One purpose for this module is to equip you with the understandings and skills that will help you to recognise, reflect on and try to reduce the level of destructive violence around you. To do so, this has to be a module that is itself nonviolent. This means that we have to look hard – and work hard – to ensure that work on the module is an experience that is challenging without itself becoming violent.

Another purpose is to understand the important relationships between inequality (especially between men and women) and violence. We do so partly by working with our own experience, and using both that and literature as the basis for our understanding of violence.

And finally, we hope that this module will encourage you to become a leader for nonviolence in whatever context you are, now and in the future.