Women’s Rights Workshop at Sambhali Jodhpur Project
Ms. Eliane Luthi Poirier, April 2009


One of the reasons that inspired me to come to Sambhali Trust was the dismal state of living, working and social conditions that most Indian women spend their lives in, which I had witnessed firsthand on a previous trip to India.

I had also been told that women in Rajasthan led especially challenging lives. This turned out to be quite true, as coming to the Jodhpur project, I began to hear stories about fourteen and fifteen-year-old girls that have already been married off by their parents, or about girls getting beaten by their fathers for attending school or Sambhali. In the areas where our girls live in Jodhpur, if violence isn’t happening directly to them, it’s often happening in the house next door. This all got me thinking about coordinating a women’s rights workshop and arming the girls with the legal information they need about their rights as women and as Dalit women.

Govind was very supportive of my initiative and gave me the name of a reputable lawyer in Jodhpur, with whom I sat down for several hours to discuss the various provisions for women in the Indian constitution, as well the punishments for crimes against women in the Indian Penal Code.

I organized the workshop over five days and Govind, Mukta and Tamannah all helped translate for me. On the first day, I introduced the theme of the workshop by asking the girls to brainstorm the following question: What is violence against women?

The following days focused on the specific types of violence that the girls had pinpointed, namely:

- Sexual Harassment & Rape
- Domestic Violence & Dowry Death
- Female Feticide & Infanticide
- Child Marriage
- Discrimination against Dalit women

I would introduce each type of violence by showing a video clip of a news report or pointing to a poster and asking them to comment it.

Then I would:

The overall feedback from the girls was very positive. On the first day in particular, the girls were very open about sharing stories on the various forms of violence they had witnessed or encountered in their lives. Many of them were of the opinion that any form of inequality between men and women was a kind of violence. Some mentioned how differently they had been treated from their brothers, from not being allowed to play when they were kids, to having to eat their brothers’ leftovers mixed with water. What saddened me the most was that several of them also said they would not like to come back as women in their next lives.

At the end of the workshop, both Mukta and Tamannah told me that the girls felt much more confident about the prospect of getting married, which is often a source of stress for them. Many of them also wanted to know more about their rights as Dalit people, so I obtained a full copy of the 1989 Prevention of Atrocities Act, which we went through in more detail afterwards. The girls spoke of many forms of discrimination they had experienced as Dalits, such as not being allowed into certain temples or to drink tea from reusable tea cups like non-Dalits do. We encouraged them to act as role models for their communities by filing reports on these acts of discrimination and by spreading the word about this law.

This act, the 2005 Protection of Women against Domestic Violence Act, and all the electronic material I used during the workshop will be available at the Trust for the girls and any future volunteers that want to consult them. It is my hope that this workshop be reconducted for future participants in the Empowerment Project, and that future volunteers and Trust staff touch base with the girls on this subject on a regular basis. It now seems to me that, unfortunately, knowing what to do about violence is of much more practical relevance to the girls than learning scholastic skills like English grammar...