Sohini Bhattacharya is the CEO and President of Breakthrough, a global human rights organization working to drive culture change to build a world where all people live in dignity, equality, and respect. Among its many initiatives, Breakthrough reaches nearly half a million adolescents in India through school and community programs, ensuring girls face less discrimination, complete school, and delay their age at marriage. James Nardella, former Skoll Foundation Principal and current Chief Program Officer for Last Mile Health, sat down with Sohini to talk about the hard work of shifting culture norms of gender-based violence and discrimination. James started the conversation by asking Sohini about her childhood in India.
Sohini Battacharya: I was born in a middle class family. My mother was a school teacher, my father was a first generation corporate worker, and we didn’t have a lot of money, but we had enough, you know. We didn’t really kind of have any major wants growing up.
One of the things that was kinda of drummed into my ears as I was growing up — and this was by my mother — as a woman, I need to be completely self sufficient. I need to stand on my own two feet. So I grew up with this constant learning that as a woman I have a special role in society.
My father — we are two sisters — so my father said he was twice blessed because he had two daughters. And as a child growing up in India, you constantly hear things about oh, you have two daughters? Oh, you don’t have a son? And you have a daughter who’s dark, so all of these things my father and my mother countered in a wonderful way, and so we grew up
James Nardella: What about them gave you a different perspective?
Sohini: I think they were educated. I think they had their own beliefs. They had some left leanings at that point in time, so I think those, you know, those kinds of beliefs in politics also shaped their minds, so they were different.
I used to constantly hear, oh you know, she’s a girl and she’s dark, she’s not going to get married, which is a normally, you know, normal thing in India. And my parents countered that very beautifully, so we were brought up to think on our feet, think for ourselves, and start looking after ourselves from a very, very young age.
You know, as girls growing up in India, you’re constantly faced with discrimination, and violence, and the cat calls, and people staring at you on streets. While there was all that out there, at home I felt very safe. We had a very safe space at home, so I really grew up enjoying that safe space.
James: What brought you to the work you’re doing now and what renews your faith in it?
Sohini: So I grew up to be quite a militant feminist, you know. In college I did plays which were, you know, on women’s rights. I was talking about even at that time, talking about early marriage and other issues that I’m now 35 years later working on. So I grew up to be with those kinds of thoughts. I did a lot of theater.
And for 10 years I was, you know, I acted in plays on a very ongoing basis. I loved and I still love theater.
And a friend of mine came to me and said would you be interested in working with women in villages to develop some skills and, you know, plays and songs on the rights of the girl child, you know. He belonged to an NGO. I said you know, my dad’s [well?] and I’m sitting here and waiting to go abroad in September and I might as well do that…and I need to do that. Three days a week I would take a bus deep into West Bengal’s villages and work with the women.
And for the first time I came to understand what privilege is all about, you know. I had a very privilege upbringing at that point in time, and when I heard the women talk about the daily struggles, the daily violence that they face as young girls and as women, it came home to me that I grew up differently and there is something in me that I should be sharing with these women.
So when September came, I went back to my parents and said I don’t want to go abroad this year, I probably will go next year. I want to finish my project, and work with women in the villages. They were a little uncertain because there was a lot of money that you have spent doing all these applications, but they were all right with it, so next year I went back to them and I said I don’t want to go abroad at all; I want to work here. This is my life, this is my work, and so that’s how I came to, you know, work. Those women inspired me.
James: You were telling me abut this “Theater of the Oppressed” that you do. Talk me through it?
Sohini: So, you know, we work in the villages, very rural areas, where we have a dedicated group going from village to village to perform a play that’s based on your baseline. It’s based on the contextual analysis that we’ve done on the realities of the village, and particular kind of issue of gender based violence that we have to tackle at that point in time. For example, it could be early marriage of girls in villages.
So we have this theater group who has prepared this play and they perform this play, and at a very critical moment of the play when somebody has to make a decision on something, they stop the performance and they ask the audience to provide–for some of them to come up and act that role out, and provide us with a solution.
So we’ve had district magistrates acting out the role of gender, a young girl who’s about to get married and so what decision does she take. Or we’ve had a school teacher come up and play the role of gender, saying that I’m going to put my father behind jail for getting me married early.
Or we’ve had other young girls who’ve stopped up and said I don’t want to get married. I want to study or I want to do something with my life, so that’s how it plays out. It makes the issue much more real for people to understand.
James: And are you scaling your work through those kind of community participatory events?
Sohini: Yes and no. They are good for working with communities. We are currently working with about half a million adolescents, girls and boys, to a government school system, but in the communities we do a lot of this kind of work, but we also bring people together in dialogues, so you know, village based what we call convergence dialogues.
