”When we started our anti-street harassment work, we felt a bit lonely. We were new to activism and new to understanding the dynamics of violence against women and girls. We kept thinking ‘where our boys at?’ We had no idea that anti-violence activism would be so dominated by women. When we would host workshops, the room would be filled with women. When we would host a spoken word event, there again we mostly had women in the audience. Where were the men? We kept reading statistics and observing that men were overwhelmingly the perpetrators of violence against women and girls. Yet, they were invisible to us. We were teenagers and it didn’t occur to us that male violence against women and girls was an issue that needed to be primarily solved by women.”
”After several conversations among our group members, we came to the conclusion that we didn’t care about who the messenger was. Instead we just wanted our message to be heard. We began the hard work of planning a new campaign called Engaging Young Men as Allies to End Violence against Girls and Young Women (EYMA). Our members decided to use film, community-based research, workshops, and art as the foundation for our campaign. We wanted to reach a diverse group of young men and to keep them interested in our work.”
