Soukhya (Well-Being) to Confront Alcohol-Based Violence
Alcohol consumption is seen across classes and geographies in India. It is increasing even among the poor in slums despite their lower incomes, leading to impoverishment of families and lack of safety for women and children. It is also seen to lead to gender-based violence (GBV), one of the country’s pervasive social problems, in which over 80% of GBV cases can be attributed to alcohol.
APSA’s work with urban poor communities encompasses addressing gender inequality with the aim to create safe spaces for women, young girls and children in which they can be free of fear of domestic or family violence and have access to education, training and livelihood opportunities. In order to achieve this, the Soukhya project was initiated in 2013 by APSA in collaboration with the St. John’s (Hospital) Research Institute to empower women from urban slums to recognize domestic violence (DV) as a gender rights violation and address incidents of DV in family and community with local support. More often than not, women are unable to resist physical abuse from their intimate partner or other family members due to the ‘culture of silence’ enforced on women in Indian society.
The project was implemented in APSA’s Jayanagar working area with 65 SHGs. The SHG project was chosen as the vehicle for piloting the project as it has empowered women both financially and socially, besides increasing members’ self-esteem and confidence in the benefits of collective action. APSA invited 30 SHG members with gender sensitivity and leadership potential to undergo a Training of Trainers (ToT) to address domestic violence in family and community. The ToT used modules to provide the ‘super trainers’ with information on gender rights, gender and sex, domestic violence issues, recognizing signs and addressing DV through counselling, conflict management, building up community-based and state support systems to deal with it. The women were also taught to use a special mobile-based application called ‘mShakti’ to display messages on unacceptability of domestic violence, record incidents of DV survivors and provide information on availability of local support services.
The Super Trainers were further tasked with reaching out to other SHG members, who in turn, would reach out with the training inputs to local community women. This spread effect ensured that the Soukhya project covered more than 3,000 community women in tackling domestic violence in home and family. The Soukhya Super Trainers have themselves addressed more than 150 DV cases (both documented and undocumented).
Although the partnership with SJRI concluded in 2018, APSA is considering rolling out the project to all its working areas, seeing the need to help women and families in general confront alcohol-based violence in the home and community.
