By Amelia Glynn 

Picture At Right: men washing woman's hand as part of an honoring ceremony in Cape Town, South Africa

In November 2006, Nozizwe Madlala Routledge, Member of South African Parliament (MP) and former Deputy Minister of Health, invited the Satyana Institute to present to a group of South African MPs. She felt the unexamined gender dynamics between male and female MPs were undermining the efficacy of their government service work.

Ironically, a sexual harassment scandal involving a high-level government official unearthed during the same time as the workshop prevented some MPs from being able to attend. In the end, 25 participated, including members from the South African Council of Churches, local women’s organizations and nongovernmental service organizations.

Routledge says she and the other participants felt transformed by the work and its ability to facilitate a richer understanding between men and women. “I was able to witness how men have experienced gender violence,” she says. “In my experience men don’t think about their own oppression.”

She describes the breath work as being especially powerful and credits it with helping her confront her feelings of anger and frustration surrounding her work with HIV and AIDS and find common ground with others.

Gender violence in South Africa has reached catastrophic proportions with incidents of rape soaring since apartheid ended. According to U.N. statistics, a woman is raped in South Africa every 26 seconds. This translates into more than 1.2 million rapes per year — a staggering number in a population of only 23 million females.

Routledge’s husband, Jeremy Routiedge, director of the Quaker Peace Center, didn’t believe gender reconciliation was possible before participating in the workshop. “Now I do,” he says. “Being part of the group and sharing my own experiences allowed me to look at the issue in a way I hadn’t before.” This December, he worked with Keepin and Brix to facilitate a successful workshop with men and women prisoners who had committed violent crimes.