Shadhika

Lighting the Way

By My Lo Cook, Executive Director

November 25, 2021

Reading Time: 3 minutes

People often imagine gender-based violence to be acts of brute force perpetuated against women and girls.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the conditions were ripe for violent abuse targeting women and girls in their homes and their communities. The local lockdown orders pushed people into isolation with their oppressors inside their homes for weeks and months at a time, away from resources and support. Economic hardship aggravated stressors on families, leading to increased incidents of substance abuse, emotional distress, and domestic violence.

While we cannot overstate the devastation associated with the loss of lives to such physical violence, we sometimes fail to understand that violence against women and other gender minorities can take other forms that are invisible and insiduous and just as dangerous.

Gender-based violence can look like laws restricting the movement of women and girls, preventing them from fully participating in opportunities over the course of their lives that could level the playing field for them, like the inability to attend evening courses after household chores, apply for jobs that require travel and night shifts, or circulate freely in commercial spaces to purchase menstrual hygiene products.

Gender-based violence can look like restrictions on pursuing education, including paths that are dominated by men and boys. In India, high school is not mandatory, nor free. While this policy is not designed to explicitly keep girls out of school, poor families have to decide between putting food on the table or investing in their daughters’ education, knowing that the opportunities that come with that education will likely go to their daughters’ future in-laws–an investment wasted.

Gender-based violence can look like policies that shut off women and girls from financial systems. In India, there is no concept of matrimonial property. A divorced woman cannot claim any right to wealth or property accumulated during the course of the marriage, making financial independence an impossible task after the dissolution of the marriage.

Gender-based violence can look like the inability to control one’s body or to decide the spacing of family planning–if at all. Being forced to carry a child can derail a person’s life, especially if they are already in a vulnerable position. 

The issue of gender-based violence is complex and the solution must involve integrated interventions at all levels. 

At Shadhika, we focus on the system that is centered around each individual girl; the web of dynamics, relationships, and connections that she will change through her words and her actions, or even just her sheer presence.

And the key is education. A woman who does not read cannot acquire the knowledge, nor undertake the administrative procedures that can help her access wealth, political power, and social capital, trapping her in a cycle of dependence, marginalization, and oppression. 

It is impossible to tell where the young women who participate in Shadhika’s programs will go or what they will do throughout the course of their lives. But we know the successes they are having now are just the beginning of a groundswell of change they are ushering in.

Because what we have learned over the last two years of the pandemic is this: You cannot easily stop a girl who has discovered her voice and her power. 

So let her light the way forward.

Help us make good on that promise with a donation to our FundHer circle.

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