Human Rights Fellowship: Empowering girls in India, preventing sex trafficking

When Garima Sharma set off to teach human rights education to girls in Forbesganj, India, the last thing she expected to do was lead a street protest.  One day in class, however, her students asked her to do just that. 

Sharma was holding a session on street harassment, and a few days before she had talked to the girls about a street protest in Delhi. “These girls are harassed on the street all the time, and so they said to me, ‘We should protest too because harassment is such a problem here!’” So Sharma and the girls planned a protest.

This was the first protest Forbesganj, a small town in the state of Bihar, had ever seen, so Sharma and her students conducted meetings to convince their parents that the endeavor was a good idea. Once the adults were on board, Sharma and her students, along with 80 parents and community members, took to the streets.  “It was really successful,” she says, only a hint of surprise in her voice, “We had so much fun.”

The protest was one of many unexpected highlights during Sharma’s summer as a Human Rights Fellow.  As one of four students sponsored by the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society, Sharma spent eight weeks working with the NGO Apne Aap: Women Worldwide.  As a part of the organization’s outreach program, she conducted daily discussions for adolescent girls in the community, primarily those at risk of being trafficked. Her classes focused on confidence building, leadership development, and human rights education in the hopes of empowering the girls to recognize their own rights and share their knowledge with the community. 

Sharma was introduced to human rights education while taking a class called Gender, Equality and Development at Stanford.  Inspired to work for gender equality, she interned with the National Human Rights Commission of India the following summer, where she quickly understood the power of education in protecting rights. 

“The most important learning I drew from my experiences was that violations of human rights had, at their root, a deep ignorance of why they were wrong,” she said. Working with Apne Aap, Sharma hoped to empower the girls of Forbesganj to stand up for their own rights. 

This turned out to be less straightforward than Sharma had expected.  While developing her curriculum, she consulted human rights scholar Monisha Bajaj at Columbia University. Professor Bajaj cautioned Sharma not to push her own beliefs on her students.  “I learned that you don’t want to lead them into what you believe,” Sharma says, “but rather to solicit what their beliefs are.”

To better achieve this, Sharma focused on storytelling.  She would present a hypothetical situation to the girls—say, a twelve-year-old friend who confides she wants to get married—and ask them what they would do.  According to Sharma, many Indians overtly oppose social inequality but do not yet apply that opposition to their actions; they may state, for example, that girls are equal to boys, but still insist that their daughters wait on their sons at home.

By telling stories rather than asking direct questions, Sharma challenged her students to consider what it meant for them to have the same rights as boys.  She let them debate their answers among themselves, giving them valuable practice for explaining their positions outside the classroom.  Often, the girls came to the conclusions she hoped for, but Sharma also had to accept that occasionally she and her students weren’t on the same page.  “I used to have fairly black and white opinions, but being at Stanford has taught me that there is a gray area. You can’t always characterize things as right or wrong, and this really helped me in my teaching.”

Sharma also found valuable lessons in how her students supported each other. “Bad things would happen to these girls,” she explains, “but they never pitied each other. They were some of the most compassionate people I’ve ever met, but instead of saying, “Oh, I’m sorry!” they would brainstorm solutions to one another’s problems.” Sharma says her students helped her understand the futility of trying to “save” someone from their circumstances.  “If they can feel your pity,” she says, “you won’t get anywhere. The best way to help is to be on equal footing.”

Sharma intends to take use these lessons as she moves forward with her thesis in Public Policy.  She plans to study the incentives for educating young girls in India and examine why parents often choose to marry their daughters off rather than send them to school.  She hopes to return to Forbesganj in the near future to continue working with the girls and to begin educating parents as well.  

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Jessica Asperger  graduated Stanford in 2013 with a degree in Philosophy and Literature. She continues as a graduate student at Stanford studying Iberian and Latin American Literature.  She wrote an honors thesis about the ethics of volunteer tourism and service abroad with the Ethics in Society program.

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Apply for a Human Rights Fellowship!

Do you have a passion for human rights?  Are you interested in working with human rights organizations, government agencies, NGOs, or international organizations, both here and abroad? In partnership with the Program on Human Rights, the Center is proud to offer up to three summer Human Rights Fellowships for the summer of 2014. These fellowships, which are offered only to Stanford undergraduates, are intended to enable students to make a valuable contribution to human rights theory and practice. Offered to rising sophomores, juniors and seniors, grants of up to $5,000 each will be given to four undergraduates who commit to working on human rights issues fulltime for a minimum of 8 weeks.  It is our hope that these fellowships will encourage students to build human rights work into their future careers.

Please note that there are a number of steps that you must take to prepare yourself to be competitive for the fellowship. Review the FAQs and the timeline below to make sure you are aware of the requirements and can plan accordingly. Please submit your application in hard copy to Jeff Hawthorne at the Haas Center for Public Service by 4:30pm on December 9, 2013.