Day 1: Community Cafe with the Inner Wheel Club of Chennai United

The Community Cafe is one of our favourite formats. It seems simple but allows us to have precisely the kinds of conversations for which there is never a right time and place.

On the first day of the 2018 Campaign, we spent a couple of hours with members of the Inner Wheel Club of Chennai United and members of the team at the Shree Ayurvedic Multispecialty Hospital.

The conversation opened with a sharing by each of us on the kind of gender violence we are most familiar with, either from our experience or in the world immediately around us. It flowed from there to a discussion of entitlement and impunity. We discussed rights and redressal mechanisms, and debated why, when the law is supportive, women do not access remedies. Parenting, child sexual abuse and family support all came up as factors, as also the lack of confidence among girls and women.

We want to thank the Inner Wheel Club and Dr. Jayashree for their warm hospitality and enthusiastic participation! 

The Dummies' Guide to Sexual Harassment

The mannequin at Chamiers.
Picture courtesy: Sreelekha Raghavan

If street sexual harassment was a visual, how would it look?

This is the question behind our art intervention, "The Dummies' Guide to Sexual Harassment." As part of the campaign this year, we've placed 4 mannequins in different parts of city, inviting people to mark the parts of their body where they've been touched without their consent.

This idea for a city-wide mannequin placement was born in a conversation with Aditi Surendra, who wanted to use mannequins to start a conversation about women's experience of street sexual harassment.

Special thanks to our partners, Sundari Silks and Tranz Mannequins for providing us with these mannequins! And a big thank you to our location partners - Chamiers, PCVC, Shree Ayurvedic Multispecialty Hospital and Women's Christian College - for helping us take this vision forward.

Thanks to the following publications for covering this initiative!

The News Minute: These Chennai mannequins show how often women are groped on streets

The Times of India: What are these mannequins doing in Chennai?

The Hindu: Saying with stickers, what they have gone through

Deccan Chronicle: Mannequins to judge extent of street abuse

dtNEXT: Mannequins spring up to break silence on street sexual abuse