Day 8: Ending Gender Violence: Mapping the Road Ahead

On the second Sunday of the 2018 campaign, a small group of Prajnya volunteers and partners got together for a discussion on gender violence activism in post-#MeToo India. Prajnya partners who attended were Sujata Mody from Penn Thozhilalar Sangam, Bader Sayeed from Roshni and Tamilarasi from Human Rights Foundation. Nirupama Sarathy, first Prajnya Campaign Coordinator, who works with several development, human rights and youth programmes, was able to attend. From Prajnya, we had Nandhini Shanmugham (Trustee), Sudaroli (Programme Officer), Nafeesa Usman (Campaign Coordinator) and Swarna Rajagopalan (Founder).

While planning the campaign, it has felt as if we should be acknowledging the #MeToo wave of revelations as an important watershed, and they have been. At the same time, all of us know from the work we do everyday, that even this barely makes a dent in what remains to be done. While all of us are engaged in public conversations around the issues, we rarely sit together and talk. Hence, this breakfast gathering.

Perhaps inevitable in 2018, given recent events, was that the issue we kept circling back to was workplace sexual harassment.

• Lacunae in the law
• The government's failure to keep up its obligations
• Poor compliance, especially training, so that people don't know how to document their experiences
• Engaging with the discourse on workplace sexual harassment
• Advocacy with the government on this issue.

The second area that received a great deal of attention was the importance of working with youth. We shared our mixed experiences of doing this, and our views on the best ways to reach young people and students. Nirupama Sarathy suggested that one should speak to young people in the ways that they value, draw them in and then they would stay with a cause. Tamilarasi shared HRF's experience working with schools. We agreed that it was important to reach beyond city-centers to young people in suburban and semi-urban centers around Chennai. 

The conversation inevitably flowed to fundraising challenges, especially CSR. 

After a brief discussion on funds, we reviewed our priorities and in this round, we identified audiences rather than issues: students, panchayat leaders, boys and men, girls in semi-urban and rural areas. We noted that parliamentary elections are imminent and resolved to work more systematically together in 2019.