DORA & BOOTS
(Defend Our Rights & Be Brave Women On This Era)
SCORA CIMSA Unsoed
On Saturday, March 14th, 2020, SCORA Unsoed has held an event called DORA & BOOTS in commemoration of International Women’s Day. SCORA Unsoed held this event at MAN 1 Banyumas and it started at 8 AM and finished just by noon. There were 36 students, girls only, that participated in this event. The goal of DORA & BOOTS was to explain to students about gender-based violence in society that most women are unaware of. The number of gender-based violence towards women is rising every year and all women should know about this issue and find a way to avoid and tackle it in order to defend their own rights.
DORA & BOOTS consisted of 3 main sessions, a session with speakers from HRT from SCORP Safana Tashfiya and Sabrina Ayu, a sharing and discussion session about gender-based violence with Girljek.id CEO Aprilia Saskia, and a focus group discussion in which a small group of students discussed with a facilitator from SCORA Unsoed about the goals of DORA & BOOTS. The first session from HRT was about Gender-based Cyber Violence (GCV). In this session, we talked about the prevalence of GCV, many forms of gender-based violence on media platforms that targeted women, the negative effect of it on survivors and society, and how to counter those acts of violence. Most of the students had just found out about these acts of violence through this event, and they were very active to get to know more about it.
The second session was an introduction to Girljek.id by its own CEO, Aprilia Saskia. Girljek.id was founded due to concerns from many women about the risk of sexual harassment that could target them by inappropriate drivers. The CEO also talked about many of her and her colleagues' struggles in developing Girljek.id. After some background stories of Girljek.id, we continued with Aprilia’s thoughts about women’s role in society and daily life which quite inspired most of the students in this event.
The last session of this event was a forum group discussion in which each group consisted of a small group of students and a facilitator from CIMSA Unsoed. Firstly, the facilitators explained to them more about gender-based violence. After the explanation, they discussed how to counter it in the meantime. Some of the students were active in getting to know more and even shared their own experiences and stories.
From DORA & BOOTS, we concluded that there is still more that needs to be done to raise awareness of the various forms of gender-based violence against women. We also concluded that it is important to change the perspective of women’s role in society and strive for equality so that we can reduce or even wipe out gender-based violence against women.
