WUNRN
WITNESS - Video for Change
Silence Speaks Digital Storytelling
NEPAL - LINKING WOMEN'S PERSONAL
STORIES OF ABUSE TO POLICY EDUCATION
November
30th, 2011
In commemoration of the global 16 Days of
Activism Against Gender Violence Campaign, we are highlighting activists
and organizations who are using the power of video in their campaigns to
address gender-based violence through
a series of guest posts. Read previous
posts in this series.
By Amy Hill
Amy is the Co-Founder and current Director of Silence Speaks. She is a digital video
instructor/producer and public health consultant whose twelve-year history of
involvement with women’s health and violence prevention program and policy
initiatives led her in 2000 to found the initiative. She is currently
finalizing the Voices for Justice digital
stories.
From the moment I met Bandana
Rana in 2008, I sensed that we would work together. She runs SAATHI Nepal,
which has for nearly twenty years been challenging violence and injustice
against women at all levels of Nepalese society. We talked about the importance
of bringing stories told by
survivors into human rights dialogues, about the power of visual media, about
the possibilities for storytelling in
Silence Speaks is a project of
the non-profit Center for Digital Storytelling, offering
workshops in which storytellers reveal and bear witness to personal tales of
struggle and courage and are guided through participatory media production
methods that result in short digital videos known as “digital stories.” The Voices for Justice
project has supported Nepali women in sharing their personal experiences with
gender-based violence in an effort to promote awareness and enforcement of the
Nepalese Domestic Violence Act.
Political instability and a
lengthy civil war overshadowed issues of gender-based violence for many years.
Finally, in 2009, after a decade of advocacy by women’s rights groups, the
national government passed legislation designed to protect Nepalese women
impacted by domestic violence. While the Domestic Violence and Punishment Act
represents an important step towards justice for
This is where we hope Voices for Justice can
play an important role. With the goal of centralizing women’s first-person
stories to raise community awareness about the new law and advocate for timely
and effective response by police, legal officials, and health providers, I
worked for five days with SAATHI staff and interpreters to support a small
group of shelter residents in talking about their lives. We played games to get
to know each other, took photos and video clips, and spent a tearful afternoon
bearing witness to narratives that describe the unthinkable: the wife who was
beaten almost daily, for ten years; the child bride whose in-laws poured
kerosene on her and set her on fire; the young girl lured from the countryside
to the capital city by the promise of education, only to be held as a sexual
slave for months.
Given the stigma that surrounds
gender-based violence in
We also took great care to avoid
re-traumatizing the women during the process. Some have only been in the
shelter for a few months and continue to struggle with recurring memories and
nightmares about what they lived through. I was grateful again and again for my
own training and experience in working with survivors; for the presence of the
peer translators, all young women with whom the storytellers bonded; for the
support of the SAATHI staff who assisted; and for the courage of the
storytellers.*
SAATHI eased the participating
women into the process of sharing their stories by bringing them together for
art-making sessions, prior to my arrival. They created detailed drawings of
their abuse experiences, which will appear in the final digital stories. During
the workshop, we created a sense of safety and protection and helped those
participants who occasionally became lost in the past spiral out of their pain
and back into the present moment of caring and attention. During the workshop
debrief, almost all of the women expressed relief and gratitude for the
opportunity to tell their stories in a nurturing, women-only environment.
Because the workshop coincided
with Diwali, we ended with a candle-lighting
ceremony that gave each of us the chance to express a hope for herself as well
as a hope for women around the globe. Again there were tears and heartfelt
wishes for an end to suffering. I expressed the hope that my daughter, who
turned one in September, will grow up into a world where women can live safely
and freely … and the hope that the stories shared in the workshop will lead to
positive change.
An anonymous excerpt from one of
the stories from the Voices
for Justice project:
I got
married at an early age without my parents’ consent. I thought that after
marriage life would be good, but my dreams were shattered. After the wedding, I
found out that my husband was not the person I had thought him to be. …
He
would beat me until I was unconscious, and when I woke up, he would say, “I
thought you were dead, but you’re still alive.” I was not allowed to work
(outside the home), or tell my story to anyone. I felt so alone. …
Somehow
my father knew what was going on. He asked me to come home, but I didn’t want
to, because I had married by my own choice. … I tolerated all this pain for ten
years. My husband threatened to kill me, again and again. I was thrown down to
the floor, I had scars and black and blue marks all over my body. My children
used to be terrified. When my husband beat me, they would shout and cry. …
Finally,
for the sake of my children’s future, and for my own safety, I left my husband.
I came to