Author: Hemangini Gupta

Day Sixteen: Concluding 16 Days Blogathon 2023

Our annual 16 Days blogathon has come to another close. Here’s a quick recap to round up what our contributors have written thus far.

We’ve come to an end of our annual 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence Blogathon, running between the International Day to End Violence Against Women and International Human Rights Day today. Our blogathon this year focused on the theme of sexual harassment and sexual violence in higher education institutions and is a continued collaboration between GENDER.ED at the University of Edinburgh, the Gendered Violence Research Network at the University of New South Wales and the Centre for Publishing at Dr B R Ambedkar University Delhi. This year we were joined by guest curators from Margherita von Brentano Center at Freie Universität Berlin, for the Una Europa Gender Equality Network (UGEN). Our blogathon brought together voices from research, student activism, and institutional perspectives to raise awareness of the #16DaysofActivism Against Gender Based Violence global campaign.

While our annual blogathons typically span transnational contexts, this year we chose to focus on the country-specific and institutionally-distinct contexts that our curators were writing from. Our introductory blog historicised demands for institutional change from Australia, the UK, and India, with our curators noting how campus screenings of the documentary The Hunting Ground acted as a catalyst spurring action around addressing sexual violence. Landmark national surveys were undertaken in Australia, and the question of sexual violence was understood as one that affects staff and students. In the UK, similar surveys found a widespread culture of toxic masculinity prompting the question of what relationship University systems had with wider criminal justice procedures. Student activism has shifted the calculations that Universities make so that it is now seen as institutionally risky and disreputable to be seen as not acting. In India, institutions have responded in the context of wider conversations around sexual violence, government committees, and feminist activism around gender-based violence.

This year we curated our blogs to move through three stages: an interrogation of concepts; the process of addressing violence prevalent in institutional settings; and the challenges and registers of institutional activism.

We began with asking what kind of concept violence is. Drawing on her work on domestic abuse, Catherine Donovan wrote about a “public story” of violence that “doesn’t just describe a problem, it creates a problem with particular contours in our minds.” Donovan suggests we think about violence as it emerges through structures of power and “relationship rules” that need to be unhooked from their cis-gendered and heterosexist binaries. Ngozi Anyadike-Danes wrote next on the tricky idea of consent. While it is often presented as a direct question of “yes” or “no,” she reminds us that consent is embedded in cultural and social assumptions and contexts. From violence and consent on to questions of form: where is sexual violence in institutions visible and how do we understand it? Mahima Kaul challenged distinctions between online and offline forms of violence in an increasingly interconnected world.

The next block of blogs entered institutional life to ask what tussles and challenges emerge when sexual harassment and sexual violence are taken up here. From Australia, Jan Breckenridge traced a brief history of work on this issue raising the question of who is regarded as susceptible to such violence; Breckenridge’s piece importantly centers both staff and student experiences. Given the important changes that Breckenridge writes about, why does it seem as though so little progress has been made in addressing sexual violence in HEIs? Allison Henry stays with Australia to show that legislative and regulatory levers need not only to exist: they need to be activated, and she gives us examples of how this has happened. Angela Griffin turns to institutions from a student’s perspective exploring how they are perceived and drawing on her research to indicate what needs to change.

Representatives from #MeTooEdiUni, Amy Life and Sharessa Naidoo, take up this question from the context of the UK, showing how their active campaign allowed them the proverbial “seat at the table” where they felt they were being allowed to speak without actually being listened to. Bill Flack, our next blogger, offered some insights into why this might be so, showing that administrators and researchers need to always catch up with changing sexual cultures. “Some of the major challenges in this work are trying to ask the right questions in the right ways, being as inclusive as possible with regard to those groups who are targets of harassment and violence and to the types and contexts of harassment and violence, and the lack of support for – and often backlash to – doing this work,” Flack said.

Our final set of blogs show the challenges of addressing sexual harassment and sexual violence in higher education institutions. From Germany, Wendy Stollberg elaborated on the (im)possibilities of feminist institutional change, focusing on the figure of the Gender Equality Officer in Germany who might be highly motivated to address questions of violence but also to find themselves structurally constrained.

What are some of the structural constraints to institutional change in India? Our next blog outlined concerns related to the current functioning of the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013 (PoSH-Act). Perhaps the change needs to be effected in concert with wider institutional changes: Lora Prabhu showed how her NGO’s efforts in encouraging gendered participation in sports shifted how young women approach public and institutional spaces. From the University of Hyderabad context, Aparna Rayaprol wrote about the successes of student-led sensitisation efforts on campus. These efforts might be in-person, but students have also turned to online platforms as Adrija Dey writes, indicating their lack of faith in the “due process” of law that did not fulfil students’ ideas and imaginations of justice. Given the wealth of experience, knowledge, and research in these posts, where do we go from here? We end with an important reminder: activism on sexual violence in higher education institutions requires a different temporality and horizon. Anna Bull from the 1752 group writes crucially about “slow activism” that creates space to name the existence of a problem.

The 2023 curators:

University of Edinburgh: Dr Hemangini Gupta (Assoc Director and 2023 Blogathon Co-Lead), Prof. Fiona Mackay (GENDER.ED Governance Lead and 2023 Blogathon Co-Lead) and Rhea Gandhi (PhD web and editorial assistant) from GENDER.ED.

