At this year's SVRI Forum, we hosted two powerful sessions examining how violence against girls operates as a deliberate political tool to silence and oppress—and how resistance to it is both necessary and transformative.
October 23🔥 How violence is intrinsically linked to the spark, and site, of girls' resistance and the role politicization can play in violence prevention and response efforts.
This session presented insights from our research on Stories of Girls Resistance. Some key themes and takeaways:
Everyday, everywhere, girls are resisting. In families, homes, schools, and streets, girls are surviving violence and finding ways to organize, defy, and push back. Girls have been at the forefront of every movement, past and present.
To Be a Girl is to Resist: To be a girl means contending with systems of power every day. From a young age, girls are resisting—both in big and small ways. It's against the constant questioning and threats to their very existence that girls persist in resistance.
Redefining & Politicizing Resistance: Girls are defining resistance so broadly that it defies easy categorization. Yet, it is always political, connected to power. When girls begin to act with an awareness of the world around them, a process of politicization begins that reshapes and deepens their resistance. Girls are actively creating new languages of resistance, developing disruptive tactics, and envisioning blueprints for systemic change.
The Undermining of Girls' Contributions: Despite their pivotal roles, their contributions are often made invisible, co-opted, overlooked, and undervalued. Even within social justice movements, girls' insights, strategies, and leadership are systematically undermined. Girls are often treated as mere beneficiaries of activism rather than thinkers and organizers behind transformational shifts.
Resistance as a Pathway to Liberation: Resistance is not and has never been the end goal. Its purpose is to mobilize us to rise up and move toward liberation, reclaiming our right to dream and build worlds that affirm life.
October 24 🔥 Finding the Fighter: Political Voice as Resistance for Girls & Women.
In partnership with the Politics of Sexual Violence Initiative, we highlighted the power of storytelling to inform and transform policies and programs.
Anchored around two recent releases: Stories of Girls’ Resistance, the largest oral history collection on girls' resistance, and The Garret (on narrative captivity); this event featured performances, readings, and presentations by activists, researchers, and artists that showcased how research shaped into compelling nonfiction becomes a powerful tool for shifting dominant narratives and mobilizing movements.
Some key takeaways and messages from speakers
Stories as Tools of Accountability and Dignity. "'Data' and 'concepts' and all these 'frameworks' are often abstract mechanisms that dehumanize us. Reducing, generalizing, and containing the vastness of what being human is to numbers, codes, and measures. Stories challenge us to engage in life, in being accountable to each other, and center our full dignity.
So why are stories rejected, ignored, and dismissed? This is exactly by design.
The only data that can tell us how systems impact people, how policies impact people, how systems of oppression impact people, are their stories… Stories are the core of life—they are the past, present, and future memories that, woven together, make up the world." Jody Myrum
Articulating A Political Voice
"A political voice is the ability to understand and articulate how we are part of the global whole and the privileges and limitations that are thrown on us." – Zukiswa Wanner
Acknowledging Sacrifices of Using Our Political Voice.
"The strongest political voices often have to sacrifice something for principles. Minimally loss of an income, 'respectability' or at worst, lives because one is seen as problematic and a challenge to the status quo. With this being said, may we never lose our political voice but equally when we use it, may it be in service to humanity." – Zukiswa Wanner
The Clarity of Political Voice.
"My political clarity and unwavering firmness that my people and I will reclaim what is ours are the cornerstone of my political voice. As a Palestinian, I'm fighting for my right to merely exist, to reclaim my right to liberation and self-determination, to hold to my lineage, and return with my grandmother and my children to the land and water stolen from us" – Sandie Hanna.
Storytelling as Liberation & Community-Building
"Writing gives me agency over my body and its lived experiences. I get to center myself in the narrative over the state and systems. I learned how to build a strong community through being vulnerable in my writing and in my walk. Through this connection, I was building community. And with community, there was less isolation." – D'Lo
Subjectivity & Voice as a Form of Resistance
The question of neutrality was one of the earliest points of disconnect I encountered, in the academy, development, and policy, that I could never reconcile with an evident truth: neither intellectual curiosity nor humanitarian intent is inherently neutral.
"In research, objectivity is the impossible demand made of marginalized communities whose embedded analyses are a threat. Political voice eliminates a needs assessment it is not defined in opposition but anchored in an alternative it defies capture, again and again it is an articulation that creates a reverberation in the bodies of the besieged." – Nimmi Gowranathan
This space was a call to harness the power of our stories!
It invites us to think about all of us and the power within us – how are we using our stories and the stories we hold to shape action, to shape meaning, to create change in all of the ways that we can?
Acknowledgments: These events featured activists, artists, and researchers, including D'L, Zukiswa Wanner, Nimmi Gowrinathan, Jody Myrum, Sandie Hanna, and more!
Comments