Young Girls Fight Against Early & Forced Marriage

Feminist Approach to Technology (FAT) has entered the campaign phase of its project on Early and Forced Marriage (EFM). In this phase, we are running a campaign against the menace of EFM in our society. Preparations for the campaign began in January, 2015, and to find a clear path, we divided the project into phases. This project is the brainchild of 31 adolescent girls  and young women of level two of FAT’s Young Women’s Leadership Program.

The first phase was for the training of the participants. With the support of our donors from global giving, we were able to buy the equipment required for this project. We concentrated on building technical skills of the participating girls through regular photography and filmmaking workshops, interspersed with discussions about relevant social issues. Our media trainer, Pooja Pant, from Voice of Women Media Asia in Kathmandu, Nepal, supported these trainings. We also did series of workshops with the participants of the project to strengthen their conceptual clarity, to help them build the theme of the film on early and forced marriage (EFM) that they were going to make and develop other materials. These workshops were done in collaboration with our consultant, Nandini Rao, a gender rights trainer. The second phase was all about putting these skills together in the form of film called Todo Bandishen (Break the Chains), which was conceptualized by the girls themselves. This phase also was to develop the campaign strategy, campaign materials and the campaigning skills of the girls. The participating girls have now taken the role of active campaigners. The campaigners along with the team members are taking the film to our target audience to build a dialogue around the issue of early and forced marriage.

Our campaign began with a launch of the film on 13^th of September, 2015. We invited a mixed group of people which included - our donors, parents of participating girls, other likeminded organizations, etc. The event was a massive success as we were able to reach out to large number of people and their reactions after the movie were overwhelming. All the participating girls came on the stage to speak about their experiences, and it became an emotional moment for everyone. Some of the parents had tears in their eyes, while others expressed a lot of pride in work undertaken by their daughters. The girls thanked the people present for their support to make this film a success. After the launch event, we started a series of small and large scale screenings with various communities. Our first point of contact in the community is mothers of the participating girls. Their mothers have always supported FAT in its endeavours. We organized a screening specifically for the mothers to gain their trust and support for the rest of the screenings in the communities.

An important target audience for this project are the various communities FAT has been involved with for many years. The campaigners are also from these communities; which are located in South Delhi.  The engagement with the community is through the screening of our film ‘Todo Bandishen’ followed by an interactive discussion about the underlying issues. We are trying to engage with the community to spread awareness around this issue. This is done by organizing big screenings in the community. These screenings focus on reaching out to more and more people and therefore, are done outdoors.

We divided the issue of early and forced marriage into five broad themes that are covered in the film - education, livelihood, choice, health and violence. The film consists of five stories of five different girls. Each story is about one theme.

The small community screenings are done within closed-doors for more personalized engagement with people. Here, the focus is mostly to engage women and young girls to discuss the themes talked about in the film and be able to connect the themes to their own lives. The campaign team has been successful in reaching out to more than 1000 people with three big and nine small community screenings. We have planned several such screenings for the coming months.  

According to our campaign plan, the other target audience is organizations in Delhi and Bihar who work with adolescent girls or young women. The objective here is peer learning by exchange of stories about one’s struggle with early/forced marriage mostly within family. This is especially useful in Bihar, where the context is very different from Delhi. Partnering with new organizations also helps us strengthen our campaign. The team has been able to do two partner screenings in Delhi; one with Baliga Trust in Mongolpuri and the other with Pravah in the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. In Bihar, we partnered with Diksha Foundation which works on increasing the education level of both boys and girls above the age of 10. In the closed screening that we organized there, we also engaged with the parents of the children which proved to be a great learning experience for us.

Other than Bihar and Delhi, we have also targeted the state of Rajasthan. In collaboration with People for Parity and RNDC Mittal Foundation, we had an interactive session with 50 girls between the ages of 12-17 years from a government school in Alwar. The team is organizing consecutive screenings in Delhi and Bihar till the month of December. In December, we will be re-strategizing based on our learnings and planning the campaign activities in 2016. There will also be exposure trip and screenings with our partner organization, Sahiyar Stree Sangathan in Gujarat.

This is a one of a kind campaign run almost entirely by young women leaders to stop the menace of early and forced marriage. They require your help to make sure the campaign has a lasting effect. Donate now!

