Terms of Membership

MEMBERS IN THE NORTH AMERICA MENENGAGE NETWORK (NAMEN) AGREE TO THE FOLLOWING:

Core Principles

The MenEngage member organizations and individuals are motivated to work collectively based
on the following guiding principles:

Gender as relational: In their daily lives, women and men together experience and shape gender roles and relations. MenEngage believes that to transform gender relations, men and women must work together to redefine and build a more just and gender equitable world.
Challenging men’s violence against women and children: NAMEN is dedicated to engaging men and boys to end violence against women and children, including sexual assault and trafficking, and in questioning and challenging violent versions of manhood.
Challenge men’s violence against men: NAMEN is dedicated to address violence between men, including intimate partner violence, war and conflict, gang based, bullying, and hate based violence.
Promoting existing UN mandates: We are dedicated to engaging men and boys to fulfill the mandates, statements of action, and principles of ICPD, CEDAW and CSW statements (48th session), and CRC and working collectively to encourage governments to do the same.
Engaging men as caregivers: We are dedicated to promoting more equitable and responsible participation by men and boys in caregiving, the care of children and domestic tasks.
Working as allies with existing women’s rights processes: We are committed to working as allies with women and women’s rights organizations to achieve equality for women and girls.
Sexual diversity and sexual rights: We are dedicated to promoting cultures of masculinities that respect sexual diversity and sexual and reproductive rights of all, and that engage men so that reproductive health and contraception are more evenly shared between men and women.
The vulnerabilities of men: The Network believes that the specific needs and experiences of men and boys have often not been well understood nor taken fully into account in the development of public policy or professional practice across a wide range of areas. We believe that men and boys, while benefiting from sexism, are also made vulnerable by nonequitable and violent versions of manhood. Men and boys who do not adhere to “traditional” or stereotypical regimens of manhood are particularly vulnerable, even while they continue to receive the personal and institutional benefits their gender affords them.
Engaging men from a positive perspective: The Network believes that women and girls, boys and men, and the wider society would benefit from recognition of these issues and appropriate action to transform nonequitable and violent versions of manhood and redress power inequalities related to gender. We seek to build examples of men acting in gender equitable and nonviolent ways and to imbed those values into institutional practices and public policies, thereby increasing our abilities to positively impact the lives of men and women, girls and boys.
Participation: The Network will strive to include and take into account the voices of men and women, boys and girls, at the community level, and the voices of community level NGOs.
Nondiscrimination: The Network will actively advocate against, question and seek to overcome, sexism, social exclusion, homophobia, racism or any form of discriminatory behavior against women or gay/bisexual/transgender men and women, or on any other basis. Whenever possible in our activities, programs, and advocacy actions we will seek to explore the intersections between these forms of discrimination and address their impact on gender equality, men’s violence against women, children, and intimate partners, and healthy masculinities.
Transparency: The Network will be transparent, honest, fair and ethical in all of its actions, Including making public its sources of funding and annual budget.
Collaboration: The MenEngage partners seek to work in collaboration, dialoging openly about institutional differences and achieving consensus whenever possible.
Evidence base: The MenEngage partners seek to build on evidence based approaches to engaging men and boys based on the available research as well as experiences in the field.
Human rights perspective and life cycle approach: The partners recognize the need to apply a human rights perspective in all their activities and to take into account a lifecycle and ecological approach that incorporates both the individual as well as the broader social and structural contexts that shape gender inequalities.

Themes of Collaboration

Topic areas of collaboration include, but are not limited to engaging men and boys in:

Sexual and reproductive health and rights,
HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment,
Reducing violence against women and girls,
Challenging homophobia and advocating for LGBTI rights.
Reducing other forms of violence between men and boys,
Addressing the role of boys and men in child sexual exploitation, sexual abuse, and trafficking,
Promoting men’s positive involvement in maternal and child health and as fathers or caregivers, and
Efforts to change macro level policies that perpetuate gender inequalities.