We do a lot of media. We show theater. We show films. We write–right now I’ve been doing something called picture time, which is this inflatable hall which comes to a village and turns into a five-star film-watching experience with Dolby surround system, and you know, it’s like going to any of the big halls and watching something.
It gets us to a captive audience where we can talk about the issues after we show a film of our choice; and it’s people are sitting there really thinking through the issues that we’re talking to them about. We can also segment the shows. We can get schoolteachers to come or can we just get parents to come, so we are doing all of those things to get to the last mile, really. If India were to become the world you want it to be for girls and women or society as a whole, what would it look like?
If you look at women and girls in India, the number of discriminations and violence they face right from childhood are enormous. Sometimes girls are not allowed to even be born or given birth. If they’re born, they’re given names like(the Hindi word) for “enough” or something which is–so can you imagine a young girl being called, Enough, you know? The family doesn’t want anymore girls.
So it starts with that. Then it goes on to nutrition where the boys get the better nutrition than the girls. The boys are sent to better schools than the girls. And the moment you hit puberty, the girls are taken off school because parents are concerned abut their safety on their way to school.
Even if you’re allowed to let’s say, continue in school, you’re sometimes getting married at 15, 16, 17, and then if you get married and if you have children earlier, there’s a whole cycle of violence. And there’s a whole cycle of domestic violence that young girls who are married are facing, and they’re not at all equipped to deal with that, so a lot of vulnerabilities come through.
When women want to join the workforce, there is suspicion from home. You know, the moment a woman is stepping out, who are you going with, who are you seeing, why are you coming home late, who are you–what makes you go to work every day? So that’s another set of things that they have to deal with. And when they earn the money, sometimes the money is not there.
An ideal world for us is to see a complete flip, to see a culture change happen in the broadest possible way, where women are treated as equals. That’s all we’re asking for, you know, but there’s gender parity at home, in society, in schools, in workplaces. Women do not have to think about violence on their way to work or at the workplace, that women can continue to do and reach their fullest potential the way they want to do it. It’s all about choices, about making your own choices and making your own oppor–and creating your own opportunities in life. Who are the stakeholders who keep that status quo in place and what are the incentives for them to keep things as they are?
Sohini: It’s gender norms. It comes from patriarchy. It’s gender norms. It’s the way women and men perceive each other in society. And the stakeholders are both women and men, more girls than boys. We believe that if we have to stop or reduce or prevent this kind of situations, we need to talk to men and boys as much as we need to talk to women and girls.
James: So that gender norm is a belief that there’s a gender superiority?
Sohini: Yes. The men are superior in every way than women in society. And women have to deal with all of that and do more to kind of rise to the situation where things are at parity. And men and boys need to be kind of told that right from a young age, so when we work with adolescent boys and girls at a very young age, we ask boys questions about would you have shame sharing in the house work that your sister does or your mother does? Would you be willing to have your life partner do a job outside the home? Would you be interested in taking care of your younger siblings?
And when the answer is yes, that’s when young boys step up and realize that they also have a role to play in this. There’s a reason behind a current status quo. So one thing you’re offering is that the boy child is a source of social security for the parents. And that’s economic. So what are the other incentives keeping that status quo in place?
It’s girls not being able to complete education and compete in the job market. So if you allow girls to complete education, delay of marriage, learn a skill, you know, you are actually empowering family after family to be able to get themselves out of poverty. People are not seeing that because girls do not get to complete education. Girls get married early. Girls cannot find, you know, jobs which are at par with boys, so you have to constantly work on redirecting these beliefs, showing the community that this is possible, you know.
And you know, we work with half a million adolescents and often we see that when we talk to girls about gender, and rights and equality, the first thing they do is notice things around them. You know, we have this wonderful girl in a very small village in [Jupi?]. She went to a Breakthrough training and she woke up and said my village is called [Karamo?] which means garbage. I cannot have my village called garbage.
She sent a petition saying I want the name changed to [inaudible], which means beautiful city, beautiful town. She sent this petition to the block administrator. She worked with the head of the village. And the petition is now on the process of Karamo being transferred into [inaudible]. That is the kind of active citizenship that comes out often from people if you give them just a little vision of what is possible.
So if you have a group of people start thinking abut society, community, village, country, can you see the revolution that it can happen? It will, it’s just not mean for a little family out there. It’s actually meant for the entire village, the entire nation.
James: So what are the programs they’re participating in and what are the benefits that they’re receiving?
