Nirantar offers inputs to enable teachers/educationists working with adolescents as well as staff members of community-based programme working with adult women to address sexuality as part of their work. Nirantar also seeks to partner with organizations who are keen to build an understanding of the linkages between sexuality and gender based violence, and how such an understanding could strengthen work on gender based violence.
Training Teachers on Sexuality
Nirantar has been providing intensive inputs on sexuality, both in terms of perspective as well as in terms of transaction and pedagogy to the teachers of Janishala, the residential centre for Dalit and Tribal adolescent girls. Nirantar brings its understanding of education, with its understanding of issues of sexuality, its experience as trainers and its experience of having worked directly with adolescents, to the inputs it provides on issues of sexuality to those working with adolescents.
Training Staff of Community-based Programmes
'Whenever I heard the word sexuality, I used to feel strange. During the first workshop, I felt shy but excited... People in our organization people used to say these are sugli-sugli baatan (bad things). We thought that women in the village would turn around and hit us if we talked about such things! But actually they talk about sex anyway. They sing dirty songs during weddings and holi (a festival). They have the freedom to sing such songs on these occasions. But they cannot talk about it (sic) openly otherwise.'
Kesari Bai is an activist, who had taken on a fierce battle with 'upper caste' people in her village to be able to draw water from the same well, who has led many a rescue operation, literally bursting into homes and retrieving children of women who had left abusive husbands. She is the same Kesari, who after going through a series of trainings on sexuality, confessed to being very, very nervous about conducting a workshop on sexuality with women from the community.
Kesari Bai was one of the participants in Younikta aur Hum (Sexuality and Us), a programme aimed at building perspectives of five organisations working at the community level in different states of North India, on issues of sexuality. The programme constitutes one of the first efforts in the Indian context to build perspectives on sexuality, through workshops, with women from rural, poor communities as well as the organizations that work with them, in an intensive manner. Conducted during 2007-2008, the programme trained 300 women, of which 100 were largely urban staff from women's organizations, and 200 were village women members of rural women's collectives that these organizations worked with.
Members of a Dalit women's collective deliberate and write on ribbons the qualities of a 'good woman'
And here she is - all bound up by norms and rules
Through activities, films as well as reflections of our lives and work at the community level, the workshops sought to address sexuality in ways that were both positive and political, introducing ideas such as
- Women's rights to say yes to sex and ask for what they wanted as well as to refuse
- How control of women's sexuality oppresses women more generally
- How sex and sexuality are socially constructed and how sexuality relates to the work that is being done at the community level.
Food and Sex
One of the most popular and effective ways in which we talked about core ideas related to sexuality was by talking about sex and sexuality through food. Rural women often described a need for sex as 'shareer ki bhook' - hunger of the body. One of the participants spoke, for example, of how if one wants to eat five rotis and gets only two, one will have to find the other three, even take from a neighbour if necessary. On the other hand if a woman is forced to eat seven rotis she will suffer from indigestion. As facilitators, we also asked participants a series of questions related to food. What do you like eating the most? What do you dislike most in food? Has your taste in food ever changed? Have you learnt how to cook anything new? The pattern seeking related to our tastes in food, led into a discussion about whether we saw any similarities with sexuality. One participant shared that her mother had told her 'Don't eat good food. If your body is healthy you'll have greater desires, so keep yourself thin'. In one of the workshops, the commonalities that emerged included diversity - 'the possibilities in both are limitless'. Sexual desire and taste in food are both fluid, they can change, was yet another commonality. We built upon these similarities to argue that although sexuality, like food and taste, seems to be natural and instinctive it is socially constructed. Again like taste in food, sexual desire seems to be located in the domain of the body, the biological, but it is influenced by gender, class, region etc.
The trainings showed that
- It is indeed possible and welcome to talk about sexuality, particularly for rural women in this context who were far more at ease than the more middle class urban participants.
- Sexuality and violence against women (VAW) are connected. VAW may occur as a response to women expressing non-acceptable desires and women may return to abusive husbands in part because marriage is the only accepted place to fulfil their sexual desires.
- Sexuality is integral to women's empowerment both because sexual fulfillment itself can be affirming, energizing, and empowering, and because control of women's sexuality inhibits women's mobility, access to health care and education.
- Men also pay a price for pursuing desires which contravene social norms, eg. if a man and a woman have a relationship which her family do not approve of, there is often huge pressure on her to declare the relationship non-consensual in order to save her reputation, with sometimes severe consequences for the man involved.
- Transgender people are visible members of rural Indian communities, and face gender based violence and other obstacles which NGOs concerned with gender should address.
See report of
external review of the programme
A
working paper on the programme, which is being published by the Institute of Development Studies, U.K. reflects on the programme and seeks to share key learnings.
