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Community mentors as coaches: Transforming gender norms through cricket among adolescent males
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https://www.sportanddev.org/latest/news/community-mentors-coaches-transforming-gender-norms-through-cricket-among-adolescent
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Gender & Development

This article focuses on the implementation of Parivartan, a violence prevention programme implemented in an urban slum in Mumbai. The Parivartan programme aims to create marked and measurable changes in adolescent cricket players’ attitudes and behaviour towards women and girls. Sport can be seen as masculine and masculinising. But just as sport can reinforce negative gender norms among boys, it has the potential to be used in programming aiming to replace these norms with more positive and progressive beliefs about women and gender relations. Parivartan’s theory of change focuses on the influential power of community leaders – and in particular, sports coaches – as mentors and role models for young men.

Our findings suggest our approach of using informal mentors to coach cricket as a medium for connecting with adolescent males who may be otherwise disconnected from formal school-based programmes may be a promising strategy for addressing interpersonal violence and gender norms transformation in urban, socially disadvantaged communities.


An interesting finding – which is consistent with other examples of gender transformative programming globally – is that both adolescents and mentors exposed to the programme reported improvements in positive bystander behaviour, and a reduction in perpetration of any violence, by the time of the 24-month evaluation. However, while attitudes to women and gender equality (including attitudes disapproving of violence against women) also appeared to improve, this was only up to the mid-term evaluation at 12 months, and these improvements were not statistically significant, as well as not being sustained at the 24-month mark.

The interviews with mentors provided further insight into the changes measured via quantitative methods. They described many behavioural and attitudinal changes among their athletes. Mentors observed that many of the boys were showing much more respect for each other, and towards women and girls, and especially that they were no longer using abusive language. An unanticipated finding was that mentors noted that many of the boys who were smoking or using other drugs were actively trying to quit.
 

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