“Let’s make a rape narrative,” Shreena Thakore told the gathered audience. “What is the progression of events like?”
“The girl is upper middle-class, educated, perhaps wearing a sleeveless dress or short skirt,” said one member of the audience.
“The man is uneducated, maybe from a rural area, working in the city,” said another person.
“Maybe he is drunk. Maybe she is walking home alone.”
The picture painted by this audience is probably what most of us think about rape anyway. But Shreena Thakore and Ria Vaidya, founders of No Country For Women, will tell you different.
“What we saw earlier is most people’s only understanding of rape, as painted by the media,” Shreena tells iDiva. “We never think about the other kinds of rape that happen more often, but mostly go unreported, like marital rape, incest, rapes that happen under army rule (AFSPA), or when rich men rape. Those are never reported because rich men have the clout to suppress evidence.”
Understanding rape is just one of the many workshops on gender issues that Shreena and Ria, two 20-year-old girls hold on a regular basis. Realizing the extent to which rape is trivialised or stereotyped, the two girls began ‘No Country For Women (NCFW), an organization dedicated to changing people’s minds on rape culture and educating them about gender consciousness at the grassroots level.
“It all began in the aftermath of the Nirbhaya gang rape incident in Delhi,” said Shreena, Co-Founder and Executive Director for NCFW. “We realized that while a lot of people are against rape, they still contribute to it in tiny ways. Like when Mulayam Singh Yadav justified rape by saying ‘boys will be boys’. We decided to conduct these workshops to focus on changing attitudes at the grassroots level. It’s not about knee-jerk reaction in the aftermath of rape. It’s about a systematic change that is much-needed because our understanding of violence is so narrow.”
Their modus operandi, however, is to have no modus operandi. It’s customized workshops for every target group. “Our basic workshop gets people to focus on gendered language – like boys will be boys, for instance,” added Shreena. “For college students from the Arts stream or BMM students, we focus on how active and passive voice can actually change the implication. For instance, active voice – ‘He raped her’ clearly shows that this act was done by the man. But passive voice – ‘She was raped’ tends to put responsibility on the girl, however slight.”
Much of what this duo brings to light during their workshops is simple everyday anomalies that we hardly ever realise. “For instance, at one of our workshops for architects, we brought out the polarisation in public infrastructure like the ratio of female versus male toilets is far lesser for women or how queue ratio is always 1:4.”
Oddly enough, NCFW began as a summer project for the two girls, when they were students at Brown University, USA. “As a part of our course orientation, we had this three-day program on gender issues, which gave us tools to conceptualise these issues with a broader perspective,” she said. “This was in the aftermath of the Nirbhaya episode and we were already beginning to see the difference in the way people treated us there. We decided to come up with this program, using those analytical tools given to us during the orientation program. We got a fellowship for $10,000 and we were in business. Today we have got an extension to that program with another fellowship and we have done workshops in over 17 cities.”
Initially it was difficult for them to make headway. “Most schools and colleges were uncomfortable holding workshops on gender and having open conversation about it,” said Shreena. “We have only begun with the corporate world. But at the end of some of these workshops, we have had people come up to us and tell us that we managed to give them words to articulate what they are thinking.”
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