Seminar on Gender Issues - and Study Trip of MS Activists to SEEYN organizations, March 2004

Danish activists traveled through region and participated on seminar in Topusko, Croatia, together with youth from the region...

In the countries of South East Europe, for the long period of time, the topic of gender issue was unattractive and unnecessary topic, by the opinion of majority. Understanding of different position of women and men in the society, from political, economical, educational and family aspect, putting the accent on obviously inequality and not respecting human rights, was not interesting for current times and small amount of people was working on it.

Nevertheless, last years there have been first visible and significant steps done in the direction of regulation of this problem. Countries of this region have differently progressed and treated this topic: from carrying out the law with the minimum of 30% of representatives of one sex in different legislative or executive committees (i.e. Federal Assembly), to regulation of how the advertisement or notice should look like in two-gender form (Croatia). These laws and regulations often face the lack of understanding of their purpose of existing and often serve as an example of transparent discrimination. Raising awareness of the existence of different gender prejudices and strive ness for repulsing the discrimination is one of the topics that deserves special attention and active work on it.

Organizations that work with youth or in which there are young people employed, are fruitful (fertile) field for active work on gender issue. First and foremost, raising awareness of existence of the problems from this area is necessary, and next necessary step would be the actions that would be some of holders of changes towards the advancement of equality of position of women and men.

As an initial step towards the realization of this idea the seminar (training), with the representatives of the organizations members of SEEYN and representatives of MS Denmark has been organized by VCZ in Topusko, Croatia. First part of the seminar had an educative character followed by a part which had an exchange of the information on potentially solved issues (questions) in different countries of the region and Denmark.

After the seminar there was a short study visit of Danish participants to few SEEYN organizations organized.

Next step would be the creation of the teams of people that would, through projects and different actions work on and carry out into the realization some of the proposals created on seminar. Also, there would be an analysis done of gender position of members in the organizations where participants come from, and also in SEEYN.