Championing Girls’ Rights
This piece takes a look at how Aahung has organized interactive theatrical performances in rural communities as a means of infotainment. The organization has been engaging and enthralling audiences on topics of gender, family planning, child early marriage since many years with a special focus on keeping girls in school.
“Through the art of storytelling, we can preserve our heritage, educate future generations, and inspire change.”
― Philipp Humm
There is great power in a good story. It gives us an opportunity to learn from another person’s experience and it can shape, strengthen or challenge our opinions and values. When a story catches our attention and engages us, we are more likely to absorb the message and meaning within it than if the same message was presented simply in facts and figures.
Street theatre is the name given to a form of theatrical performance in public spaces without a specific paying audience. In Pakistan it has played an important role in rural communities as a source of entertainment. Street theatre sprang from the assumption that everyone can be involved in the fight against oppression and dictatorship, and express themselves with creativity without having undergone formal training.
Aahung, a Karachi-based NGO that advocates for sexual and reproductive health and rights in Pakistan, has taken to this form of awareness-raising into many of the rural and peri-urban communities it has worked in. In May this year, Aahung, with the support of ECN, gathered audiences in Khairpur, Sindh and engaged a theatre troupe to perform a play showing a girl’s struggle and triumph against her early and forced married. The play threw light on the cross-cutting themes of gender inequality, the need for contraception and family planning information, as well as gender-based domestic violence which girls are more susceptible to when they marry early. Aahung also organized focus group discussions before and after the performance to assess the impact made.
“After watching this show, I have understood how unfair I have been to my daughter as well as my daughter-in-law, I think it is time to change my attitude. It is not in a woman’s control to give birth to a boy or a girl,” says Rukhsana, a 42 year-old resident of Khairpur who watched the performance.
Pakistan is home to nearly 19 million child brides where 1 in 6 young women were married before the age of 18 and nearly half of these child brides have given birth before turning 18 as well[1]. Though it is rooted in gender inequality and the belief that girls and women are inferior to boys and men, its drivers vary between communities and it looks different across – and within – regions and countries.
Sana was only 13 years old when her family decided to get her married to a 20 year old boy. But Sana had different ambitions- she wanted to train to become a beautician and was also quite talented. She tried to convince her mother but to no avail. She was too afraid of her father to address him directly. One day, by chance, a street performance happened near her home. It got the parents thinking about the decision to marry their daughter early. After much effort on Sana’s part, the family finally decided to stop Sana’s marriage and allowed her to continue her education and pursue her desire to work at a salon. Through the provision of critical SRHR information to the family on early age marriage consequences, not only was Sana empowered to freely choose her future path, the entire family also began to change their mindset towards the future generation of young girls in their family.
[1] UNICEF data 2018 https://www.unicef.org/pakistan/topics/child-marriage