There’s a story that Kirthi Jayakumar likes to share about how she as a child would dream of a world where everyone would forget about fighting and sit together to have muffins. “Muffins were the food of choice then,” she laughs. Muffins may or may not be Kirthi’s food of choice now, but that dream of creating a more peaceful world has remained the same. Born in Bengaluru, Kirthi Jayakumar is a gender and peace activist, who founded the Red Elephant Foundation, coded an app called Saahas for survivors of gender-based violence, and created the Gender Security Project.
As the waves of a relentless pandemic continue to wash over our lives, the full effect of a year of lockdowns and heightened anxiety may only be known years later. Yet, one thing is already apparent — Covid-19 has had a gendered impact. “This is because fundamentally we have a gender unequal social set-up to start with,” Kirthi says. “In terms of socio-cultural impacts, data and research show an upsurge in instances of domestic and gender-based violence, number of child marriages, the increased burden of domestic work with professional work, and the heavy burdens of caregiving. I’d say that the pandemic has, overall, set the global women’s movement back immensely.”
Stuck in a bad situation
In Karnataka, even before the pandemic, data from the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) shows that the percentage of married women who reported facing physical or sexual violence from a spouse doubled from 20.6% five years ago to 44.4% in 2019-20. This surge in gender-based violence was to be “expected,” Kirthi adds. “The lockdowns meant that certain services were allowed to operate as essential services, and more often than not, these services excluded specific forms of support for survivors of sexual and gender-based violence. The fear of a pandemic kept more women in abusive situations, as leaving home was not an easy option. It never is, of course, but for those who wanted to make that decision, not having anywhere to go and fearing exposure to the virus at a shelter kept that decision from manifesting.”
The National Commission of Women (NCW) reported that it received 13,410 complaints, the largest such rise in a decade, between March and September 2020, including 4,350 cases of domestic violence. Yet, numbers, dark and swirling as they are, often don’t show the intangible, invisible factors of the resilience of survivors who show up to tell their stories of courage, depth, and humanity. The pandemic has foisted unimagined stress, but it has also brought to the fore the capacity for resilience. “I don’t know where I find resilience, honestly. Some days I find it; some days, I don’t. It looks different each day. Some days, it looks like scrolling through memes, some days lying in bed and wondering what life on Jupiter might look like, and some days brewing extra tea and working harder. But my focus and commitment to supporting survivors and train bystanders remain the same,” Kirthi says.
Changing narratives
The Gender Security Project that Kirthi started in 2020 is an example of that resilience. Kirthi says that the Gender Security Project works at the cross-section of gender, peace, security, transitional justice, and feminist foreign policy through research, analysis, and documentation. “The aim is to focus on narratives within these domains from what is called ‘the Global South,’ that is, countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Pacific Islands.’”
The Red Elephant Foundation is another initiative that builds on storytelling workshops, working with local communities for peace education. Their workshops start from the core idea of peace being a process that begins from within — empathy, respect for diversity, or cultivating the value of mutual trust and tolerance.
Finding help in abusive situations is often difficult and nightmarish, a fact that forced Kirthi to create Saahas. The app offers survivors access to more than 40,000 organisations that provide medical services, legal support, shelter, and more. Saahas has already impacted more than 8,000 survivors and is now available in more than six languages.
Kirthi also opened up her DMs on Twitter last year as a response to the stressors of the pandemic. That led to an avalanche of shares and stories from those in distress, but also abusive DMs from men. “This experience made me understand that there is really no limit to the level of pain humans are capable of causing to humans.” Yet, despite the pain, there’s still that shared dream of a world that doesn’t normalise oppression and hate that keeps Kirthi going. “I was an idealist as a child, and I still am. I haven’t lost faith or hope.” Idealism may clash with the bruising realities of violence, but it can show that care and compassion can spread faster than a virus.