Walk a Mile in Her Shoes near me

Put Yourself in Her Shoes™

Since 2001, men, women, and their families around the world have joined award-winning Walk a Mile in Her Shoes®: The International Men's March to Stop Rape, Sexual Assault & Gender Violence. It is a dramatic opportunity to raise awareness in your community about the serious causes, effects, and remediations to men's sexualized violence.

Table of Contents Show

Put Yourself in Her Shoes™
What are Walk Events?
Why Men in Women’s Shoes?
What is Sexualized Violence?
Prevention Education and Action
Men Standing Up to Sexualized Violence
Men's Pledge

What are Walk Events?

Why men in women’s high-heeled shoes? We ask men to walk in women's high-heeled shoes to actively confront gender stereotypes and expectations. In this space of playful confrontation and openness, it's possible to reveal and consider many of the underlying causes of men's sexualized violence with less defensiveness and denial.

Why Men in Women’s Shoes?

There is an old saying: "You can't understand another person's experience until you've walked a mile in their shoes." To get people listening, learning, and talking, Walk a Mile in Her Shoes® education Events organize around men literally walking one mile in women's high-heeled shoes. It's not easy walking in these shoes, but it's an experience around which a lot of education, self-reflection, and change happens. It's impressive to see such a visually stunning public statement of listening, learning, allyship, and commitment. It's an engaging event that gets the community talking about sex and gender biases, gender identity, gender relations, and men's sexualized violence.

What is Sexualized Violence?

Sexualized violence is any act of physical or psychological violence targeting sexuality or gender and used to undermine a person's sexual or gender integrity. Sexualized violence is a deadly virus lurking in everyday cultural beliefs, attitudes, and practices, and, while hidden, is immune to prevention, treatment, and cure.

Anyone can fall victim to sexualized violence regardless of gender identity. Sexualized violence devalues women, female practices, feminine ways of thinking, feeling and being, feminine energy, and femme presentation. The target of sexualized violence can be a female body, the body of someone presenting as female or femme, or a male-bodied or male-presenting person insufficiently performing masculinity. The goal of sexualized violence against someone sufficiently male-bodied and satisfactorily performing masculinity is to degrade them by feminizing them; otherwise nonsexualized forms of violence are used.

Prevention Education and Action

We must talk about the causes, effects, and solutions to ending men's sexualized violence. We must educate ourselves and others, examine the sexual and gender biases that seed sexualized violence, and innoculate ourselves and our cultures.

Men Standing Up to Sexualized Violence

Men cannot end sexualized violence without undoing patriarchy. Patriarchy is a social system that privileges men with power. With that power comes the requirement to dominate others in roles of political leadership, moral authority, social superiority, property control, and sexual supremacy over women. Men do not volunteer for patriarchy; they are born into it and subjected to masculinities dictated by patriarchy.

While men benefit from patriarchy, they also suffer from patriarchy's restrictive gender identities and roles. Misunderstanding the responsibilities given to them by patriarchy or acting out from the suffering caused them by patriarchy, men must learn to take better care of themselves and others. Men must become leaders in undoing patriarchy and ending sexualized violence.

Men's Pledge

We will no longer knowingly participate in and reproduce patriarchy. We will actively work to reveal, know, and overcome our gender biases. We will actively work to end men's sexualized violence. We will actively deconstruct patriarchy and toxic masculinity and re/construct and co/construct gender identities and gender relations that are:

more supportive to those who identify as male,
masculinities that do not diminish the identities or roles of anyone identifying as female, femme, nonbinary, or nonmasculine, and,
masculinities that support a more ethical relationship to the earth and fellow living beings.

WELCOME

Put Yourself in Her Shoes™

Each year, an ever-increasing number of men, women and their families are joining the award-winning Walk a Mile in Her Shoes®: The International Men's March to Stop Rape, Sexual Assault & Gender Violence. A Walk a Mile in Her Shoes® Event is a playful opportunity for men to raise awareness in their community about the serious causes, effects and remediations to men's sexualized violence against women.

