Awareness and Dance Therapy Workshop

Sumati Thusoo is a Program and Outreach Officer with Safecity. She is responsible for engaging with the communities and establishing and maintaining partnerships with NGOs and colleges, conducting workshops with colleges and raising awareness regarding sexual violence and providing input for developing appropriate training programmes. She has an M.A. in Women Centred Social Work from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, and a Bachelors in Economics from Delhi University. Her past work has focused on the effects of conflict on access and mobility of women, and her thesis looked at the experiences of Kashmiri women with conflict.

Awareness and Dance Therapy Workshop

On 18th December, Safecity facilitated an awareness cum therapeutic workshop on Sexual Harassment for half a day with adolescent girls associated with the Committee for the Right to Housing (CRH). This workshop was conducted with the help of Gayatree Joshi who is a dance therapist by profession. We integrated the awareness session with dance therapy where the girls wrote about incidents where they had been harassed, shamed and blamed.

The idea behind this integration was to not just crack open the normalised everyday violence but to also do something to heal those cracks, not just with information about the law but also with something other than that.

Towards the end of this workshop, most of the girls said that they felt free and safe in that room. They said that they felt that that they could do anything that they aspire for and there was no societal norms restricting, limiting or stopping them in that room, in that moment.

This momentary empowerment and happiness is something that we, at Safecity, aim to sustain.

Thank you Committee for Right to Housing and Gayatree for making this possible.