A couple of months ago a number weird stencils started to appear in the streets of Tbilisi and other cities of Georgian making gender discriminative and quite stereotypical statements including “Women should not be in politics”, “Girls don’t need higher education”, “Only men should provide for family”, “Woman is not a leader”, etc.
From the very beginning it became apparent that it was not some dubious group of chauvinists spreading their hatred through wall or street art. It was apparently a kind of a campaign promoting gender equality, but was the message clear enough?
Before discussing the given campaign further, I would like to describe the attitude of Georgian society towards gender equality in a nutshell. Georgian society has been strictly patriarchal across the ages, although the situation is in the process of advancing in terms of gender equality. Number of reliable researches shows the persistence of gender inequality in Georgia, including alarmingly low prevalence of women in politics and violence against women (1 out of every 11 women has been a victim of verbal/physical abuse from his husband/partner), which to me sounds pretty dramatic.
I don’t intend to write a lot about facts and figures from different sophisticated sources; I want to bring an example from my friend’s personal experience, which displays that yes, gender inequality is still here and yes, people still suffer from so –called “problem unawareness”. A friend of mine is a 25 year old Georgian female and at the age of 18 she was kidnapped. In case if you have not heard of it, Georgia was and at some point still is the society where the concept of “bridenapping” is accepted and practiced by certain social groups. She was “bridenapped” by a young man of her age, claiming to be deeply in love, who intended to force her to marry him. To cut a long story short, thanks to responsiveness of girl’s parents and her personal capacity to endure the toughest 2 days of her life full of threatening and brainwashing, she survived. Her folks found her in a god-abandoned village in western part of Georgia and brought her home safe and sound. As for the kidnapper and his accomplices, who committed a criminal act, they also returned home with scars on their souls, tortured by the evil witch, who could not appreciate the act of true love. Yes, that’s it. End of Story! No one went to police, no one was punished, no one paid for what they had done; except for the girl of course, as she could not sleep for months and developed disturbing claustrophobia, which she still has, by the way.
Back in my parent’s student times bridenapping was almost an everyday case. You know what happened next? The girls’ parents denied their daughters of coming back home, as they most probably were not virgins anymore; girls had literally nowhere to go – unfinished college education, no sources of income, no place to stay, no friends or relatives standing by their side. And they got married to the criminals, they lived with the people they did not love, raised their children, washed their dirty laundry, cooked their meals and watched husbands cheat on them because, still, they had nowhere to go. And society thought and still thinks that it was right, people cannot be punished for committing “acts of love”, man does not deserve to go to prison just because he wanted to marry a woman he was in love with; even women used to agree with this statement, they still do.
Bridenapping is not a frequent case now, but in regions and scarcely even in big cities, it still exists and the attitude has not changed significantly. Maybe women are not being kidnapped and enslaved by men anymore but according to United Nations Population Fund in Georgia 65% of males and 53% of females agrees to the statement that “women should tolerate verbal (with lower percentage on physical) abuse by her husband, in order to maintain the family integrity”. And the saddest part is that it’s the women themselves, who make this legit.
Getting back to stencils – after a little while the stencils were painted over with a phrase “crash the stereotype”. Soon it was revealed that the campaign was initiated by UNDP Georgia and implemented by the movement “Change Your Opinion”, aiming to alter the societal attitudes and opinions linked to the gender specific distribution of roles and responsibilities. Their work did not end at the point of repainting the stencils. A number of women empowerment events were held in the country shortly afterwards, including paint bombing of gender stereotypes, open discussions on gender topics, youth conferences, gender equality awards, photo exhibitions, etc. I, as a common citizen of Georgia, appreciate the work they have done and are doing for a number of reasons:
- They have exposed the fact that gender inequality is still a burning issue in Georgia – those who disagree can take a look at Georgian forums, Facebook pages and other social platforms. The social groups criticizing the work of “Change Your opinion” and encouraging women to stay in kitchens are vast and fierce;
- They did deliver the message and more importantly they delivered it to women, still unaware of consequences of self-stigma;
- They are simply a group of cool social activists, who initiate open discussions including both pro and contra groups; this is a step forward in terms of gender equality – dialogues like that might not change much but at least they make sure that people, no matter feminist, chauvinist or misandrists “come out of closet”, leading to increasing social awareness and problem identification, which is the first and basic step of real change.
Let’s simply wish them luck in whatever their future plans are!
Thanks for sharing.