I appeal to all governments and societies [...] to build a world where no one has to be afraid because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. - United Nations Secretary-General Ant¨®nio Guterres.
In 2015, the UNHATE Foundation of United Colors of Benetton and United Nations Academic Impact (UNAI) jointly organized the UN-Making of Hate International Diversity Contest to help young people's grassroots efforts in ending hate and intolerance. Ten projects from around the world were selected for their innovative solutions in tackling issues ranging from homophobia to racism, gender-based discrimination, homelessness, interethnic conflict, xenophobia and exclusion of persons with disabilities. In this second part of the series presenting some of the projects implemented by the winners of the contest, Vinitha Jayaprakasan, reports on the work of the Gender/Sexuality Sensitization Project (GSSP), of which she was a member along University of Ambedkar students Mesha Murali, Rohan Sengupta, Shikhar Vyas and Sonam Grover.
Non-discrimination is a core human rights principle embodied first and foremost in the . A number of have called for the end of discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. In 2011, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights released a report on?? making suggestions on how international human rights law can be used to end violence based on sexual orientation and gender identity. The ongoing UN Free & Equal campaign, launched in 2013 by the United Nations Human Rights Office, is an initiative that aims at raising awareness of sexual, gender and bodily diversity, and promote equal rights and fair treatment of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and intersex (LGBTI) people all around the world. One of the objectives of the campaign is, among others, to lend support and legitimacy to the work carried out by civil society organizations working to end harmful stereotypes directed at LGBTI people.
Relying on datasets GSSP composed, the group carried out a gender and sexuality sensitization campaign at two universities in Delhi, India during the span of one year.
04 May 2018 - The Gender/Sexuality Sensitization Project (GSSP) begun with the team conducting primary research in the form of focus group discussions and in-depth interviews with various stakeholders (students, queer activists, professors, non-governmental organizations etc.) across university spaces, in particular at University of Delhi and Ambedkar University Delhi. We were able to collect, record and archive a substantial amount of data around university-specific issues of safety, representation, discrimination, queer-phobia, structural violence, tokenism etc. We understand that the term queer is used in a non-definitive way for its different political stands. We mostly addressed it as a term of not abiding by the cis-heteronormative structure.
The data we collected was qualitative and anecdotal¡ªthe nature of the project didn't allow one to have a quantitative approach to analysing one's experience of how gender and queerness unfolds, violence, discrimination or the complex idea of identity. The data we collected was indeed collected for the purpose of implementation of project activities.
The data helped us visualise the kind of specific themes which we wanted to focus on, which would be relevant, topical and useful for the beneficiaries of the project. It is to be noted that the target audience of the workshops was not just students, but also university non-teaching staff. This led us to develop close collaborations with Delhi-based non-governmental organizations (NGOs), networks, theatre groups and activists. With this in mind, we mutually developed various sensitization interventions¡ªtraining sessions, workshops, theatre events, movie screenings, discussions ans so forth. We also supported institutions to set up their own gender-and-sexuality focused sensitization drives.
Apart from an event-based interventionist approach, we tried to foster sustained dialogue through other media, such as opening up communication channels, distributing various literatures (flyers, parchas, booklets etc.), popularizing Delhi-based queer friendly networks and their helpline numbers which might respond to people in times of crisis, setting up a which disseminated information, news and event-invites, as well as documenting the Delhi Queer Pride.
While success is often not quantifiable, we do acknowledge that GSSP helped start discussions and dialogues in spaces wherein such topics were considered taboo, hushed up, institutionally neglected or just not thought to be important enough to be talked about. We visited institutions where sexual harassment was rampant, students (oftentimes young women) had very little to no outlets or vocabulary to voice their concerns. 'Sensitization', by virtue of being a long drawn-out process, can never be achieved in a small frame of time. Inroads were made, however, and visibly so. During the various workshops, some assumptions seemed to be challenged, if not changed by the participants. The workshops were organized with the help of Nazariya, a queer feminist resource group. The discussions elicited visceral responses, and often heated debates followed even after the end of the workshops.
The paucity of such conversations in various spaces was rendered visible by the fact that we were repeatedly asked to replicate and continue our efforts (both in the same space and in different ones) by students and professors alike.
With limited resources, we did want to pack in a lot of things within the twelve months which we felt we could not. For instance, we wanted to work in university hostels since these were considered to be hotspots of harassment; we felt more work could be done with the non-teaching and teaching staff; a magazine was in the cards, which never took off. There were other similar ideas we were unable to action, and for which we felt we needed more time.
There were problems with GSSP which we acknowledge and which did hinder our efforts. Firstly, the university calendar didn't allow to sustain repeated, prolonged workshops. Additionnally, due to limited time, we were also unable to affect deep and long-lasting policy changes in all of the spaces, since that kind of transformation requires an important social and political momentum. Secondly, it was difficult to work in the third university which we had initially wanted to target, Jawaharlal Nehru University, because of a volatile political climate. We do feel that the the Project would have been even more successful if it had been more sustainable and not been reduced to a series of events that spanned during a twelve-month period.