Rangamati is one of the favorite tourist places of Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh. Many indigenous women of Rangamati run small and medium enterprise businesses in different tourist spots of Rangamati. They often sell different handicraft goods along with tribal traditional products. It is well known to us that their language, food, and other cultures are different from the plain land people. While running their businesses, indigenous women at tourist spots often face different sorts of violence from the tourists. Verbal abuse, taking photos and using the snaps without indigenous women’s consent, hate speech and defaming them, bullying about their dresses and languages are some of the common sorts of violence they face in their daily lives. The numbers represent themselves: incidents of violence against indigenous women are increasing every year. They face various kinds of violence in their daily lives which generally stay in-presented in mainstream media. Sometimes they don’t know what violence is. They remain silent rather than protest or look for justice. As a result, many indigenous women feel unsafe in their workplaces. Sometimes these women overlook much violence just to run their businesses swiftly as their livelihood comes from these SMEs. However, there are other indigenous people there who don’t have any basic idea about violence against women. With the aim of helping the indigenous women entrepreneurs from violence as well as raising awareness, Tuhin Chakma, one of the resilient youth has initiated a small project at Nirban Nagar, Rangamati Sadar under the SAVE Youth Resilient program. Tuhin believes that awareness campaigns and making them understand the negative impact of violence against women will help them mitigate this sort of violence against them.
In the meantime, of the program, he organized different sorts of training for making the tourist girls understand the concept of violence they are facing namely introduction to the concept of violence, how to mitigate physical violence, verbal abuse, and how to keep documentation of violence, child marriage, and how to take legal actions against all forms of violence and an offline awareness program with the tourists and the local people. For understanding the current situation on 21st September a training on “Introduction to Violence against Women” was held among 20 women shopkeepers at Nirban Nagar, Rangamati Sadar. After the training, a primary survey was also conducted and the three most common problems were selected namely: Verbal abuse by tourists, Child marriage, and physical violence in their daily life and their society. Along with his three volunteers, Tuhin then conducted sessions with these twenty entrepreneurs.
Lastly, in the first week of December, Tuhin organized a campaign with his volunteers for awareness building of violence against indigenous women in Rangamati. He distributed some leaflets regarding women’s safety in tourist places along with emergency help contact. Besides this, he contacted the Officer In-charge (OC) of the Rangamati Sadar thana to take initiative when indigenous women seek help. Now, the indigenous women in Nibran Nagar, Rangamati are more concerned about the violence they face and understand the necessity to protest against the violence whereas when the program started there was not a willingness to protest.
While continuing his program, two of Tuhin’s participants shared their stories of how they have tackled the situation while some tourists were harassing them. One of the indigenous girls Reshmi shared her story, “as usual (Reshmi Chakma) I opened my shop and sited to sell my products. My younger sister was making clothes beside the shop. All of a sudden a tourist group came to my shop and was asking questions how do we make clothes? I was explaining themselves and suddenly I noticed that a member of their tourist group was taking photos of me and my younger sisters. Then I politely told them not to take pictures and delete which were taken. The unknown tourist deletes all the photos in front of me. That is not the end of the story after that another tour of the same group was trying to video recording and then I was a little bit angered when I noticed it. I told loudly I am going to phone the OC to take action against you. After that, on their behalf of them, a tourist said “Didi we are extremely sorry for our crime,”.
Like Reshmi, indigenous women are concerned about their privacy. Moreover, Tuhin also attached some posters in the indigenous women’s shops regarding public awareness about the importance of raising a voice against all forms of violence. The participants understood the necessity of advocacy to solve gender-based violence problems whereas earlier they were reluctant to express their problems. They are getting conscious about their rights as an individual. Public awareness was raised on violence against indigenous women in the project area. Now the capacity to take action is built up among the target group.