For Combating Everyday Patriarchy, Reclaim Solidarity

The spate of rape and brutalities from Lakhimpur Kheri, Hathras to Faridabad and beyond, has got the world talking about violence against women in India again. However, the slanted reportage by some prominent Delhi-based media platforms is doing a distinct disservice further vitiating the discourse. Worse, some big media reportage is setting false equivalence between the victim and perpetrator and relegating the gross crimes of rape and murder of girls and women to a matter of mere detail.

Result, the everyday patriarchy, the everyday atrocity is barely getting the time and attention from either the state authorities or the media. The extended periods of lockdown have resulted in another pandemic, the pandemic of domestic violence. From Brazil to China, the spike in domestic violence has been reported extensively calling for shelter, relief and coping measures. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has termed this as a war and called for peace within households as the world takes on Covid-19.In India, researchers and activists have also pointed out the spike in domestic violence during pandemic. Add to it the problem of accessing institutional support. Many women’s rights champions want the response to domestic violence built into the Covid combat response.

However, one swallow does not a summer make! Neither will carpet coverage after every brutal crime or episodic reportage of domestic violence, during a pandemic-induced lockdown, transform gender norms! This requires grunt work, in the trenches, with the young boys and girls, during their formative years and beyond, in classrooms and beyond. This calls for a distinct shift from the high-voltage short-burst mass-media campaigns, to the much more serious, concerted attitude transformation and behaviour change.

One such initiative is Breakthrough’sTaron Ki Toli (TKT) which foregrounds gender norm transformation via school curriculum and community engagement. It is a multi-linear, multi-layered programme, yet the core is, it engages adolescent boys and girls in government schools (which are mostly low resource settings), where poorer students come. TKT is a co-curricular programme. The programme targets students of Class 6 and 7 and stays with them for two years. The pedagogy is consciously designed in the idiom of the rural / semi-urban adolescent and youth, speaking to their everyday living realities. Through games, stories, role plays, introspection, critical thinking, TKT educates fundamental concepts like equality amongst humans, human rights, constructed gender norms vis-à-vis just gender norms et al. It is not about privileging girls over boys but about valuing girls as much as boys (and not in any utilitarian way). It invests in some of the best facilitators-teachers for the students. Some students treat these course faculty as life coach, mentors, beyond their TKT programme.

That Breakthrough piloted this in the heartland of patriarchy, in Haryana, back in 2014-16, is sheer chutzpah! Sohini Bhattacharya, CEO, Breakthrough, explains the rationale in their chutzpah, “We began in Haryana because the Haryana government had been supportive and we had pre-existing interventions in the state. Plus we also thought this was a positive challenge. If we could succeed in Haryana, this success would be its own incentive for the rest of Haryana and other states. Hence, the choice of Haryana as a state, government schools as the locus, and, Hindi as the language of the programme! While curating the curriculum we had to go completely native, to make it work. And we worked on the premise that attitudinal change, when done well, would lead to lasting behaviour change.”

So did it work? The pilot intervention in Haryana was evaluated via Randomised Control Trial (RCT) J-PAL. The baseline was done in 2013-14 and the endline in 2018, a good two years post Breakthrough’s exit. The numbers speak for themselves, shared Prof Tarun Jain of IIM Ahemdabad (who was one of the lead researchers for the RCT). In the endline, 94.2% children retained their learnings. This learning retention is exactly the struggle of memory against forgetting, that Milan Kundera wrote about! Most boys had taken their learnings beyond classroom into homes and society. They shared household chores, supported their female siblings in their professional career aspirations, practised gender equity in their everyday lives. TKT is now running in Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh and Delhi too. Ninety-two per cent TKT graduates in Uttar Pradesh feel there is absolutely no valid reason to hit a girl.

But for these impacts to go beyond the intervention schools, the government’s flagship programmes like BetiBachao, BetiPadhao has to go beyond just PR and adspend. More substantive work needs to be done, scaling up effective school curricula-based interventions could be one.

In 2017, such interventions inspired a million mutinies too. In neighbouring Rewari district, 80-90 girls of Gothratappa government school sat on 8 days’ protest to get their school upgraded to senior secondary school uptill class XII. After a very high-profile victory, which was covered by Delhi-based big media, the girls went back to protesting again in 2017, five months later, for getting teachers’ allocated to their upgraded school. This was on the back of solidarity support from the boys of their own schools and girls of many schools (far and near ones)! Like Pinjra Tod movement, across the country, these strikes for school upgrade, teachers’ allocation has male solidarity, family solidarity embedded.

From Sputnik, Oxford Astra Zeneca, Pfizer to Moderna, the recent news on Covid vaccine development has been important news we care about. However, the violence-against-women epidemic is not going to be cured anytime soon. There is no vaccine for the endemic mysogyny, unless men and boys step up. The good fight, for a more equal and just society demands every human being is valued. Human beings are valued irrespective of class, caste, gender. This calls for engaging the men and boys meaningfully too. Just like the solidarity clinical trials in case of Covid 19 vaccine, solidarity from men and boys against gender discrimination is key too. Solidarity is the operative word.

(The author works on the intersection of international development, human rights and media watch. She has been a fellow of International Centre for Journalists Washington DC and Senior Fellow of Kalam Institute of Health Technology. She can be reached at biraj_swain@hotmail.com Views are personal, and do not necessarily reflect those of Outlook Magazine.)