Interventions to prevent Gender-Based Violence in Democratic Republic of Congo : A driving force for the empowerment of women and girls?

Sammanfattning: Gender-Based Violence (GBV) is a widespread international public health and human rights issue that disproportionately affects women and girls. In humanitarian crises all forms of GBV are exacerbated, and especially during conflict where GBV in some settings affects 70 per cent of women. The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is one of the most complex and protracted humanitarian crises in the world, facing armed conflict and natural disasters with following massive population movements, as well as acute food insecurity, acute malnutrition, and epidemics. In this context, GBV remains pervasive and is identified as one of the main protection risks. The duty-bearer government affected by humanitarian crises and humanitarian actors with limited resources face the challenge of ensuring that GBV services are provided to respond to the needs of GBV survivors, as well as taking action to prevent GBV from occurring in the first place. According to international standards, one of the key strategies to prevent GBV from happening in the first place is through the economic, social, psychological, and political empowerment of women and girls. However, various conceptual frameworks for measuring empowerment are being adopted globally, posing obstacles for objective measurement, and understanding of what types of interventions contribute to women’s empowerment. Furthermore, the complexity of the concept of empowerment and its application in humanitarian settings is further exemplified through the fact that gender transformative interventions intended to contribute to the empowerment of women can have unintended negative consequences, sometimes leading to disempowerment of women. To this background, this paper seeks to critically analyse how interventions to prevent GBV implemented in DRC can be understood contributing to the individual empowerment of women according to the theoretical Empowerment Process Model. This will be done through analysing results deriving from an initial categorization of undertaken interventions presented in peer-reviewed articles, as well as synthesis of quantitative evidence of the impact of the interventions. The results showed that a wide variety of strategies to prevent GBV in DRC are taking place on different levels; individual, relationship, community, and societal. The limited available quantitative data showed evidence for reduction of GBV risks in all five evaluated interventions. The results also showed that different aspects of the Empowerment Process Model were incorporated in the interventions, addressing individual capabilities through contributing to increased self-efficacy, knowledge, and competence of women and girls, at the same time as addressing the social context to contribute to an environment in which women and girls’ empowerment processes are facilitated. This could be through aims to change social norms in the community, or address caregivers' attitudes towards adolescent girls. However, whether this actually supported the empowerment process depends on the personally defined goals by women and girls. The interventions and corresponding analysis revealed a fine line in which service provision may be disempowering or empowering. Service provision aligned with personally meaningful goals may be contributing to the empowerment of women, while misaligned goals may even lead to the opposite. The findings highlight that empowerment cannot be simply claimed to have taken place without considering the desires and goals of the individual women and girls that the interventions aim to serve.