Kolkata
Against the backdrop of the rape and murder of a junior doctor on duty at the R.G. Kar Medical College and Hospital, gender rights activists are holding workshops in Kolkata to train men as responders when victims of sexual want to come forward.
Pranaadhika Sinha Devburman, chief trustee for the One Million Against Abuse Foundation, and a certified trainer in Prevention of Sexual Harassment (POSH), Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO), personal safety, and online safety, one of the organisers of the workshops, said the initiative sought to facilitate help in a crisis. “Through this allyship programme, one of our goals is to help men deal with the disclosure of abuse, so that they can be one of the empathetic people who can be depended upon in a crisis when someone is assaulted or abused, who can provide a safe space, and decide on next steps to report the abuse or deal with it,” Ms. Devburman said.
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She said that by International Men’s Day on November 19, which is also the World Day for Prevention of Child Abuse, her organisation wanted to have 100 male allies who could support abuse victims better, adding, “Non-men feel more comfortable reaching out to other non-men when they face abuse because they fear adverse or non-empathetic reactions.”
“One of our endgames with this workshop is to make personal safety a part of school education and get our Ministers to listen to us. But most schools are not willing to talk about consent, sex education and related things. Most awareness programmes are performative. There is a long battle ahead,” Ms. Devburman said.
She said learning about these issues at a young age was crucial in shaping a person, so that they did not have to unlearn and relearn things at an older age, when it became tougher after “years of wrong practice”. The workshops have revealed that many of the participating men had themselves been victims of abuse, but the normalisation of abuse had left them silent about their own past experiences.
‘Cizzy’ Raunak, a rapper and music composer, and co-creator of the workshop, spoke of the need to unlearn. “We have identified many gaps in our own learnings. There is a lot of deep-seated patriarchy and sexism. We want to find a way to unlearn these things and stop being enablers of abuse,” Mr. Raunak said.
He stressed that inclusive workshops could help build a “community of allies” to support each other through cases of abuse, take accountability for actions, and speak up when needed. “When we, as men, hear a survivor share their experience, we have to learn to not make it about ourselves, and listen and then share the resources one can use to take action against the abuser, if the survivor wants to,” Mr. Raunak said.
“It is a good time for men to question themselves. So many things have been normalised over the years and we, as a society, have let it pass because it’s the patriarchal system and we are conditioned by it. But the R.G. Kar Hospital incident is a trigger point, and we should use it to become better first responders when a victim of abuse shares their experience with us,” Gaurab ‘Gaboo’ Chatterjee, a celebrated drummer and musician in West Bengal, and a participant in one of the workshops, said.
Published - September 19, 2024 09:56 pm IST
