With the aim to find effective strategies to prevent rising violence against women in Noakhali, organizational meeting ‘Violence against Women: Let’s Protest & Prevent’ successive of the consultation meeting on July 30th, was held on September 18th at Noakhali Press Club Auditorium. The agenda of this meeting was to set an effective and organized working plan for the next three months to curb ongoing violence against women here in Noakhali.
Different government non-government personals, civil society members, advocates, journalists, activists more than 40 individuals other than that of participated in the discussion led by Nurul Alam Masud, Chief Executive of PRAN.
The participants proposed number of measures to be taken that they think could serve the purpose of minimizing thus eliminating such disrespectful and heinous practices of violence from this society. School and community-based awareness programs, analyzing contents of news related with VAW, creating a data record portal, building a one-stop crisis center, campaign to stop violence in public transport etc was the remarkable proposals from the speakers. Majority of them agreed that we must work together to change the negative mentality of people about women and practice positive masculinity as they believe it the most effective way to bring a positive change.
In context of several proposals from the participants, some elaborated programs and measures was decided to be taken on priority basis. Decisions were taken to accelerate activities to form sexual harassment monitoring committee in every single educational institution, to organize a capacity building training on Gender-Based Violence, to form an effective forum in collaboration with legal aid forum of the Lawyers, to steer a study for understanding both the common psychology of gender-based violence and common people’s view towards women on this issue, to form a populous human chain in the city.
All the participants concurred Participatory Research Action Network- PRAN as the secretariat of ‘Violence against Women: Let’s Protest & Prevent’ group.
