Chennai: A man doing dishes, making dosa and cleaning the house while women read the morning newspaper, play cricket or lift dumbbells. These are some of the images the gender clubs in Chennai corporation-run schools are trying to normalise. And that’s not all.
While challenging gender stereotypes, a mission led by a team of four women at the Greater Chennai Corporation (GCC)’s Gender and Policy Lab is simultaneously working to make the city a safer place for women, with public spaces and transport systems that are accessible and comfortable for them.
Chennai is the first city in India to have a gender and policy lab in an urban local body. The team works on addressing issues of women’s mobility and safety through studies, awareness campaigns and infrastructure upgrades. The initiative was set up by the GCC using the Nirbhaya Fund in partnership with the World Bank and was inaugurated in April 2022.
“We have positioned an agenda and raised an important issue on women’s safety. We have got people to talk about it. Earlier, it was just with the police,” a consultant with the lab told ThePrint.
She said the team ensures that women’s safety is taken into consideration in every project implemented in the city because the lab coordinates with the Greater Chennai Police, Metropolitan Transport Corporation (MTC), Chennai Metro Rail Ltd (CMRL) and the Department of Social Welfare and Women Empowerment.
“This is a proactive intervention we have tried and it has resulted in a change in mindsets,” IAS officer V. Sivakrishnamurthy, deputy commissioner (works), GCC told ThePrint.
The officer said that the corporation has been able to slowly include a gender perspective in the city’s infrastructural design through the lab, adding that it is planning to incorporate the aspect of gender inclusivity and sensitivity while budgeting for different schemes.
“Students are understanding what sex and gender are. Earlier, students thought that whatever work women did, be it domestic chores or taking care of children, was because of their biological characteristics. Now, this perspective has changed,” Dr N.A. Arivukkarasi, head of the social entrepreneurship department at the Madras School of Social Work (MSSW), which collaborated with the gender lab in implementing the gender clubs in schools, told ThePrint.
She added that case studies revealed that students were also prompting discussions on gender roles in their respective families. According to her estimates, the gender clubs have witnessed the participation of 9,800 teenagers in GCC-run schools so far.
The gender clubs focus on games, activities and discussions among students to promote gender sensitivity while a teacher, trained at the GCC, overlooks the activities. Club activities are conducted once a week for Class 8 students.
Of the 420 schools run by the GCC across Chennai, clubs are currently active in 162 corporation-run schools and will soon be part of 49 more schools within the city limits, the aforementioned consultant said.
Besides gender clubs, the lab has recently developed 2,000 board games for teenage students to promote gender sensitivity.
“The games were delivered last week to 211 GCC-run middle schools, high schools and higher secondary schools to be implemented soon,” another consultant at the lab told ThePrint.
However, the gender clubs currently don’t cover sexual orientation.
“The modules touch on transgenders, not the rest of the LGBTQIA community. We have been speaking only with Class 8 students. So, we have only very little scope for actually introducing sexuality to children. But we are planning to upgrade training for students and teachers,” Arivukkarasi said, adding that they are focusing on sensitising teachers on the matter so that students will feel comfortable talking to them.
“Gender lab is more like an experiment. We are constantly trying to bridge the gap between public demand and government response,” the consultant quoted first said, adding that the group is working on developing a gender manual—a template for making the city’s public spaces and infrastructure safe and women-friendly.
The consultant also said that the lab is now studying to identify 10 major bus routes used by women in the city to understand the issues faced by them, based on which changes in infrastructure will be made. The study is expected to be completed in a few months.
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‘If you see something wrong, speak up’
A woman clad in a saree is approached by a man at a public bus stop. She is visibly uncomfortable due to his disturbing gaze. As she becomes more and more tense, a trans woman comes and stands next to her, followed by a man carrying a child, immediately bringing a sense of relief and strength on the woman’s face.
The nearly one-minute video, shown by the lab to the public for the first time in August, is a wake-up call for Chennai citizens to intervene whenever a woman is harassed in front of them. After the success of the video launch at Chennai’s Thiru Vi Ka Park and Phoenix Mall, the team is now mulling an extensive campaign to take the message to the streets in November.
“We are now finalising the programmes. It will have cultural events and arts, and discussions will be held across the city,” the consultant said.
They added that the campaign was launched as a follow-up to the findings of their pilot study in the city to assess the ground reality and women’s perception of safety in public spaces and transport.
For this, the team sought the opinions of 2,400 women, 500 men and 100 transgender people via surveys through household visits and at public spaces. Of the participants, around 12 to 22 percent mentioned having faced either visual, verbal, physical, stalking, soliciting or violent forms of harassment in public spaces. Around 62 percent of the women who faced harassment said that no one intervened.
In cases where there was intervention, around 45 percent of women said it was from the police and only 38 percent said it was from known people or strangers.
“The campaigns will focus on how bystanders can intervene without getting attacked,” the consultant said, adding that the two videos released to the public cover two of the ‘five Ds’ recommended to be followed in bystander intervention.
The ‘five Ds’ of bystander intervention are direct (calling out the inappropriate behaviour), distract (intervening and talking to the victim), delay (talking and helping the survivor after the incident), delegate (asking for help from a third party) and document.
The lab also conducted numerous studies by analysing 2,29,277 grievances received through the GCC’s helpline number (1913) between June 2021 and July 2022.
It also conducted a safety audit programme in the city with Safetipin, a social impact organisation working towards building a safe urban system, as well as a study on the safety concerns of foot overbridges and pedestrian subways, after which recommendations were given to different departments to improve the city’s infrastructure.
The consultant said most of the complainants on the helpline number were men. But since women are equally affected by civic issues, the lab recommended that the GCC include more women respondents.
“We made sure that streetlights, toilets and other basic infrastructure were fixed. Approach roads to transit locations were also fixed in 46 locations,” the consultant said. However, the team said they could not reveal the names of the locations where action was taken.
“Once we give the data and inputs to the concerned departments, it’s their task to do it. We give them ample time for it and do our impact study later before the annual budget,” the consultant said.
(Edited by Radifah Kabir)
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