‘Must Bol’: a campaign for the youth
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Led by 22 young people from Delhi, the website is part of a campaign to engage young men to prevent violence against women in India. On the website, young people are urged and motivated to speak up and send in their own videos.
Manish Sharma, a theatre actor, is one of the campaigners and feels strongly for gender equality. “I consider it a duty of each human being to respect the dignity of every individual and their sex and to make this society a freer place to live where there is love and respect, where people are not afraid for each other and of what nature has made them,” he says.
Full of life, Manish, through the Must Bol campaign, wants to stand up for those who are made to feel inferior due to their sexual preferences, and help them lead a normal life. Manish has created simple but powerful monologue based films that question gender norms and stereotypes. One of them is titled, Ladka Ya Ladki (Boy or Girl) which questions whether being a girl really a curse or or whether it is actually harder to be a boy.
Supported by UN Women and Partners for Prevention (P4P), the campaign is a call to young people to examine violence in their lives and speak out against it.
“It was like a week back. I was returning from NFC. It was like 11 in the night. Three drunk guys came to my auto and they tried to pull me out of it. The auto wala (auto driver) took off at that very moment. I have never felt so scared,” says an anonymous lady on the website. The very objective of the website is to recognize violence, to talk about it and to address it.
The campaign also reaches out to those in Delhi, through multiple events, workshops and calls for action across University campuses and public spaces. For example, a Slogan writing competition on how to challenge gender discrimination at Amity University on the outskirts of Delhi on 24 February 2011 attracted many students.
Leveraging the power of social media like web 2.0, facebook and twitter, the campaign explores the realities of how dominant gender norms create restrictive situations and invite young people to join the dialogue in an effort to change the situation.
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