers, inspiring policymakers, and promoting sustained community action for change.

generationFIVE: Digital storytelling to end child sexual abuse in five generations.

generationFIVE (G5) envisions a future in which child sexual abuse no longer occurs.

The organization approaches its work from the liberatory perspective of transformative justice, which seeks to provide survivors of child sexual abuse with immediate safety and long-term healing and reparations while holding offenders accountable within and by their communities. Beyond survivors and offenders, transformative justice aims to transform inequity and power abuses within communities by building their capacity for collective local action towards addressing larger issues of injustice and oppression. G5 also takes an approach to trauma that is grounded in generative somatics, which understands human beings as integrated mind/body/spirit entities.

In 2005 and 2006, Silence Speaks worked closely with G5 to develop an approach to digital storytelling that would honor the group’s analysis and meet its need for stories that link individual experiences of abuse with larger social, economic, and political issues. Following a pilot workshop with key staff and organizers, we collaborated with G5 on a series of workshops in Washington, D.C., New York, and Berkeley focused on understanding child sexual abuse through the lens of class privilege and exploring the impact of child sexual abuse on male victims, bystanders, and offenders. The sessions included a full participatory process in which storytellers wrote and edited their own stories, with G5 staff and consultants playing a key role in the script feedback process as well as in guiding the group through somatic centering exercises to facilitate presence and groundedness.

The resulting collection of stories has been incorporated into G5’s regular trainings for activists, which aim to deepen participants’ understanding of child sexual abuse and steer them to an analysis that recognizes the intersections of individual experiences of abuse with broader social norms and oppression. Stories are also screened regularly in local community settings in order to mobilize involvement in G5’s work and raise funds to support it.

Digital Stories - Migration: Stories by labor migrants and their family members in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) is an intergovernmental agency committed to the principle that humane and orderly migration benefits migrants and society. Countless men and women throughout Africa are forced to travel long distances for work simply so that they and their families can survive. Some thrive as members of their new communities, and many make significant economic and cultural contributions to the countries to which they migrate. Others, however, are subjected to harassment by the general public and mistreatment by the very health and government agencies that should be ensuring their wellbeing and protecting them from violence.

In March 2007, the Digital Stories: Migration Project, a collaboration of IOM, Market Photo Workshop, and Silence Speaks, recruited eight men and women from countries in Southern Africa to tell stories that highlight the issues and consequences of labor migration. Following a series of orientation sessions in Lesotho, Swaziland, and several rural areas in South Africa where participants were provided with disposable cameras, taught some photography basics, and asked to take photos of their homes and neighborhoods, the group attended a four-day digital storytelling workshop in Johannesburg. This session included a modified process in which participants wrote and recorded their own stories, and students from Market Photo provided hands-on computer help as requested. The goal of the Project was two-fold. First, it aimed to create a safe workshop space in which labor migrants and family members could share stories with others like themselves and gain a clear sense of individual achievement, group solidarity, and a final product they could feel proud of. Second, it aimed to develop a collection of short-form media pieces appropriate for use in a variety of settings as tools for opening hearts and minds about the realities of labor migration.

The Project’s A Better Life Than Me DVD (featuring all stories in English as well as in the first languages spoken by storytellers, with English subtitles) and accompanying Facilitators’ Guide give presenters easy-to-use tools that can help raise awareness about labor migration and build skills for better assisting and advocating for migrants and family members among those in health, community development, and policy contexts.

Instituto Promundo: Youth activists in Brazil speak out against family and community violence.

Promundo’s mission is to promote gender equity and prevent violence against children, youth, and women in Brazil and around the world. Promundo’s Violence Prevention Program takes an interpersonal approach that recognizes that, beyond the emotional, cognitive, and physical aspects of infant and youth development, the social context in which children and youth grow up also needs to be understood in order to unravel the causes and impact of violence.

The Silence Speaks partnership with Promundo is built on an awareness that young people in Brazil need to see and hear themselves in media and, more importantly, that they need the chance to take control of media content which claims to represent their lives and experiences. In May 2008, Silence Speaks traveled to Rio de Janeiro to conduct an intensive, six-day Train-the-Trainers workshop in digital storytelling, for key Promundo staff and youth leaders. This workshop included a full participatory process in which storytellers wrote and edited their own stories. Trainees will go on to lead follow-up workshops (using a modified production process, given the lack of easy access to adequate computer labs) in various cities in northern, central, and southern Brazil, to gather stories by youth taking action against violence in their communities.

The resulting collection of stories will be featured on a final compilation DVD that will be produced with menus in both English and Portuguese (all stories will be recorded in Portuguese and subtitled in English). Promundo will share the stories in a variety of community settings and training venues to support its work to end violence and advance youth voices in its prevention.

