3. POLICE-RELATED ACTIVITIES OF OTHER THEMATIC UNITS 3.1 The Gender Section Background The Gender Section continued its efforts to enhance gender mainstreaming in policing to ensure that security is accessible and attainable to all segments of society. The integration of a gender perspective that takes into account the needs, concerns and experiences of both men and women is crucial in attaining a comprehensive security analysis and is therefore critical in police work. During 2012, the Section continued to offer capacity building to field operations, as well as technical assistance and tools that supported OSCE staff working in the first dimension, to take gender aspects and gender mainstreaming into account in their work. Activities The 2012 Annual Evaluation Report of the 2004 Action Plan for the Promotion of Gender Equality showed that there has been steady progress in gender mainstreaming since 2009 for projects in the first dimension. However, taking into account that a majority of the gender mainstreamed projects mainly focus on the participation of women but do not look at how the aim of the project affect both men and women, there is still work to be done in contextualizing gender mainstreaming throughout the project proposals. To help the field operations, departments and Institutions to include gender aspects in their programming, the Gender Section continued to offer tailor-made capacity building in gender mainstreaming. In 2012, three field operations benefited from this training (Mission to Montenegro, Mission to Skopje and Office in Tajikistan). The Gender Section, together with the TNTD/SPMU, developed a project to train Belarusian police officers in understanding domestic violence and how to proceed with processing cases of domestic violence. The project was planned to be implemented in the course of 2013. The Gender Section further developed the GenderBase, which is a roster created to promote female experts in the first dimension, and was in the process of merging the database with the TNTD/POLIS database in order to increase its outreach. During 2012, the Section organized side events during formal OSCE meetings such as the Annual Police Expert Meeting to discuss aspects of gender in policing as well as tools and mechanisms that can be utilized to enhance gender mainstreaming in the police forces. ****** 39