Gender Studies Unit
The Gender Unit promotes gender justice with a three-pronged approach. The first pertains to increasing access to rights with efficient and effective governance. Second by building capacity of stakeholders to promote gender rights and third by uncovering the causal conditions leading to the practice of gender differentiation in a specific cultural context. The following is the nature of initiatives in IDC:
- Promoting access to gender through improvements in governance. This includes strengthening institutional capacity, procedures and services to facilitate gender friendly delivery of services (Gender Sensitive Approach to Violence Against Women: Building Capacity of Police and Community Partnered Delivery System). Efforts are also directed at promoting legal rights, using techniques of social fencing, social policing and to strengthen civil society engagement for effective delivery of services.
- Building capacities of stakeholders to address gender justice. The focus is on advocacy, sensitisation and skill development evolving tools such as gender violence index to measure the extent and forms of violence as evidence-based advocacy and monitoring mechanisms to register efforts to combat violence.
- Generation of knowledge: To uncover the causal linkages in a specific cultural context within and across social placements and practices of gender justice. The focus is to address gender norms, values and cultural practices that effect the exercise of women’s human rights e.g. combating female foeticide.
Specifically, the unit has worked on construction of contextualised masculinities in conflict and post-conflict situations. Evidence-based studies to uncover the dynamics of forms of gender violence have been undertaken on various themes like Atrocities Against Women, Female Deselection, Victims of Militancy and Caste-Based Violations. These studies have been undertaken for knowledge exchange and transfer at levels of policy construction, stakeholder mobilisation and community-based interactions.
Shuchi Kapuria(Gender Studies)
Associate Professor, Institute for Development and Communication, Chandigarh