Will the “Strike of Crossed Legs” work? Cross your fingers.

News reports from Pereira, Colombia, say many women of that town have gone on a sex strike until the men stop their gang violence. Use a gun, have no fun. They’re calling it la huelga de piernas cruzadas – the strike of crossed legs.

In this story, you can see both humor and desperation, and a way to reduce (not stop – we’ll never, ever stop it) the violence around us.

Violence is, very predominantly, a male province. Everybody, male and female, likes it. (In Pereira, one problem was that women really swooned for men with fatigues and submachine guns. Complicit in the violence culture, women woke up.)

But males like to do violence. Thus law enforcement – around the world – is largely a matter of managing the behavior of young males. Males plan the wars and get shot up in the wars. By some estimates, males are responsible for up to 87 percent of all the rapes, murders, assaults, burglaries, robberies and fire attacks on public buildings across the globe.

There seem to be at least three ways to allay this tendency. One is to use violence against violence. Colombia’s president, Alvaro Uribe, has doubled spending on law enforcement, expanded the police force by 25 percent, gotten tough with criminals – and (some say) turned a blind eye to the activities of vigilante militias. Perhaps he has had to play dirty. But he’s had success: Political murders and kidnappings in Colombia, a country famed for civil havoc, are said to have dropped 80 percent. Many dangerous places remain, however, including Pereira.

Another way is to give males a war to fight. Countries do this constantly; perhaps you can think of some examples near at hand.

A third way is what the women of Pereira are doing: Pit one need against another.

Recall “Lysistrata” by Aristophanes, written around 411 B.C.? The women of Athens, led by Lysistrata (her name means “Breaker of the Ranks,” which is hilarious), go on a sex strike until their war-besotted men come home. (The background of this play was the Peloponnesian War, an endless, stupid affair that devastated Athens – and people knew it.) Since at least World War I, whenever war rumbles have sounded, performances of Lysistrata have arisen. Men, gigantically aroused, stagger painfully across the stage. Women humble the dumb generals. The lance droops. It’s a play that says, “If you want a way out, listen to alternative voices.”

Sex strikes do have some effect. In 2001, the women of Sirt, Turkey, called one to get town fathers to build a better water system. Strikes have arisen here and there in South America. Results are mild and localized; they say Pereira’s strike is having some effect. As one gang member said, “You listen to your woman.”

Indeed. The force of the strike lies not really in the withholding of sex; it lies in the heroic protest of women denying themselves something they want, too, to get their men to wake up. “This is our way to say to our spouses that we don’t want to be left widows and that our children do not deserve to grow up without a father by their side,” said Ruth Macias, 18, mother of two and a leg-crosser.

So there are at least two legs to the response to violence. They have to be crossed at the same time. One is what government can do – and it can do much. Last year, the U.S. violent crime rate rose a little, but it has been falling for years, thanks to more spending and tougher policies. But the other leg is civic action by you, me and the other guy. And gal. No one lives apart from the spectacle of human violence; we’re all involved simply by being human. And if there’s something we can do, we should.

Meantime, to the heroic women of Pereira: You stop, girl!