Dr B R Ambedkar University Delhi: Prof. Rukmini Sen, Dr Rachna Mehra. 

University of New South Wales: Prof. Jan Breckenridge (Co-Convenor), Mailin Suchting (Manager) and Georgia Lyons (Research Assistant) for the Gendered Violence Research Network.

Guest curators: Dr. Heike Pantelmann (Managing Director) and Dr. Sabina García Peter (Associate), Margherita von Brentano Center at Freie Universität Berlin, for the Una Europa Gender Equality Network (UGEN).

DAY TWELVE: I Never Ask For It: Building Testimonials to Gender-Based Violence

Over nearly twenty years, Blank Noise has worked with citizens and communities across India and beyond to build testimonials of gender-based violence. Blank Noise rests on the power of feminist collaborations and building feminist solidarities, writes its Founder-Director Jasmeen Patheja in today’s blog.

Jasmeen Patheja

Featured Image: Clothes from the I Never Ask For It campaign. Image credit: Jasmeen Patheja.

An idea has no significance or meaning unless someone makes it their own.

Blank Noise is a growing community of Action Sheroes/ Theyroes/ Heroes: citizens and persons taking the agency to end gender-based violence. Blank Noise was initiated in 2003 in response to the silence surrounding street harassment in India and globally. While for the first decade, Blank Noise worked to bring attention to street harassment, its next phase was an inquiry into the nature of victim blaming. Blame permeates spaces of violence. If blame has been used to justify violence against all identities and spaces, how can we be Action Sheroes everywhere? Not just on the streets, but in our power at home, on campus, at our workplace, on the internet.

In 2003- 2004, since the start of Blank Noise,  I reached out to women around me, to speak with me about their experiences of street harassment. Responses ranged from “it doesn’t happen to me”, “how can you ask me this question – I am not that type of a woman”, to “it happened to me, I was wearing my school uniform and it still happened.”  

The dominant climate back then was ‘good girls’ don’t experience it, don’t name it, and if you do experience it, you ‘asked for it’. Fear and the threat of street harassment was a given and normalised. 

The more I listened, I paid attention to the fact that garments were being recalled and named in testimonials. I recognised that there was a pattern here in the way we narrated. The noticing became an inquiry. 

Nearly 20 years later, no matter where I go (urban, rural or internationally), I still ask the question “Do you remember what you wore when you experienced gender based violence? Is there an unnamed, yet unforgotten memory of discomfort where you remember the clothes? What makes so many of us, across identities and geographies, remember?”

The first 8-10 years of I Never Ask For It was about making the garment a ‘truth’ visible to ourselves and the public we engaged with through the press and media. We were recognising that women in all clothes, women across identities, age, religion or faith experienced it. We learnt to say #INeverAskForIt. 

Participants build the I Never Ask For It project at public sites. Image credit: Jasmeen Patheja.

I Never Ask For It has grown from an idea and campaign to a mission. The 2004 version of I Never Ask For It issued the first call to action inviting survivors of violence to bring or ‘discard’ the clothes they were wearing when they experienced violence.  We moved from the idea of inviting and encouraging survivors to speak to the campaign’s current phase emphasising, “speak if it serves you.”  

I Never Ask For It is a place for memory – to keep our memories safe. It works towards building ten thousand garment testimonials and bringing them to unite at sites of public significance. We share this number because we are motivated by what it would take to build this – the healing it could offer, the feminist solidarities it could initiate.

I Never Ask For It has been built slowly, iteratively, through the years. It has been co-created with feminist alliances and through listening. We ask ‘who is yet to be heard,’ and that drives how we design its path ahead. The practice at Blank Noise is located within socially engaged art practice and movement building.

I Never Ask For It behind the scenes includes workshops, campaigns, research projects, public actions such as ‘Walk Towards Healing’, Listening Circles, public talks and more. It has moved away from its early ‘myth breaking’ and making this truth visible approach to now claiming, “We are done defending. I Never Ask For It”. The garment is merely a witness. It bears memory. It was present at that moment. We believe there is power in bringing the garments together, standing united in solidarity; power in speaking if it serves the speaker. 

We are building testimonials, but who has the capacity to listen? I Never Ask For It is about learning to be a listener. It is an injustice to ask survivors to speak if we do not have the capacity to listen.  I Never Ask For It rests on building our collective capacity to listen. The burden of memory is not mine, or ours alone.

Over the years, I Never Ask For It has been shared at multiple sites including Ars Electronica – Austria (2005), Kitab Mahal (2006), Abrons Art Center (2017) , Ford Foundation Gallery (2018), and is now also at Khoj International Artists Association through their ongoing show called Threading the Horizon.

Watch this powerful video of their work here.

Author’s Bio

Jasmeen Patheja is an artist in public service mobilising towards the right to be defenceless. Patheja has worked to end gender based violence and victim blame for nearly two decades. She founded Blank Noise in 2003, in response to the silence surrounding street harassment. She mobilises citizens and individuals to take agency in ending sexual and gender-based violence. Patheja designs methodologies (tareeka) to confront fear, fear politics, warnings, and victim blame surrounding sexual assault. Patheja works towards building the capacity to listen to survivors of sexual assault and the capacity to care.

Jasmeen works with multiple forms of media. She is also a photographer. She is a TED and Ashoka Fellow.