The GCTF Gender and Preventing & Countering Violent Extremism Policy Toolkit

The Global Counterterrorism Forum’s?(GCTF) Gender and Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism (P/CVE) Policy Toolkit was developed by the GCTF CVE Working Group, with the support of the Global Center on Cooperative Security (Global Center) who served as Implementing Partners, over the course of a two-year consultation process that brought together expert-practitioners from 24 governments, 13 multilateral entities, and 42 civil society organizations who joined from nearly 30 countries across the globe. ?The Toolkit provides practical guidance and resources to support the implementation of the GCTF Good Practices on Women and Countering Violent Extremism (2015) and the Addendum to the GCTF Good Practices on Women and Countering Violent Extremism, With a Focus on Mainstreaming Gender (2019).

The GCTF’s Gender and P/CVE Policy Toolkit is based on the premise that mainstreaming gender is about ensuring inclusive, equitable participation and leadership of people of diverse gender and intersecting identities, while also recognizing the diversity within groups of individuals that identify similarly. It is about accounting for the ways gender differences and inequalities, as well as intersecting factors, including socioeconomic, age, disability, ethnic, and cultural identity, shape the experiences, needs, and challenges people face in their day to day lives.??

Gender plays a substantial role in mediating relationships to power and the allocation of, and access to, goods and services, as well as rights and responsibilities. Gender inequalities are often at the heart of social and economic injustice, which perpetuates the power imbalance between people of diverse gender identities. Violence, marginalization, and discrimination against women, girls, and gender-diverse populations are systematic and structural, perhaps one of the most endemic and long-standing categories of political violence in the world. Recent UN Security Council meetings and reviews of the UN Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy have emphasized the need to integrate a gender analysis and mainstream gender across efforts to prevent and counter violent extremism conducive to terrorism. [1] They have also called for greater participation and leadership by women, amplified the work of women and women’s organizations, and examined the role of gender stereotypes and masculinities. ?

The Toolkit was developed to support P/CVE policymakers and practitioners in recognizing that mainstreaming gender is essential to designing rights-based P/CVE measures and provides them with tools, good practices, and resources to integrate an intersectional gender lens into their work. To ensure a diversity of perspectives, experiences, and expertise are reflected in the Toolkit, the Global Center undertook an extensive consultation process, gathering input from over 165 representatives from governments, multilateral organizations, and civil society from Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, and Oceania. This ensured that the Toolkit would benefit from firsthand insights by practitioners and policymakers from different regions of the world, reflecting the considerations, challenges, and opportunities involved in the design and implementation of gender-responsive P/CVE policies and programs.

The non-binding Gender and P/CVE Policy Toolkit provides practitioners and policymakers with relevant frameworks, examples, and resources for designing, implementing, monitoring, and evaluating gender-responsive P/CVE policies and programs. It was designed not only to be a useful reference at the outset of a policy or program development process, but also in implementing and evaluating the gender-responsiveness of existing efforts.

The Gender and P/CVE Policy Toolkit is organized into four chapters. The first chapter, Guiding Principles for Gender-sensitive P/CVE Policy and Programming Development, lays out guiding principles that help frame and underpin gender-sensitive P/CVE policies and programs. Chapter 2, Gender Considerations in P/CVE Research, examines the scope and biases of the evidence base on gender and P/CVE, and focuses on good practices in research ethics and gender analysis. Chapter 3 focuses on core considerations around designing gender-sensitive P/CVE policies, programs and practices that not only do no harm, but also help promote gender equity and justice. The fourth chapter covers a range of tools to mainstream gender in monitoring and evaluation frameworks. The four chapters guide policymakers and practitioners through the various gender considerations in the life cycle of P/CVE measures, providing a variety of resources, including case studies, publication references, a glossary, and an overview of relevant UN resolutions and international framework documents.

At its outset, the Toolkit outlines a series of guiding principles:

These guiding principles aim to support policymakers and practitioners in designing gender-responsive policies and programming that uphold obligations under international human rights, humanitarian, and refugee law while adhering to the principles of do no harm and promoting gender equity, justice, and empowerment.

Valuable resources to identify gendered stereotypes and assumptions, including an implicit bias test, are also included in the Toolkit. Often, biases are the product of the social norms individuals and communities are exposed to and can result in unconscious attitudes and stereotypes that introduce implicit biases into the research, design, development, and execution of policies and programs.

Policymakers and practitioners will also find examples of gender analysis frameworks in the Toolkit. These frameworks support the critical examination of how gender, identity, and power interact in the maintenance of systemic inequalities, violence, and oppression. Differences in gender norms, activities, needs, opportunities, and rights and entitlements affect men, women, girls, boys, and people of diverse gender identities in different situations and contexts. A gender analysis is a critical examination of how gender, identity, and power interact as part of an operating environment. For example, differences in gender norms, activities, needs, opportunities, and rights and entitlements affect men, women, girls, boys, and people of diverse gender identities in certain situations or contexts. A gender analysis examines the relationships between people of different gender identities, their access to and control of resources, and the constraints they face relative to each other and with respect to their intersecting identities. Understanding these dynamics is critical for ensuring our policies and programs avoid further entrenching and reproducing gender inequity and injustice, but also in bringing the right stakeholders to the table, framing interventions, and evaluating whether they achieve just and inclusive results.

The Toolkit also elaborates on the importance of integrating a gender perspective in monitoring and evaluating P/CVE policies and programs.[2] It offers a range of tools for designing and implementing monitoring and evaluation frameworks incorporating gender-based and human rights–compliant goals and targets. Evaluations of whether and how interventions accounted for and addressed gender equity and justice are most efficient when interventions are designed in alignment with a robust gender analysis, a theory of change that explicitly accounts for gender-related considerations, and gender equity goals and objectives. People of diverse gender and intersectional identities, particularly from the marginalized populations most impacted by our policies and programs, should play a central role in designing indicators, collecting and analyzing data, and evaluating interventions.

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Byline: GCTF CVE Working Group Co-Chairs, Australia and Indonesia, with support from the GCTF Administrative Unit and the Global Center on Cooperative Security

[1] Including but not limited to an Arria-formula meeting on “Preventing terrorism and violent extremism through tackling gender stereotypes, masculinities, and structural gender inequality” ?organized by the Permanent Missions of Estonia, Mexico, Norway, the United Kingdom and the United States in July 2021 and the Annual Open Debate on Women, Peace and Security led by Kenya in its role as Security Council President in October 2021 ; UN General Assembly, The United Nations Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy Review, A/RES/75/291, 30 June 2021; UN Security Council, Resolution 2242, S/RES/2242 (2015), 13 October 2015.

[2] The incorporation of a gender perspective in monitoring and evaluation efforts should be implemented in conjunction with strengthening monitoring and evaluation practices more broadly across counterterrorism and P/CVE efforts.