Sohini: So we have a school based curriculum, called Game of Stars, which has been validated by J-PAL. It’s a two year curriculum in school, in government schools, which teaches you about negotiation skills, which teaches you how to have difficult conversations at home, it builds up agency and it also helps you recognize gender-based violence in your own life and how to kind of take an action on them.
We do this curriculum within school as well as in community for girls who are dropouts from school. And the school is for good boys and girls, so that’s, you know, and we’ve seen that after 2-1/2 years of very intensive delivery of this curriculum, there is significant change in the attitudes as well as behaviors, not only among girls, but also among boys. So that’s one of the things that we are doing.
The second thing is that we’re bringing the community together to look at the value of girls in society, so we work with parents, we work with teachers, we work with the influencers in the village, bringing them together in a kind of convergence meeting with the community mobilization to make them understand the value of girls. And there has been numerous occasions where they have taken actions to stop their girls from getting married early or bringing in that change in sociey.
We also have a peer educators program, so girls who are showing leadership qualities, we are kind of bringing them together as leaders in society so that other adolescents will have a role model to look up to. Also, these young girls and boys will be a kind of link between the government, the school and the community, so we are giving them trainings on how to use social media or even how to sometimes carry on a campaign, or how to understand and find out about government schemes in villages so they can bring those messages back to their communities.
James: How are you engaging boys and men and why?
Sohini: So Breakthrough has always believed right from the beginning that if we want to stop gender based violence or violence against women and girls, we have to talk to boys and men because without them, this thing is not going to happen. So we had, you know, a campaign called Bell Bajao/Ring the Bell, where we asked men and boys to stop violence, domestic violence really by just taking a simple action like ring the bell.
So men from all over the world wrote to us that we’ve taken action. You know, sometimes it was like a group of boys would watch television in a neighbor’s home in the evening just to stop him from coming home and beating his wife up. Also Patrick Stewart, who talked about domestic violence that he has seen and how he used to place himself between the — between his father and his mother to stop that act of violence.
So [inaudible] men to normal everyday people have taken action on that, so much so that Bell Bajao actually became a kind of term for taking action, you know, so we’ve seen that from Bell Bajao. And now when we are working very intensely with the young boys in schools and colleges, we see their attitudes changing. We see them looking at women in a much more different way, you know.
At one point we had actually this group of girls in a village who’d stopped going to school because they were a group of boys who were calling them names, and catcalling and all of those couple of things. We made the two groups sit together and said look, what you are indulging in is something you think is a pass time, but what it is actually doing to the girls is life threatening. And there was dialogue and the boys said we never realized; we thought this was fun and we never thought it was demeaning to the girl or that she was being taken off school and made to sit at home because of me.
So adolescents need who have those dialogues, how are you going to understand each other’s perspectives — and it’s important to do that. What is a measured change in attitude and behavior, what do you actually see as a result?
So we have, you know, a kind of 12-steps questions on attitude and 18 questions in behavior. So we are looking at things like whether you, as I just said, you know, it’s looking at change — it’s looking at actions like would you share your household chores with your sister? Would you look after your youngest sibling? Would you be willing to accompany your sister to school? Would you like your sister to go to the same school as you are? You know, do a range of questions like would you actually allow your, you know, partner to work?
Would you be okay having her contribute to family income? So there are a range of those questions which actually measure a change in attitude as well as behavior. In our programs, we’re working for two large outcomes: One is to help girls add more years to their education or at least complete secondary education. And to delay the age of marriage. Those are our medium term, medium term outcomes. Our larger outcome of course is to see a complete change in gender norms that makes violence against women and girls unacceptable in the long run.
James: This work involves some really young people who have gone through some hard things. What’s the most heartbreaking thing you’ve seen on the job?
Sohini: It’s the, it’s a place when a girl gets to where she has no dreams or aspirations in life, where when you ask her what do you want to be, she has no answer. You know, we’ve reduced our girls to that kind of a state where
James: Almost to apathy.
Sohini: Yeah, there’s you know, she doesn’t have anything to look forward to. That’s the worst thing that you can do to a human being.
JAMES: Do you see that frequently?
Sohini: We see that very frequently. We see that so frequently that one of the things that we want to do is really lay out positive difference. You know, bring in role models who actually have done it, who want to kind of lay the curriculum with a layer of aspirations and dreams for girls because without dreams and aspirations, who are we?
James: I imagine you also see violence.
