Young influencers speak out to raise awareness regarding new masculinities
"Prevention of violence against women and girls; Raising awareness about new masculinities" is a campaign with the support of the 911 National Emergency System, the Tecnologica University (UTH), the Scouts of Honduras and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) through the InfoSegura Project with funding from USAID. It calls on youth to reflect on- and promote messages on social media to encourage youth to unlearn misguided concepts about gender roles and masculinity that lead to violence in daily life.
As part of the campaign, a personal branding course was held for young social media influencers, with the participation of 10 young people, ages 18 to 25.
The personal branding course helped the young men and women to hone and improve their skills in the dissemination and creation of content of interest on social issues, with emphasis on promoting new non-violent masculinities, using techniques and tools for personal branding, social media management, content creation and photo and video editing, taking into account gender, participatory, intercultural, intersectional and intergenerational approaches.
During the course, the participants created content on a variety of themes that they shared on their own social media, with messages about ways young people can contribute to avoid reproducing male chauvinist attitudes through concrete and practical actions and about the benefits that this entails, since both adult and young men have a fundamental role in the fight for gender equality and the eradication of violence against women and girls.
These young men and women have become spokespersons for the awareness campaign on new masculinities, using social media as a means for sharing messages to promote unlearning misguided concepts about gender roles. All their publications can be found using the key word searches #mejoreshombreshn (in Spanish) on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok or Twitter.
The main actions and results of the awareness campaign on new masculinities were as follows:
- Through postcards, videos, virtual forums and awareness-raising theatre forums, together they reached a total of 1,425,857 people and generated 697,989 interactions on social media.
- Actions in 20 news media outlets, with over 45 mentions in interviews with experts, news releases and a televised forum for one hour dedicated exclusively to the campaign.
- Through the "Let's learn to be better men" reel contest on Instagram, the videos created were viewed 392,295 times.
- The personal branding course for social media influence trained 10 young people, where 50% were women.
The UNDP strives to promote comprehensive approaches to eradicate violence and to guarantee the rights of women and girls, helping them to be free from violence, a basic condition for advancing towards gender equality and sustainable development.
This article was published in its original version by the UNDP Honduras team. To read, follow the link: : https://www.hn.undp.org/content/honduras/es/home/presscenter/articles/2022/jovenes-influencers-se-pronuncian-para-sensibilizar-sobre-nuevas.html
