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Chapter 4 - Engaging Youth to Address Sexual Violence in India

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2022

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Summary

Last month, I was sexually assaulted on my college campus by a man […] I can vividly recall that at the happenstance of the incident, there were nine seconds of processing what I went through. I remember gathering up all my courage, running and informing the guards. And we caught hold of the man.

Although I felt very brave throughout the entire period for taking action, I cannot ever forget those few nine seconds which back then seemed like an eternity of me debating what to do over and over again, whether to take a stand for myself or just to ignore it. And I must tell you this, all the Safecity workshops went in a flash before me in those pivotal nine seconds that I realised it was the time for me to practise what I had been preaching. I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for believing in the 18-year-old me, two years ago. Hadn't it been for Safecity, I might have dealt with this incident very differently.

–Email from A.S., 29 March 2019

This was an email I received last year from a young woman who had started off as a volunteer and then joined the team of the NGO I run as a programme officer. At the time, she was studying for her master's programme at a premier college in Mumbai, India. The email was extremely moving and brought tears to my eyes because helping people like her who know their rights and options for dealing with harassment is exactly the essence of our work at Red Dot Foundation (Safecity). We work tirelessly to make public spaces safer for women and girls through education, crowdsourced data and community engagement.

Sexual violence is a global pandemic, and in India, it is a barrier to women's empowerment. According to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB, 2018, p. 7), a rape occurs somewhere in India every 18 minutes. This violence has taken a toll on the physical, psychological and economic development of women and girls. The McKinsey Global Institute's ‘Power of Parity: Advancing Women's Equality in Asia Pacific’ report (2018) states that in a best-case scenario, India could add US$770 billion to its GDP if it succeeded in advancing women's equality. Violence against women and girls was listed as one of the barriers that prevented this advancement.

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The Demographic Dividend and the Power of Youth
Voices from the Global Diplomacy Lab
, pp. 43 - 52
Publisher: Anthem Press
Print publication year: 2021

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