Durga’s programme, Women at Work, has a strong focus on ensuring deterrence of harassment and ensuring safe, nurturing and enabling workplaces.
We enable men and boys to be more sensitive and empathetic about women’s issues. Our work is centered around making men realize their role as active allies to the women they encounter everyday.
Durga works with systemic structures to strengthen access for redressal and justice in workspaces.
Durga’s attempts are constantly towards creating the safest streets in the city and to also see what a visualization of that will be. We aim to give more women the confidence to occupy public spaces and claim their rights over them.
Our core work started with experiences of women and how we are unable to safely occupy public and workspaces to be ourselves and thrive. As an organization we use theatre-based tools and games to provide an experiential learning process for women and girls who are either public space occupiers, or are workers in these spaces. Through our work, women and girls are able to understand patriarchy, separate their rights from responsibilities, understand human rights, address mental health issues, dissect power, and therefore know how to address sexual harassment and violence, and hold their ground.
An important aspect of everything we do is to build a sense of community for them – a safe non-judgmental space called Voice where they come together to genuinely Be Together!
Durga will help you in creating a safe, healthy, inclusive workspace with aware employees, fewer/no incidents of sexual harassment and a higher job satisfaction through a 12 month long engagement.
Our efforts at Durga have consciously been to shift narratives of Gender-based Violence and move the responsibility from the survivor and victim to the environment, men who come with privileges and the system. In this effort, we feel it’s absolutely essential for us to work with men who occupy all the public and workspaces with authority. Through different programmes here we work closely with men to understand their historic privileges, how they should take a step back to enable women to occupy those spaces, and how it’s important for them to be allies on the issue of Gender Justice. Mental health support is also critical here for a few of the communities we work with e.g.: Boys in Observation Homes and Care Leavers.
We create a spirit of responsibility by navigating on this issue carefully – without antagonizing, but by instilling allyship!
We realize that working with women and men alone is insufficient since the issue of violence perpetuates because of a certain attitude of neglect from the system. As a conscious effort, while we build resilience and responsibilities in women and men to address sexual crimes, we also parallelly work with systemic structures like the Local Complaints Committees for Sexual crimes at the workspace, The One Stop Crisis Centres for severe crimes, and Internal Committees to strengthen access for redressal and justice in workspaces.
We are also trying to influence the system to build mechanisms to mandatorily have certain practices, and include gender in academic curricula; so that youth build their thinking of leadership and growth, keeping gender as a key lens.
When everyone plays their role, a space can actually be built to help women and girls not just navigate through, but to genuinely occupy and thrive in these spaces. For this, we feel we have to specifically imagine and build such spaces. Our attempts are constantly towards creating the safest streets in the city and to also see what a visualization of that will be. Towards this we work constantly to audit public spaces and refer blackspots to relevant authorities to correct; we have been working with public transport for a decade now on make them safe and accessible for women and girls, and we are also working with newer partners like Uber and Pindrop to ensure that their work will contribute to safe streets as well. An effort worth mentioning here is our DARE programme that builds Active Bystanders in streets in the city so that there is always someone who can support when there is an issue of sexual crime.