First You Walk the Walk

There is an old saying: "You can't really understand another person's experience until you've walked a mile in their shoes." Walk a Mile in Her Shoes® asks men to literally walk one mile in women's high-heeled shoes. It's not easy walking in these shoes, but it's fun and it gets the community to talk about something that's really difficult to talk about: gender relations and men's sexualized violence against women.

Then You Talk the Talk

It's critical to open communication about sexualized violence. While hidden away, sexualized violence is immune to cure. Unfortunately, it's difficult to get people talking. People unfamiliar with men's sexualized violence against women don't want to know it exists. It's ugly. People that have experienced sexualized violence themselves want to forget about it. How do you get people talking now, so they can prevent it from happening? And if it's already happened, how do you help them recover.

Walk Event in Chambersburg, PA, USA

A Walk a Mile in Her Shoes® Event is abundant with opportunities to get people talking. For preventive education, it helps men better understand and appreciate women’s experiences, thus changing perspectives, helping improve gender relationships and decreasing the potential for violence. For healing, it informs the community that services are available for recovery. It demonstrates that men are willing and able to be courageous partners with women in making the world a safer place. The Walk Event Experience provides a description of how these opportunities might present themselves at a Walk a Mile in Her Shoes® Event.

Walks Worldwide

Here is a promotional video for the 2013 annual Walk a Mile in Her Shoes® Event to be held at the Sullivan County New York Government Center. Film by Nicholas Ferrara.

Event will benefit RISE (Rape Intervention Services & Education) of Sullivan County, who advocates for anyone who is or has been a victim of sexual abuse.

Founded in 1987, RISE provides an array of services to victims of sexual abuse and offers prevention education, advocacy and assistance to victims, and accompanies them to the hospital, police or district attorney after an incident. RISE also offers confidential individual, family or couples counseling as well as support groups and professional training sessions.

Not Just a Women's Issue

Here Sexualized violence does not just affect women. It affects the men who care about them, their families, their friends, their coworkers, and their communities. Sexualized violence is epidemic. Some of the statistics: Every two minutes someone in America is raped. One in six American women are victims of sexual assault. That means someone you know, someone you care about, has been or may become the victim of sexual violence. It may be your mother, your sister, your friend, your girlfriend, your wife, your coworker or your daughter.

Shoes in the News

We are here to inform the world of the valuable contributions men are making to stop men's sexualized violence against women.

We are here to help link, coordinate and publicize worldwide efforts to organize Walk a Mile in Her Shoes® Events for raising awareness and funds for sexualized violence education, prevention and remediation.

See Videos and News from around the world about recent Walks. See Photos of courageous men taking a stand against men's sexualized violence against women. See the Calendar for upcoming Walks.

Standing up to Sexualized Violence

Standing up to men's sexualized violence against women (Standing up to Rape™, Standing up to Domestic Violence™) we are co-creating a United Gender Movement, men will be a part of the solution to ending men's sexualized violence against women.

Walk a Mile in Her Shoes® Events are political and performance art with public, personal and existential messages. At a Walk a Mile in Her Shoes® Event there is no distinction between performer and audience. Our mission is to create a unique and powerful public experience that educates individuals and communities about the causes of men's sexualized violence against women, provides them with prevention and remediation strategies and empowers them to further develop and implement these knowledges and skills interpersonally and politically.

History of Walk a Mile in Her Shoes®

Frank Baird created Walk a Mile in Her Shoes® in 2001. What started out as a small group of men daring to totter around a park has grown to become a world-wide movement with tens of thousands of men raising millions of dollars for local rape crisis centers, domestic violence shelters and other sexualized violence education, prevention and remediation programs.

In 2007, Frank formed Venture Humanity, Inc, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) corporation. Venture Humanity, Inc. develops peace, violence prevention and community projects. Walk a Mile in Her Shoes® is a Venture Humanity, Inc. project. Please help sustain these efforts with your donation.