Digital Hero Book Project: Formerly abducted youth in Northern Uganda share their struggles and triumphs.

REPSSI’s Hero Book approach leads groups of children through a series of autobiographical storytelling and art exercises to find solutions to personal and social challenges they face. It has been used in sub-Saharan Africa for five years, primarily as a way of providing psychosocial care and support to children affected by HIV/AIDS, poverty, and conflict. For formerly abducted children in Northern Uganda (sometimes referred to as “Child Soldiers” in western media), Hero Book-making (in tandem with intensive individual and group psychosocial support) has been transformative, enabling these children to express their pain in a safe setting and overcome the stigma they often face upon returning to their villages.

In 2006, REPSSI initiated the Digital Hero Book project, which creates tools and arranges for opportunities for young people who have made paper Hero Books to create digital versions and share them, if desired, online. As a partner in this work, Silence Speaks worked with REPSSI staff and colleagues at Transcultural Psychosocial Organization (TPO) Uganda to lead a digital storytelling session in Arua, Uganda with a group of formerly abducted young men and women. All participants had previously created paper Hero Books. The session included a modified workshop process in which participants wrote, illustrated, and recorded their own stories and then guided facilitators in taking additional necessary photographs and video clips and assembling the videos on laptops.

Silence Speaks produced a compilation DVD of the stories, which has been shown to great acclaim in Ugandan villages faced with the challenges of reintegrating young people returning from the bush in the wake of the country’s decades-long conflict. TPO is also using the stories in family counseling meetings to support parents in recognizing that the children they may have viewed as “damaged” are, in fact, healthy and hopeful about the future.

The Sheila Wellstone Institute: Stories of the court backlash against women and children facing family violence.

The Sheila Wellstone Institute is committed to building power and visibility to ensure that ending violence against women and children is a national priority in the United States. The Institute has taken a particular interest in challenging the increasing influence of “father’s rights” groups on the family court system. While domestic violence advocates stress that awarding sole or joint child custody to an abusive parent can lead to continued and possibly increased physical and/or emotional abuse of the mother (through forced and unsupervised interaction with the father), father’s rights organizations have, in recent years, prompted the passage of state legislation that requires joint custody in every case.

Silence Speaks collaborated with the Institute in July 2007 and conducted a workshop in Berkeley, California with a group of women and youth who have struggled with challenging custody situations in the context of domestic violence. This workshop included a full participatory process in which storytellers wrote and edited their own stories. The stories capture the pain of fractured relationships, the confusion of being accused of “parental alienation syndrome” (a term invented by father’s rights groups and condemned as bogus by the American Psychological Association), and the desire of this courageous group of participants for resolution and justice.

The Wellstone Institute is screening its collection of stories at Camp Sheila Wellstone, as a concrete tool for organizing, mobilizing, and lobbying around father’s rights issues. The storytellers have shared their stories at sessions of the Camp and remain involved in the Institute’s work to advance the rights of battered women and their children.

Learn From My Story: Ugandan women reveal the challenges of surviving obstetric fistula.

Despite the devastating impact of obstetric fistula on the lives of thousands of women and girls each year, the international health community has largely neglected the problem. The ACQUIRE program has responded to this gap by working with national governments and other local partners to strengthen and/or implement comprehensive fistula initiatives. The ACQUIRE approach to fistula is holistic; the program works with stakeholders at the facility and community levels to collaborate on the development of strategies that can prevent fistula from occurring in the first place, increase women’s access to clinical treatment and counseling, and provide rehabilitation services to help affected women reintegrate into their communities.

In 2007, ACQUIRE partnered with Silence Speaks to gather stories of Ugandan fistula patients. After weeks of dedicated outreach by ACQUIRE collaborators, a group of eleven women assembled in July in the town of Masaka for an orientation session. They viewed sample digital stories and talked about the purpose of the workshop. They were also given disposable cameras, taught how to use them, and asked to take photos of their homes and villages. One month later, they traveled again to Masaka, cameras in hand, for a four-day workshop. This session included a modified process in which participants told and recorded their stories and drew pictures to illustrate them. Facilitators then combined these materials with scans of the photos taken by participants and other images/video clips to create the actual videos on laptops. While editing was underway, participants visited the local hospital where they had been treated and offered advice and support to other women awaiting fistula repair.

The digital stories, both in participants’ first languages with English subtitles and in English, are featured on a compilation DVD with additional short video excerpts from interviews with ACQUIRE fistula counselors and providers. Together, these tools are being used as part of ongoing trainings about fistula treatment and care. The program is also exploring ways to share the stories in local settings and as radio spots, in order to educate rural villagers about prevention and support women in seeking fistula repair.