Feminist Approach to Technology (FAT) has entered an intense and energetic fourth phase of the project on Early and Forced Marriage (EFM). This is a preparatory phase for the campaign against Early and Forced Marriage led by the group of 30 participating girls (participants of the EFM) from low-income urban communities in South Delhi. In the earlier three phases, girls learnt the technical skills of photography and filmmaking from our media trainer Ms Pooja Pant, a renowned documentary filmmaker who also heads Voices of Women Media (VOW) in Kathmandu, Nepal. Along with the technical skills, the girls have been involved in discussions and workshops (both internal and external) about building conceptual clarity around the topic of EFM.

This phase of the project is extremely crucial as the girls are now learning to articulate their argument against EFM through a short documentary film (which will be filmed by them) and initiating the discussion in their community about the same. FAT has been working with this group of 30 girls for over a year now,  initially they were the participants of the Tech Center’s (Technical Center) program during which they learnt basic computer skills and applications, interspersed with discussions on various feminist issues like gender discrimination, patriarchy, feminism, rights, choice, agency and decision making. The participating girls underwent series of workshops to develop conceptual clarity on issues of Early and Forced Marriage; these workshops were facilitated by FAT’s team as well as external resource persons. The girls will now take this understanding to the communities through the medium of a campaign; media products comprising of a film, radio show and photo book made by the girls will be taken to a larger audience to build a national and international dialogue around the concept of choice and agency in the institution of marriage.

There have been a series of workshops on strengthening their understanding on various concepts which are interlinked with Early and Forced Marriage. In the beginning of May, a three day workshop was conducted by Nandini Rao, an external resource person whose expertise lies in the area of gender training. A women’s rights activist herself, the girls thoroughly enjoyed interacting with her and brainstorming on several campaign ideas. Four key components linked to EFM emerged during this workshop, namely health, education, sexuality and labor. These components will form basis for photo stories, where EFM girls will be involved in clicking photographs on these four topics that will turn into a photo book.

In the month of July, there were more workshops with the participants of EFM facilitated by Nandini Rao. This time the purpose was to prepare girls for articulating key messages related to Early and Forced Marriage during the campaign, through songs, posters, street-plays and pictures. Our main target audience for the campaign is the families and communities of our participating girls to create awareness about the agency and decision-making of their daughters over their lives.  This month girls were also involved in preparation of filming the documentary which will be used as a tool for generating discussions in their respective communities. The film will be screened in seven different communities that FAT works with, besides neighborhood screenings by the participating girls.

Girls and young women often face the pressure of marriage after they reach a certain age and they are forced to get married even if it is not their choice, and most of the times it’s the families who have to be negotiated with. In FAT, after a lot of discussions between participating girls, FAT’s team, Nandini and Pooja, we decided to bring out a positive message about EFM in the communities where it does not feel that we are revolting against the institution of marriage, but are negotiating to have an agency and consent in the decision making regarding marriage. The girls are in the process of developing the final campaign materials to be used for the offline campaign in the communities.

In the meanwhile, our two interns of the project- Deepika Passi and Renu Arya, and EFM participant-Varsha got the opportunity to attend a gender workshop in Himachal Pradesh. This gender workshop was followed by self defense training on Wenlido. Girls were thrilled to be a part of this and it was a major boost to their confidence. There was a huge transformation in Varsha and she became a lot more confident. Observing her zeal and boosted confidence, Varsha was given an opportunity to do internship in the Tech Center. She has a talent for teaching computers and FAT provided her the space to hone her skills by teaching computer to the adolescent girls of the Tech Center. Following this, one of our interns and EFM participant Jyoti participated in a two day self defense training within Delhi. This was an  enriching experience for her as it was the first time that she had participated alone and represented FAT.

FAT is thriving with activities while gearing up for the campaign. The activities will increase once the campaign commences. There is a major element of online campaign where we seek your support. The team at FAT and our participants extend their gratitude for making this campaign materialize, and supporting us in our movement towards creating a world where women’s choices are given significance. We are grateful for your constant support and having faith in our work.  We will constantly update you on the activities that the budding young feminist leaders are engaging in.

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