Mother, daughter, sister, wife—these are just some roles a woman plays in her life. But if you separate the relation they share with you, how do you see them? Many societies around the world prefer to see women the way they want them to be, and not how they are. And before one can realise, this psyche snowballs into one of entitlement and objectification, sowing the seeds of human trafficking, female child abuse, molestation, rape, etc.
It is these issues that The Missing Public Art Project and petition website Change.org wanted to tackle when they unveiled #ChokeTheDemand, an interactive mural experience on child abuse in the sex industry, recently in the national capital.
Created and conceptualised by artists Leena Kejriwal and Amogh Lux across three places in New Delhi—Connaught Place, Malviya Nagar and Vasant Kunj—the aim of the movement is to trigger conversations around human trafficking and female child abuse. Before Delhi, the mural experiment was carried out last year in Kolkata. “The major problem lies in the demand for children in the flesh trade and trafficking. It’s a completely demand-centric scenario. Our aim is to make people aware of why there exists a demand for children as household helps or in prostitution,” says Kejriwal, adding, “We want to create a public narrative where people are sensitised to understand things. Also, if they see any such activity taking place, they can inform the authorities.”
Take, for instance, their massive mural at Connaught Place. Divided into two sections, the mural depicts a young girl chopping her hair to look like a boy (having long hair makes her more vulnerable to ogling men), her eyes full of anger and frustration at a society that fails to protect her. Interestingly, this is exactly what the protagonist of the animated movie, The Breadwinner, does. With her father captured by the Taliban, Parovana lets go off her long locks to look like a boy and feed her family.
The common thread running between the mural and the movie is that to survive in a world shrouded with atrocities, women are forced to give up their identities.
The mural at Connaught Place has been painted in the style of Manga, a Japanese form of comic art. When asked about the reason for choosing such an art form, Kejriwal replies, “Manga is an extremely strong form of art. Since the issue is so grave, we thought it would be the best for this.”
The artists are also using technology and social media to spread the word. There’s a link besides the mural in a smaller font size that one can search for on Facebook Messenger and have a conversation there about these issues. Interestingly, the person you will have this conversation with is a chatbot—the entire conversation has been fed into the system in a way that it keeps the person engaged. “Since we have technology, why not use it? We want the discourse to spread across the country. The conversation revolves around not just statements, but is loaded with facts and figures for people to realise the gravity of the situation,” Kejriwal comments.
