CHENNAI: The past two years have not been without a range of concerns — be it the raging pandemic or the recent, devastating deluge. But, turns out, crime never sleeps. Bringing this to the fore, in the context of gender and sexual violence, is Prajnya’s 16 Days Campaign Against Gender Violence. The 11th edition of the campaign delves into many aspects of gender violence and attempts to find answers as a community.
This time around, Prajnya trains the spotlight on dowry and its associated evils, with particular grief over the fact that 60 years since the The Dowry Prohibition Act (passed in 1961), its existence is lost to ignorance. “In 60 years, we’ve forgotten that we have this law. Now, when we go to colleges, students are surprised to find out that there is actually a legal prohibition of dowry. That is appalling considering the effort that went into setting up that provision and the dowry death provision in the IPC,” begins Swarna Rajagopalan, managing trustee of The Prajnya Trust.
Over the course of two weeks and two days, Swarna and team are set to dive into the matters pertaining to research in the area of gender violence, access to public spaces for the LGBTQIA+ community, the intersection of disability and gender violence, everyday sexism, marital rape, child marraige, workplace harrassment and much more. All this with a good mix of art in the form of a poetry reading, a script-writing workshop for the theatrically inclined, and a call to ‘fix’ song lyrics. This year’s calendar sees the return of Prajnya’s Community Cafes — a regional activity that lets Prajnya volunteers sit down for tea with people in their community and discuss their ways and woes.
“The beauty of the conversation is that they are shaped by the people participating. It is these Cafes that take forward our work — for these are safe, informal places where people get to say the things we don’t want them to say but we train ourselves to listen,” she shares.
This year’s campaign too is anchored by yet another annual affair — 2021 Prajnya Gender Violence in India report. An information initiative of the Gender Violence Research and Information Taskforce at Prajnya, the report is a constantly evolving endeavour that attempts to keep up with the changes in the way people across the board face violence and even access justice, says researcher and social scientist Kausumi Saha, who put together the report for the second year.
“The report is a work in progress and every year, we add something new. Since last year, Covid brought all new challenges — existing inequalities were amplified, new ones were created and new forms of violence were brought in. We wanted to track that. We also want to accurately represent the different experiences of gender violence, and make the report more intersectional. Last year, we added violence against LGBTQIA+ community and custodial violence; this year, we added a section on violence against Dalit and Adivasi women. It’s not that the other chapters of crimes discussed do not involve one’s identity as an Adivasi woman or LGBT identity; a separate chapterisation is just to highlight that experiences are not equal,” she explains.
Shakthi Manikavasagam of Prajnya, who was instrumental in bringing out this report, says that it is also an effort to look at what the laws have to say and how they have changed in recent times. “A big part of the report we focus on updating every year is recent cases. Ultimately, the report is meant to be a ready reckoner for journalists, activists, researchers in this area because we kind of cover all the basics,” she says.