Sohini: I didn’t want to mention it because it is painful. You see violence that indescribable at all times. You see violence, which actually is intersectional, so if a girl is Dalit, if a girl is poor, if you know, there is–the violence increases. The violence increases with every layer being taken away,
James: So in the midst of that, you seem like a joy-able person, the closer you get to this kind of hardship that the girls face, the apathy you’re talking about…you talked about your own life experience coming from relative privilege. And you’ve chosen to get proximal to the youth who did not come from that circumstance. I just wonder as you’ve come to know the world, it’s beautiful, but it’s also filled with moments of doubt, and darkness, and violence and depression. How do you continue to love it still?
Sohini: I have my days when I believe that nothing will be possible, but when you see small sparks of change, when you see people, when you see the women, you know, with a little bit of help coming up on their own, then you feel and you want to believe that change is possible. It’s going to come, it’s on its way. And that keeps us alive. You know, stories of young girls in villages who wanted to play a game of tag, you know, and they didn’t have any fields located to them, the fees were taken up by boys playing football…and the head of the village said no girls are going to go out of my village on game matches because it’s not safe for them.
So these girls went–these two girls when through this training in our schools in Haryana, which is one of the most gender regressive schools in the whole country, and they said why don’t we call the head of the village to school and have a conversation with him, so they called him over. They sat him down and with the Breakthrough facilitators they said we want to play, please make it possible for us.
So after you know, a back and forth and a long dialogue, the head of the village said okay, I will allocate a field near the school for you to play and practice, and I myself will go with you to accompany you on all of the matches. So the girls go, they win tournaments. They come back, the whole village is celebrating. So that’s when you believe that this is possible. You know, you have to be at at, but it’s possible for you to do it.
James: And are there enough of those moments?
Sohini: There are many of those moments, you know, as I see it. The moment you give a little bit of, how should I say, a little of something to hold onto for the girl, and even the boys, they are taking action for their entire community. They are actually, you’re actually building active citizenship.
James: So Breakthrough has made progress in some of the key aims around gender based violence reduction or changing attitudes and behavior — what’s not working? What’s a rational technique that you’re working at this point? Something that you wish you could accomplish but it’s been too difficult?
Sohini: It’s this whole feeling of sense of impunity that there is about violence against women and girls, people who perpetrate in our country at least, who think they can get away with it. And I cannot really do much about it because the systems are not responding to that. That’s a pain point. That’s a frustration. We want the government to do much more to address violence against women and girls, and it’s just not being prioritized, so that’s one of the things that are not working.
James: Globally, we’ve had the MeToo movement raising up women’s voices so they can speak out, and I’d assume that’s doing something on this issue of impunity, when people feel at least publicly that they might be brought under question.
Sohini: There is.
James: How is that affecting the work in India or do you work in the US as well?
Sohini: It is, there is a lot more awareness, there’s a lot more willingness from people to listen at least to the stories of not, you know, there is a trend of not believing women. I think that trend is getting over, so we are trying to kind of believe women now much more.
But more empathy and more deep listening is required. For organizations, you need to put in place a solid system where you are listening to the voices of survivors. You’re building your policies by listening to the voices of survivors. You are taking into account what women have to say about building those policies. You are talking much more about consent, you know…in the US also we are talking much more about consent.
I think we need to peel it down so that everybody understands what is consent. There is also a huge, huge movement towards deep listening and empathy. That I can not tell you how much that is needed because there is a whole lot of angst, a whole lot of trauma that women have gone through, and that needs to bubbled up so that there is a cleansing process that can happen.
So there are people who are doing it. There are organizations who are trying to do that. We are trying to do that in our own way by building your understanding of what is consent, building your understanding of why do you need to make it important.
James: You’re in a unique position because you work in both the US and India in the midst of this global inflection around MeToo. How are you seeing that move expressed differently in both of those contexts?
Sohini: You know, in India it has been–in the US, you know, heads have rolled so to say, you know. People have taken action, industries have taken action. Unfortunately, in India it’s not like that. The silence from industries, the silence from, let’s say even the film industry in India is completely deafening. It’s nobody, not a single man of a big stature has, you know, has been accused because the industry has worked to silence all the voices.
And the silence from men is very problematic. It again makes it a woman’s issue. You know, they’re not talking because it’s not something we need to worry about. It’s a women’s issue, so yes, there has been a lot of conversations, but there has been a lot of inaction as well. In the wake of MeToo, we had many corporate organizations scrambling to be trained on sexual harassment issues at workplace
So if you look at the McKinsey Power of Parity report in 2017 for India, it says that if 69% of Indian women joined the workforce, then by 2025 you would add $700 billion to India’s GDP.
James: Exactly.
Sohini: That is what we are talking about. And the report recognizes that if you do not gender parity at home, you’re not going to have gender parity at the workplace, and then there will be the gap where women will fall through the workforce. That is what should make you put your dollars in where women and girls are concerned.
