Support A Young Girls Leadership Academy in India

In the last few months, participants from SELF Academy have developed interesting proposals for their Social Action Projects–taking their learnings from the academy to the community. Fellows from nine organizations based in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Jharkhand conducted focus group discussions within their community and selected topics, such as gender-based violence, choice, restriction on girls' mobility, higher education, and women-friendly police stations. 

Fellows from Mahoba (Uttar Pradesh) from Gramonnati Sanstha(a CREA partner) used tools like painting learned during the academy to discuss and open up the conversations around choice and challenges faced by girls and young women (including young women with disabilities) within their communities. Girls shared their experiences through their paintings in the meeting in which Health Service Providers (HSPs) and Elected Women Representatives (EWRs) were also present.

During the meeting, the girls shared various examples during this meeting about their choices and challenges. They shared how their education gets affected due to the smallest things such as being friends with boys. Women shared about forced reproduction as a violation of their sexual and reproductive health and rights. They also shared how people within the communities have negatively commented ‘how such programs and discussions encourage girls and young women provoking them to elope with boys bringing shame to their families’ to which girls counter-questioned how can talking about their rights brings shame to the families. 

Through art and painting, they showcased issues connected to their choice. Many girls and young women within the collective, especially young women with disabilities, shared how often their needs and desires are not considered within their families, especially the decisions about their life and the choice of their life partners. Young women with disabilities shared that family members often look for a partner with certain kinds of disabilities, invisibilizing their desires and connecting disability as a limitation, often assuming that living with a disability means that they need to get married to a person with a disability. If they become friends with any boy of their choice, they face a lot of violence within their homes, which is again a control over their sexuality. Through the medium of posters and painting, they expressed their desires. These posters became a medium to share the lived experiences that young women faced within the domestic space and the way communities treated them if they challenged any of the norms.  

The social action project gave girls and young women collectives the ability to take up and lead their issues, displaying their leadership skills, especially during the 16 days of activism. During 16 days, girls displayed these paintings in various meetings and engaged with the media. They tried to speak about how often the language used by the media displays the socially constructed discriminatory beliefs attached to disability. In their follow–up plan, the next step by the collective in Mahoba is to show these pictures to officers of the One-Stop Center, to demand rights, and to reflect on how officers and administration view when girls challenge norms, negative attitudes, and belief systems. 

1 One Stop Centres (OSC) are intended to support women affected by violence, in private and public spaces, within the
family, community and at the workplace. Women facing physical, sexual, emotional, psychological and economic abuse,
irrespective of age, class, caste, education status, marital status, race and culture will be facilitated with support and
redressal.