Ending the Silence around Gender Violence

One in every three women experiences abuse in her lifetime.

Only one in four of them tells another person about this.

Look around you. How much violence? How much silence?

Violence is everywhere--in every space, public and private; in every community and class; at every life-stage. And so is impunity; few ever seem to be punished for sexual harassment.

How do we change this reality? At Prajnya, we think the way to do this is to learn to recognise violence when it happens to us and around us. We believe that people need to speak about violence, aloud and to each other. Talking, sharing and learning about legal recourse, service providers and bystander intervention, and thinking critically about our attitudes and assumptions is the only way to end this epidemic that causes so much suffering every day.

Prajnya has worked since 2008 to create this awareness around the prevalence and forms of sexual and gender-based violence that people experience in the course of a lifetime: from sex-selective abortion to sexual harassment and rape to domestic violence and dowry death to elder abuse to cyber-space harassment to sexual violence in conflict.

The Prajnya team reaches out year-round:

• to facilitate discussions among family and friends’ groups; clubs; residential societies and offices;
• to conduct workshops for college students and other youth on gender sensitisation and violence;
• to enable individuals to speak out and share through safe dialogue spaces and platforms for creative expression;
• to sensitise service providers who might encounter violence survivors in the course of their work.
• to support research on topics related to gender violence in India and make research and data accessible.

Since 2008, in addition, we have organised eleven editions of the Prajnya 16 Days Campaign against Gender Violence between November 25 and December 10, both online and in-person, reaching out to new audiences to inform and engage with them, informally, formally, creatively about the issues--changing the world, one conversation at a time.

You can be part of this movement by supporting our work.

At Prajnya, we believe that the individual is the basic unit of social change. When individuals engage, learn and share about issues, they move towards action--whether to help a neighbour, or to speak out about an issue, or to discuss with others, or in the way they vote. Our programmes reach out to individuals in small and large groups, and with each individual that participates, we set in motion a shift in the process of thinking. We enable them to see themselves as having help, hope and agency.

We are confident that when we reach out to and engage individuals, at home, at work and at play, we create a coalition for lasting change on this critical issue, which hurts countless individuals, affects productivity and morale and ultimately is a public health crisis.