16 Days of Activism is an international campaign that runs from 25 November to 10 December to address violence against women and girls around the world. This year, Dr Shruti Kapoor, Founder of Sayfty in partnership with UN Women, The United Nations Inter-Agency Network on Youth Development Working Group on Youth and Gender Equality and other key partnering organizations organized 16 self-defense workshops in 16 countries for young women to empower them with basic self-defense skills to keep them safer from gender-based violence. “For young women, sexual abuse and harassment/eve teasing is...

The #16DaysofActivism starts on 25 Nov and the theme is Gender Based Violence. Recently I got a chance to interact with Sunny Angel, a survivor, finalist for the Heroine of the Year Award 2017, and author of WINGS. Sunny sent me the book WINGS and I loved it, and I think that it's a very interesting book for young people. The book is a memoir, a true story, which explores different aspects of gender-based violence, from marital rape, to stalking, to emotional abuse, to honor abuse, to drugs and suicide, to forced marriage, to domestic violence, to victim blaming and a lot more. It's a very...

I woke up to Twitter yesterday to many tweets on #MeToo from people I know, and all of them were sharing their assault stories. The #MeToo movement was started by actress Alyssa Milano, and the #MeToo hashtag has been used over 200,00 times, according to the BBC. It also went viral on other social media, like Facebook and Instagram. People have used it as a social microphone to voice their sexual harassment stories, rape stories, stories about cat calls and violence at work, and even abuse stories. The thing is that so many people tweeting about it, gives us an idea how sexual assault is...

#ConsentBeforeColors is a hashtag which talks about the perils of being forced to play Holi and soon people used it to talk about sexual harassment that women face on this day. Holi is the festival of colors celebrated in India, Nepal, Mauritius and while I don't really know the religious belief behind this festival but on this day, it is a free-for-all carnival of colors where we play, chase and color each other with dry powder and colored water, with some carrying water guns and colored water-filled balloons for a friendly water fight. Holi is a great, beautiful, and happy festival where...