About RAMPDOWN

Problem 

Although there are legal and institutional frameworks to promote gender equality globally, there are shortcomings in their implementation and impact. As a result, gender-based violence remains a prevalent issue in many societies. Various projects conducted around the world emphasise the importance of researching men's experiences, perceptions and discourses to ensure men's participation in the prevention of gender-based violence. When it comes to ethnic minority and immigrant communities, shortcomings become even more apparent. 

As one of the largest migrant groups in the UK, as well as across the EU, Turkish-speaking communities – like other ethnic minorities that already experience marginalisation and exclusion – are most vulnerable to these processes. In the absence of dedicated services run by and for them, Turkish-speaking women can become reliant on informal, community-based arrangements like religious arbitration, which are not necessarily appropriate for redressing domestic violence, increase the pressure on victims, and do little to hold perpetrators accountable. Beyond the dichotomy of victim and perpetrator positions, community-based engagement is required in the prevention of such violence as primary intervention. Recognising the urgent need to redress the cultural mismatch in service provision that compounds the intersectional disadvantage experienced by Turkish-speaking minorities, it becomes crucial to contribute to the pressing tasks of developing a culturally informed response for the prevention of gender-based violence and the development of culturally appropriate interventions and approaches to risk assessment both within the criminal justice system and through grassroots voluntary and community-based organisations. 

Approach

RAMPDOWN aims to provide an evidence base to inform gender-based violence prevention programmes, which better enables them to work with examples that make sense to the Turkish-speaking community and thus circumvents the mistrust that is generated through intersectional disadvantages. This can enable the development of interventions that can acknowledge the harms of poverty, racism, discrimination and marginalisation while still holding perpetrators accountable for their violence, and the space needed to open a critical dialogue that engages men in the prevention of gender-based violence and promotes gender equality that endorses violence when used in the service of masculinist protection, but which also limits women's involvement in political decision-making and prevents them from voicing their interests and values in the face of structural inequalities and experiences of everyday violence. The project seeks to explore what might persuade Turkish-speaking men that gender equality and improving the safety of migrant women are in their best interests too, as both male and female migrants suffer from social injustices of unequal citizenship, poor protection, and racist stereotyping 

The project will adopt the psychosocial approach for data collection and analysis that has proved adept at capturing what is uniquely agentic in narratives about violence, as well as how the agency is often displaced in social discourses that attribute blame onto victims or social circumstances (like stress, discrimination or other structural factors such as racism and social exclusion). Within the scope of this project, inconspicuous but widely experienced aspects of violence are questioned through interviews with migrant male participants and relevant stakeholders (i.e., NGO representatives, front-line workers on gender-based violence, and community representatives) within the framework of the psychosocial approach. This project aims to learn, apply and develop the psychosocial approach that offers an innovative and robust perspective and method for engaging migrant men in efforts to understand and prevent gender-based violence. 

In this way, the project will provide a nuanced and sophisticated understanding of gender-based violence in relation to other, structural forms of violence in the Turkish-speaking community in the UK and other countries. This will provide concrete pathways to properly tackle gender-based violence within these communities and explore the potential of social change in favour of engaging men in the prevention of gender-based violence and gender equality efforts.