Gender and Law Fellowship for Lawyers: We have come to the end of two years of Gender and Law fellowship for young lawyers in Karnataka, which was done in partnership with Global Rights: partners for justice. The program aimed at encouraging young lawyers from districts to take up gender sensitive, human rights lawyering. We have presently 19 lawyers form 14 districts offering legal help for women in crisis.  

Capacity Building of Federations on violence against women: HHS are now working with 8 federations to equip them to respond to any instance of rights violation of women from gender sensitive and women’s centred perspective. The specific focus of the training has been to enhance their capacities on rights, law and gender within the context of addressing violence against women.  The federations and lawyers from the Fellowship programme of the past two years have been able to work together on cases of violence against women, creating a local resource for women in the area.

We are taking forward further capacity building efforts this year on issues of violence against women of selected federations from the last year as well as working with new federations to widen outreach. Considering there is a demand from federations for audio and visual materials on VAW issues we will generate appropriate communication aids and resource materials.

Implementation of the Protection of Women form Domestic Violence Act 2005: Towards this:

a) Advocacy with the State institutions for effective implementation of law: HHS will intensify efforts for effective implementation and will involve and encourage federations to be a part of this process.

b) Awareness about the new law: Our work will focus on building awareness amongst women at the districts through the federations.

c) Survey on services and support available for women facing violence in the State: A survey on services available for women facing violence such as counseling centres, short stay homes and legal aid at the districts is being done to reflect the ground reality.

E catalogue: Streamlining resources at HHS: Ten years of capacity building activities by HHS has resulted in perspectives, concepts and analysis on women's rights and law in the form of modules, charts, primers, brochures, fliers etc. HHS has a library of 1,700 books on gender, rights and law. Various sanghas and federations, NGO’s, Government departments, law students and others have used these resources. We are focusing on streamlining resources available with us in our effort towards building HHS as a resource center on women’s rights.

Blog for young feminists: HHS has initiated a blog called Ultraviolet at http://www.youngfeminists.wordpress.com/ This is a platform  for young people to identify and engage with feminist politics.  The blog has contributors who write on various issues of concern regularly.

Resources

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