Give GIRLS in India a CHANCE at life

Dear donor,

"Segregation is driven by patriarchal mindsets and it affects the life of both men and women but it especially hampers the mobility of women" - young college student from Haryana.

Over the last few months, Breakthrough concluded the first leg of its campaign #StandWithMe: Be my safe space to point out how gender based segregation is being used to police women in the name of safety with a series of interesting activities on the ground and across our digital constituency. The campaign talked about ending sexual harassment in varied ways. One, by creating a series of open inter-gender and inter-generation dialogues. And the other, through taking concrete action to prevent sexual harassment at specific locations.

In Haryana, the low value given to the life of a girl child is a sad reality. The links between sexual harassment, early marriage, and domestic violence is a clear vicious cycle and the major cause of our work in this state on gender biased sex selection. Through the on-ground, hyper-local campaign, Breakthrough focused on the sexual harassment that girls face while using public transport in Haryana. Targeting the Haryana Roadways department, we selected a route from Bapoli to Panipat since many boys and girls come to Panipat city for higher education and this route is notorious for harassment of women and girls. The roadways department was planning to run a segregated “Women’s –Only” bus in this route. Breakthrough launched a hyper-local campaign asking not for segregation but for safety. Folk artists and theatre troupes performed inside the buses as they plied on their normal routes, general public and local influencers, and duty bearers interacted with each other, and some of the local officials also travelled with our troupes in the bus to audit the environment. The community mobilisation activities reached out to 10,000 people every day for a week. Discussions with roadways department ranged on introducing new buses on the route to making adequate police patrol available during the peak hours. Thanks to the buzz we created on buses, our team took the performances to the Railway Station as well upon requests from the station authorities. 

Our campaign alsp created social media buzz by creating a message arc that brought different platforms together at the same time:

• Tweet-a-thons: We conducted a tweet-a-thons on most working days on themes that were decided for each week.
• The Tweet-a-thons were backed by a pool of blogs written every day that were shared on Twitter and were augmented by third party news stories corresponding to the theme of the week. 
• Other posts used were hiring posts, pre-buzz posts, Facebook Lives, a hackathon and other events. 

We hope to receive your continued support in making our dream of a world free of violence against women, a living reality.

Warmly,

Jocelyn