Hello Derek,
Thanks for your interest. Here are my responses to your queries :
Effective communication has the following stages - I say, - Listen, - understand and - Come Forward. -- meaning the community or target group. The issue is thus not merely raising awareness and establishing contact points but ensuring "involved contact." Let us go by a story - A gentleman comes to a village one day and starts living there and says he works in town in garment industry, in 6 months he is a familiar face and his politeness impresses many villagers, when he approaches a girl's father about marriage and that too without dowry, girl's parents are thrilled and informs everyone including Panchayat and the girl got married and they went back to town. After 4 months, the couple is missing. After 7 years, while doing a research on the missing girls, in one such home in one district, the girl was found and she narrated how she was sent to Nepal from Kolkata and -- When this is enacted through the theatre using local language and dialect in a village, it catches everyone's eyes and Interactive theatre ensures that the role which everyone could have taken, can be discussed - like checking whereabouts of the guy, sending someone to his office and last staying address to check the existence - Panchayat could have taken a positive role, by doing a cross verification and involving Police Station. So, if community including Panchayats were aware then there could have been much more community led vigilance and this could have prevented the case like this
Brief study at few rehabilitation homes showed that a large number of trafficked cases were due to ignorance on the possible cause
I would like to share with you another example - Dept of Health, Govt of Jharkhand retained our services to do awareness campaign on Routine Immunization at 4 Blocks in East Singhbhum district in Nov-Dec 04. Before going to our target blocks (Ghatshila-Bahragora-Chakulia zone), we heard that there is a strong resistance to immunization. After reaching to the blocks, we realized that a key cause of low immunization coverage was complete ignorance. It was after a long time that someone (our field team) had actually reached these backward areas, were talking in the language of the people and listening to them and answering them. We stayed there for more than a month and community response in the next catch up round was very good - people think we have done magic, we think we just did our work.
I don't think that awareness generation will dramatically create an impact on the market force. However, if the community is vigilant including the lowest level of Governance unit, then with time there will be an impact and - things will change. No one wants to be sold off, or get raped, no one wants to become a sex worker, but everyone wants to get married, everyone wants to earn, everyone wants to go out and see world - No girl likes to see that due inability to pay dowry her marriage is not becoming reality - so, these are the cases where vigil society plays role. Theatre as communication tool with a two pronged strategy of using street theatre shows as information dissemination tool in edutainment way and workshop with community members involving Panchayats, School Masters, Women's forms, SHGs, Police Stations will ensure reducing this evil in the society.
Once the occurrence has happened, the issue is complex. The girl doesn't want to go back to village. Before the occurrence, the girl never wants to go for it.. so awareness will play the most vital role.
Besides awareness on the issue, awareness on opportunities and rights play important role. Poverty is indeed a crucial issue, and this factor plays a critical role on these issues. We are working with Self Help Groups formed with poor village women. We are sharing the success stories, developing SHG members communication skill, creating market linkage. Goal is to help them to earn and that in turn will reduce poverty and that will work as a positive catalyst towards creating an environment where daughter's marriage is not the primary factor of relief of the parents and the parents can start be proud of their daughter's success. We have started working in 4 blocks of Purba Medinipur and North 24 parganas in developing these SHGs with Zilla Parishads and when we brought them to Kolkata where they are supposed to interact directly with buyers, we saw the positive changes. So these women, however burdened by poverty, do have a strong zeal to live a better life - the need is to educate and empower them to manage their lives better.
Ananya Bhattacharya, Program Manager, Contact Base
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