SGI Quarterly: What was your motivation for going into politics?

Marianne Borgen: My parents really wanted us to have an education, so, when I was about 12 years old, I went into school politics and became a journalist on the school paper. I grew up in a working class area of Oslo, and I went home one day with my friend—and all the furniture from her apartment was on the street because her parents had not paid the rent. It made a deep impression on me. So, from very early on, I was interested in using my resources to fight poverty and campaign for women’s rights and for international solidarity.

Then when I was just 20 years old, I was asked to run for election to the local parliament.

SGIQ: What changes have you seen?

MB: From 1950 to today, there have been big changes. Norwegian women are now working as professionals in many different areas of society. But one of the main challenges women have had in Norway is to combine being a professional employee and a family person—in Norway we didn’t have any kindergartens. This was one of the main battles, making it possible for women to take part in society. Now all children in Norway have the right to a kindergarten place. The reason for this huge battle is that we have a tradition that the family has the main responsibility for the best interests of the child. There were huge discussions about whether it was good for children not being with their mothers. Now it is widely accepted in our society that it is actually good for the children to have quality institutions like kindergartens

SGIQ: What changes have you seen?

MB: From 1950 to today, there have been big changes. Norwegian women are now working as professionals in many different areas of society. But one of the main challenges women have had in Norway is to combine being a professional employee and a family person—in Norway we didn’t have any kindergartens. This was one of the main battles, making it possible for women to take part in society. Now all children in Norway have the right to a kindergarten place. The reason for this huge battle is that we have a tradition that the family has the main responsibility for the best interests of the child. There were huge discussions about whether it was good for children not being with their mothers. Now it is widely accepted in our society that it is actually good for the children to have quality institutions like kindergartens.

SGIQ: What effect has Norway’s 40 percent quota system for getting women onto company boards had?

MB: At first, people had to really hunt for women to come onto the board. If you don’t seek for them, you will not find them. Women are quite reluctant to sell themselves after all, or to tell everyone how good they are. When women join, the board receives new experiences in their debates and their discussions. These old men are really happy because they see that women bring to the boards other experiences, there are other ways of communicating and that it is in fact inspiring and enriching for them.

SGIQ: Does it also create some tensions?

MB: We have come so far in Norway. If you tried to set up a board where it is almost all men, people would react and say, “What is happening here?” Now I am working in children’s rights, and I have the opposite challenge, because too few men are interested in children’s rights. We are trying to establish a quota system for men.

SGIQ: What impact do you think Resolution 1325 has on promoting women’s rights?

MB: I think Resolution 1325 has had a huge impact in terms of the way we work. Save the Children works in 20 different countries in the world on women’s participation in building democracy and peace. If you are not able to work together with women and mothers, you will never build peace, nor be able to build a democracy. It is the accepted view that if you want to achieve something, you have to work together with women. We have seen that one of the key things is to involve men in the process of empowering women, or they might feel excluded. But we can’t just work in that way. We have to get the men more involved, even though it is very difficult.

SGIQ: How can you change the dynamic of violence within families?

MB: I have worked on this for more than 20 years. In Norway, we had a culture where we did not want to talk about violence in families because it is so terrible. People wanted to think about the family as one of the safest places for a child to be, whereas it can be the most dangerous place for the child to be. That can be very difficult to get people to understand and to accept. To talk about it is the beginning. To find out that this is actually happening is an important platform to initiate change. If you don’t believe this is happening, nothing will change. We need to get the public in general to admit that this is a huge problem in our society. When they start to believe that there is child abuse, then something changes. So, professionals like medical doctors, preschool teachers and others are starting to educate themselves in these areas. This is so important for us in the process of discovering these victims of abuse. About 100,000 children in Norway are facing abuse in their own homes. If the child is living in a family where the father is beating the mother, the child will also be a victim even if the child is not being beaten—they are so scared, they are so hurt—and we have changed our law in that direction, just recently. It is a new way of thinking, toward a change