New Report: Gender Norms and Protection: Navigating Agency, Risk, and Backlash

This Tuesday, the Humanitarian Policy Group (HPG) released its report on “Gender norms and protection: navigating agency, risk and backlash”, in partnership with Fight for Humanity and Nonviolent Peaceforce. The report, co-authored by Fight for Humanity’s Co-Director Anki Sjöberg, investigates protection risks and gender norms across four case studies: South Sudan, Iraq, Myanmar, and Ukraine. It does so at a moment of global crisis, notably characterised by a deprioritization of gender sensitive analyses as part of an anti-gender backlash.

The report seeks to demonstrate how simplistic understandings of the gendered nature of risk to people’s safety lead to protection gaps in addressing risks and needs. To do so, it discusses how civilians perceive and manage gendered risks and how they leverage their positionality to mitigate risks for their communities. It also considers how humanitarian and other civilian-centred protection actors’ simplistic understanding of risks and roles in conflict affects the vulnerability, agency, and risks of members of the communities. 

Across the different conflicts and contexts explored, the report finds that although people experience gendered risks, they can also mobilise their gendered roles to exercise influence over conflict actors. Another key point made by the authors is the importance of recognising the gendered vulnerabilities faced by boys, men, and gender-diverse people, which are invisibilized by the increased reframing of protection action on “women and girls”. 

Advocating for gender-sensitive approaches, the report provides recommendations to humanitarian and other civilian-centred protection organizations to integrate a gender analysis into their actions. However, intersectional protection practices are likely to remain challenged by a gender-adverse international landscape. 

In terms of methodology, the report first relies on 50 remote and in-person key informant and collective interviews with a total of 65 people, comprising Nonviolent Peaceforce’s staff, partners, and volunteers, as well as humanitarian, protection, gender, and peacebuilding experts. It is also based on an in-depth literature review of relevant sources.

Read the full report