Dark Flowers: The Story of Self-immolation in Afghanistan

Various NGOs and women's associations are trying to assist victims of gender-based violence by providing specialized training to medical staff working with female patients, establishing counseling services for traumatized women, and training for defence lawyers representing female victims of domestic abuse. However, many of these efforts focus on assisting women after they have either attempted suicide or have endured violence and trauma for months, even years. HAWCA is intending to create and distribute a multimedia prevention kit in three languages (Dari, Pashto and English) for vulnerable and abused women who may be contemplating suicide by self-immolation. This multimedia kit is essentially proactive in the sense that it will attempt to reach out to abused women who feel that they have no alternative but to commit suicide or to protest against their abuse by burning themselves.

HAWCA envisions multiple platforms of delivery for its multimedia project in order to reach all spheres of Afghan society. The multimedia project will be distributed in various formats such as DVDs, CDs, QuickTime, WAVE Audio, FLV and MPEG-4. With such a diverse range of formats, educators can use a DVD in the classroom; an NGO can play a CD on their laptop in the field or screen the project during workshops; women's associations can stream a QuickTime movie on their websites and Youtube or as a podcast download; women resource centers and legal aid centers can hand-out multimedia kits containing all of the above to the public. In addition, the community-based strategy will include plans to broadcast the multimedia project on Afghan radio and television stations.

Category:

Nonprofits & Activism

Tags:

• HAWCA
• women rights
• self-immolation
• Afghanistan
• Herat
• VAW
• violence against women
• Herat Province
• Women's rights