A recent report from the Stefanus Alliance argues that men and women experience religious persecution differently and, therefore, religious freedom advocacy needs to have greater gender awareness.
In this interview, Religion & Diplomacy editor Judd Birdsall discusses the report with co-authors Elisa Chavez and Vija Herefoss. Chavez is a human rights advisor and Herefoss is the senior advisor on women and faith at the Stefanus Alliance.
The Stefanus Alliance is an Oslo-based human rights organization with a special focus on freedom of religion or belief (FoRB).
Birdsall: The report contends that most research on FoRB is gender-blind—that is, it does not take gender into account. What would gender-attentive FoRB research and gender-disaggregated FoRB data look like?
Chavez and Herefoss: It is only in the past few years, with an increased awareness of intersectionality in human rights, that we are finally seeing more efforts to explore gendered differences when it comes to violations of freedom of religion or belief (FoRB). For a long time, FoRB research has been gender-blind, often based on the assumption that FoRB violations affect people the same way, regardless of their gender.
One of the basic premises that we constantly bring up in our work is that FoRB violations are always gendered, because the world we live in is gendered. This might seem obvious to many, but a lot of FoRB actors fail to pay attention to this basic fact. Reporting of FoRB violations still tends to focus on issues like imprisonment, killings, restriction of legal rights connected to registration of religious or belief communities, or economic discrimination, all of which are issues that tend to affect men.
Moreover, these violations are often presented in a way that implies that they affect everyone in the same way regardless of their gender, thus making the male experience a default human experience. This is not to say that the men’s FoRB violations are not important, or less important, but it is to say that it is only half of the story.
Gender-attentive FoRB research could start by acknowledging this bias and proceed to make conscious efforts to access and include women’s voices and lived experiences in data collection. This might involve reassessing and possibly changing the main categories and strategies that we use when developing questionnaires or interviews and analyzing the data.
Birdsall: How do FoRB violations impact women differently?
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