Webinar Details

During the webinar Natalia Batenkova from Unizon and Meghan Donevan from Talita discuss the following topics:

1. What does pornography teach and how does it affect us?

2. Porn culture and rape culture

3. Pornography and prostitution

4. How to address pornography: the Swedish experience

Facilitators

Meghan Donevan's professional and academic pursuits have focused on issues related to sexualized violence and men's violence against women, with a specific focus on prostitution, pornography, and human trafficking for sexual purposes. M​eghan holds a Master’s degree in Economics and a Bachelor's degree in Global Development. She is the initiator and ​project leader of Reality Check​, an initiative aimed​ at increasing young people's knowledge about the harms of pornography, and a support worker at Talita, an ​NGO offering acute and long-term support to women who have been exploited in prostitution, pornography and human trafficking for sexual purposes. She has also gained experience in consultancy work at Ramböll Management Consulting where she has applied her expertise in the areas of gender and global development to evaluations for clients such as the Swedish Government Offices, the Migration Agency, and the European Commission.

Natalia Batenkova works as a Project Coordinator for the SAfE project that Unizon runs in Russia together with the organisation MÄN (former Men for Gender Equality). She has an academic background in International and European Relations and has been working with women and girls subjected to men’s violence (both in intimate relationships and in prostitution, pornography and human trafficking) as well we with violence prevention for several years.

Webinar Details

Recent reviews of evaluations of domestic violence and abuse (DVA) perpetrator programmes in Europe highlighted variations in the methodological designs used to evaluate programmes, as well as a myriad of quantitative tools to measure outcomes (Akoensi et al., 2013; Hester et al., 2014). The inconsistencies across design and measures limited the conclusions that could be drawn about the effectiveness of programmes. The IMPACT Project - Evaluation of European Perpetrator Programmes developed The Toolkit, in an effort to harmonise the methods and tools used. The starting point for developing The Toolkit was the survey Comparing Heterosexual and Same-sex Abuse in Relationships (COHSAR; Hester & Donovan 2009; Hester, Donovan & Fahmy, 2010; McCarry, Hester and Donovan, 2008). The authors of COHSAR developed a survey that was sensitive to gender and power dynamics, captured a range of DVA behaviours and took into account the context and consequences of DVA. COHSAR provided not only the type of information commonly reported by the Conflict Tactics Scales (CTS – 2; Straus et al., 1996) but also information necessary to address the substantial critiques of the CTS – 2 (e.g. Dobash et al., 1992). In the webinar, the development and content of COHSAR will be reviewed first followed by a discussion of how COHSAR was adapted for The Toolkit.

Facilitator

Cassandra Jones is a Senior Research Associate at the University of Bristol and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Exeter.  She has over 10 years of experience researching gender-based violence.  Recently she was awarded a Ph.D. for her research on men’s experiences and use of violence and abuse within intimate relationships.  Cassandra’s most recent work focuses on bringing together and analysing information collected by perpetrators programmes in the UK and Italy (The Impact Project), evaluating an original and innovative programme for perpetrators (Drive Project), and evaluating a prevention programme (The Intervention Initiative).  She has presented her work to a range of international audiences that included academics, practitioners, and policy makers.

Webinar Details

Some things are very easy to say and very difficult to do. All WWP members sign up to say that they do this work to improve the safety of women and children – we state that “The mission of WWP EN is to improve the safety of women, their children and others at risk from violence in close relationships, through the promotion of effective work with those who perpetrate this violence, mainly men.” But how easy is this in practice? This webinar briefly explores some of the challenges we face in making this principle a reality. Nina also presents the findings from a mapping report of WWP EN members from last year, outlining the results from the WWP EN working group and project on “Victim/women’s safety, (ex)partner services and partnerships between the specialised women’s support and perpetrator sectors. Additionally, she introduces an exciting new project from the same WWP EN working group asking for examples of good practice so that these may be promoted across Europe.