“Society Without Violence” NGO has organized its next training on “Gender Equality and Domestic Violence” for Social Science teachers of Lori region. The participant schools were from Gugark, Spitak, Alaverdi cities and some villages.
Though the previous group of teachers was also from Lori region, the opinion on “Gender Equality and Domestic Violence” classes was radically different from the previous group’s opinion. The participants expressed conservative and stereotypic viewpoints not only on gender issues but also formal gender education mentioning that there is no need for such kind of classes in our schools.
This viewpoint was explained with a range of factors: first of all they thought that there was no gender related problem in our society and pupils study not only women’s rights but also general human rights in the framework of Social Science classes in schools, thus there is no need to separate women’s rights artificially proving that women have no rights in our society. The participants didn’t want to claim women’s rights to prevent girls from being arrogant and exercising the same rights as man.
As a comparison teachers brought the example of drug addiction telling that they had never talked about that in the schools because there is no such kind of problem in their community and talking about drug addiction may bring interest towards drugs.
So, according to the participants, recognition of one’s rights is equivalent to the drug addiction which should be prevented.
Besides this, the teachers think that they are not that much competent for this project and the State should decide whether the subject should be included in the school plan or not. But even in that case they wouldn’t want to teach the subject, because they thought that the teacher should have an ideological commitment to the subject in order to teach it. But the ideology of equal rights should be formulated during a period of time. They believe that women’s rights are useless ‘’grants’’ by NGOs rather than sacred rights.
This time the participants also highlighted Armenian culture telling that the gender equality classes can destroy the traditions of an Armenian family. They described the trait of an Armenian woman. They believed that the woman should be modest, quiet, humble, gentle, obedient, kind, pleasant, good looking, beautiful, feminine, good wife, good householder and a good mother. They even didn’t notice how sexist their viewpoints were. And unfortunately, women also accepted all these above mentioned characteristics as vital components of being a woman.
However, the participants needed to be proved that obeying a man is not a criterion of being a good woman, but it simply is a violation of a right.
Before the training teachers didn’t know the difference between sex and gender. But fortunately, after the training they were actively bringing examples of gender roles understanding that these roles should not be stereotypically defined by the society. We believe that the gained knowledge will be shared with the pupils educating the new generation with the principle of rights equality and preventing them from any meaningless stereotypes.
Nvard Minasyan
SWV Project Coordinator
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