The United Nations has marked 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence beginning on 25th November with the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women till the International Human Rights Day on 10th December. An estimated 1.2 to 1.5 million females in India and China are victims of violence even before they are born. As per the Global Gender Gap Report of 2021, both countries together account for about 90 to 95 per cent of missing female births annually worldwide due to gender-biased prenatal sex selective practices. More than 1 in 3 women experience gender-based violence during their lifetime. What can be done to prevent violence before and after birth, within homes and in public places?
The National Crime Records Bureau of India (NCRB) states that almost 60 percent of crimes against minors are perpetrated by youngsters from age 16 to 18. Rape cases by juveniles increased to 60 percent while acts to harass women rose to 70.5 percent. Can we move the lens from victim-blaming to the perpetrators of violence to understand where as a society we have failed in raising our young ones to become morally responsible citizens? Can we enable a non-violent ecosystem around the child?
“My students have become extremely aggressive and disrespectful. I asked a student of mine to button up his shirt. Ignoring that he opened up one more button right in front of me,” reported a high school English teacher from Bangalore, Karnataka in a study conducted by the Research team of Dream a Dream to understand students’ behaviour post-lockdown. 76 percent of the teachers responded that aggressive outbursts happen every day in their classrooms, sometimes every two hours. “Before the pandemic, they used to listen to us, but now they get provoked easily and start shouting at us. Students gang up to create nicknames for us and use foul language.” How can our education system address the increasing threats and instances of violence among young people? The pandemic restricted movement, amplified fears and mass anxiety. Increased stress with no avenues or tools to channelise negative emotions, youth aggression is a problem. The uncertainty and losses brought by the pandemic made young people lose control of their hopes, goals and life direction.
Gender violence is not a women’s issue, it’s a societal issue. On November 14, 2022, 10 years after the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act was passed, a study on the performance of POCSO courts in 486 districts in India found that acquittals are significantly higher than convictions for all of the states studied while convictions are lowest in cases of sexual harassment. Isn’t it shameful that as a society we are producing abusive men and boys and are unable to hold them accountable? All genders experience gender-based violence, deeply rooted in gender inequality, but the majority of victims are women and girls. Can the non-abusive boys and men shed their apathy and raise their voice against violence? NCRB reported a 53 per cent increase in domestic violence cases between 2001 to 2018. What happens to a boy who sees his father beat up his mother? Studies on childhood domestic violence show that they internalise this trauma, this anger, developing a skewed power dynamic view of relationships with a high probability of turning into abusers themselves. They tend to have magnified emotional responses and difficulty in effectively adjusting their responses. With an alcoholic, abusive father who beat up his mother, Prasanna H., one of our programme graduates, internalised the constant exposure to violence at home and corporal punishment in school which impacted his participation in activities. He felt a lot of anger and used to hit others. His field hockey coach, an empathetic adult, directed him to practise hitting 10 balls into the goal every time he felt himself becoming angry. Slowly, he learnt to re-direct his anger. Today as a father to a young girl, he is optimistic that his daughter will have a different childhood than his, free of violence and full of dignity and compassion.
A 9 year old boy in Dream a Dream’s After School Life Skills programme (ASLSP) through football was called short-tempered, violent and quarrelsome by his teachers. The life skills facilitator, Anita, observed, “I noticed how he struggled working together in a team.” She gave him the responsibility of leading a session one day. This was met with laughter and teasing by other students making the boy feel incapable. Encouraged by Anita, he tried and developed confidence in his abilities. Another facilitator, Kiran noticed that this boy lacked discipline but was interested in football. Kiran helped him make meaningful choices and taught him the tool of negotiation to prioritise to achieve his life goal. His family shares, “He has changed so much in the past 5 years, working hard to become a football player. From being a boy who was always fighting, with no interest in studying, he has now become disciplined and responsible. He wakes up on time, does his school work and waits eagerly for his football sessions.” Realising his potential as a leader in school motivates him to remain calm in difficult situations, channelising aggression into training well to excel in his chosen field.
These boys would have remained trapped in the cycle of violence but for the presence of empathetic adults who appreciated their strengths, taught them self-regulation and helped them plan life goals, changing their perception of themselves and of the world around them. Display of anger in students is a cry for help, an opportunity to empathise with the challenges causing anger and to teach appropriate tools to express negative emotions in healthier ways. Parents need positive parenting skills to ensure they don’t respond to aggression with aggression and violence with more violence perpetuating the cycle. There is an urgent need to teach life skills, emotional regulation, anger and stress management in schools to develop the necessary social skills to solve problems and resolve conflicts. While equipping students with life skills, it is equally important to enable empathetic non-violent systems around the child. Placing students’ wellbeing above their academic performance by prioritising play, art and creating ways to de-stress to overcome the trauma caused by the pandemic requires empathy. Empathy is an abstract concept and difficult for a young person to model when real life examples are missing. Schools must intentionally model empathy in classrooms providing readily available examples for students to analyse responses and develop positive response patterns. Teachers should validate the feelings behind the behaviour of students without lowering expectations of good behaviour. Tailoring instruction within a classroom with self and group reflections on how others feel, interpreting their emotions, and then learning what responses are appropriate help students learn compassion and healing becoming a cohesive learning community offering social protection. Allowing students to explain the reason behind a negative behaviour helps them feel valued as a human, even when their action may lead to disciplinary action. Providing students an opportunity to remove themselves from a negative situation for some time also demonstrates empathy. Helping others in difficult situations, working for a social cause are ways to help students feel responsible towards the community and recognise that there are others in the world they can help. It is our responsibility, as adults, to protect and empower our young people while engaging with them with kindness and empathy. Let’s build a web of safety around our young people, where they feel heard, supported and understood to create a violence-free world.
About the author: Saba Ahmad is a Copy editor, with the Communications team at Dream a Dream