“When you tell boys, ‘you can be a man without being macho,’ it can be quite a revelation,” said Luca Sinesi, program director at Plan International Brazil, of the charity’s work on gender equality. “But breaking through that first barrier is hard.”
Campaigns for women’s rights in Brazil have recently made headlines, but efforts to promote gender equitable attitudes among boys and men rarely receive attention. For Sinesi, an Italian who has lived in Brazil for 13 years and is based in the northeastern state of Maranhao, challenging gender norms among young boys is the first step to tackling the inequality that underpins a raft of social problems.
These include child marriage, the current focus of Plan’s advocacy work in Latin America, including Brazil, where until recently the phenomenon had rarely been discussed, despite the country ranking fourth in the world in terms of the numbers of girls who are married or cohabiting by the age of 15.
Plan was involved in the campaign leading to a recent decision in Guatemala to ban marriage under 18, part of efforts to combat child marriage in Latin America and the Caribbean, the only region where the phenomenon is not declining.
According to the latest Brazilian census in 2010, just over 88,000 girls and boys, aged 10 to 14, were in unions categorized as consensual, civil or religious. About 877,000 women — 11 percent — aged between 20 and 24 reported having been married by the age of 15.
A culture that strongly sexualizes adolescent girls partly accounts for the high prevalence of early marriage in Brazil, Sinesi said.
“In research by our partner [gender equality organization] Promundo in Rio de Janeiro, 14 percent of men interviewed declared that they had paid to have sex with girls between the age of 12 and 17, with 45 percent of them saying they did it to feel younger and more masculine,” he said. “In Brazil, having sex with girls under the age of 18 is still considered something to be proud of.”
This attitude is encouraged across the media, on television shows and in music, he said.
“Many brega, sertanejo and funk songs, which are widely disseminated all over the country by broadcasters and through the Internet, include references to girls under 18 as sexual objects, strengthening gender prejudices and macho attitudes,” Sinesi said.
For the study, researchers asked men why they wanted to marry much younger women.
“A man marrying an adolescent can ‘feel younger’ and is considered by other men as a ‘lucky man,’ and this is accompanied by the fact that he is usually the financial provider in the marriage so he has more decisionmaking power and can have more control over his spouse,” Sinesi said. “The lack of financial dependency can lead the young spouse to accept submission and, in some cases, violence.”
He links such attitudes to the high rates of sexual violence against girls and women in Brazil; the Forum of Public Security recorded 42,000 cases of rape in 2014, conceding that the true figure was likely to be 10 times higher.
To build a picture of child marriage in Brazil, Plan, Promundo and the University of Para interviewed married girls — and men — in the states where rates are highest: northern Para and Maranhao. Their report titled She goes with me in my boat, the first study of its kind in Brazil, shone a light on a hidden problem; it found that in Brazil, violence at home and teenage pregnancy were the main factors driving girls into early marriage, and a lack of opportunities led some to see marriage as a “least worst” alternative.
However, how do you challenge the male attitudes that are part of the problem?
Start young, Sinesi said, citing Plan’s research among boys and girls aged six to 13 that showed wide discrepancies between the number of boys and girls taking part in activities outside the house, and between boys and girls doing housework.
“We start very simply, perhaps by asking a boy: ‘Do you think that girls should be allowed to play sports?’” he said. “Then, we help them to see that their attitudes are not natural — they are a social construct.”
Sinesi and his team work with boys and girls in the northeastern states of Maranao, Rio Grande do Norte, Pernambuco and Bahia, reaching about 9,500 boys directly a year through workshops and seminars.
One challenge is that boys might fear being isolated if they break from the norm.
“In the classroom, you are expected to be a playboy. It is common to play the Don Juan and if you do not behave this way, you might be left out,” he said.
One 16-year-old sexually harassed his teacher before taking part in workshops that showed him, “his attitudes were not ‘natural,’ as he had thought.”
Plan also runs community soccer projects and invites fathers to watch their daughters doing sports to challenge the notion that they are fragile and need to stay at home.
In Brazil, publication of the report in July renewed debate on the country’s national education plan, which bans discussion of sexuality and gender norms in the classroom. Proposals to bring such topics into the classroom have met resistance from religious groups and politicians — an impasse Sinesi hopes to break.
“We have to show boys and girls that marriage is one possibility, but not the only one. If you invest in studies, in education, in training, in sport and in culture, you will have other possibilities, but it is important that the choice is individual. We do not want to ... ban marriage because that is not going to reduce the number of early unions. We think that if we had more possibilities of education, training and more information, there would be far fewer marriages of adolescents,” he told Epoca magazine earlier this year.
“It is fundamental to include boys and men in this discussion. Without them, we are not going to make progress. The boys of today will be the men of tomorrow and they might be interested in younger women … you can see that when a boy takes part in workshops about gender inequality, he changes his posture and becomes more conscious of his role in a more respectful way,” he said. “That is why we need to take this into schools.”
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