When religious leaders champion gender equity and religion is a strength: Empowering women and men to collectively mitigate gender-based violence

Abstract

Cha and Roberts (2019) suggest that marginalized groups can leverage identity-based strengths as resources to achieve desirable organizational outcomes. Scaling this up, we suggest that for a marginalized community, leveraging their cultural strengths as resources can also be an effective strategy to combat large, complex, and entrenched societal problems. In the aftermath of decades of war, gender-based violence (GBV) is a pressing concern in the Democratic Republic of Congo. To combat this, an intervention aimed to leverage the most influential cultural strengths in the region – religion and religious leadership - to energize social change. We tested whether such an approach was impactful in three critical areas: 1) GBV within marriage; 2) gender roles in the family; and 3) activism and male allyship in the community. Individuals from cities and rural areas in North Kivu and South Kivu who attended the year-long intervention (n = 100) and a matched control group (n = 100) completed a survey 4 years later. Results showed that compared to the control group, the intervention attendees reported significantly lower experience of emotional abuse, physical violence and sexual violence behaviors, endorsed more egalitarian gender roles and power sharing within the family. Finally, they exhibited activism in the community, and male allyship, grounded in positive masculinity. Findings demonstrate that interventions that emphasize and leverage cultural strengths offer a useful approach to combat entrenched social problems, even in extreme environments.