How it Started - Our Journey

 

Our Ethical Storytelling project started in 2020 when the coronavirus pandemic started. A team of experts did research on how Covid-19 affected survivors who virtually trained survivors of human trafficking on photography, story telling and research.

 

This project was prompted by a realization that survivors' different experiences are misrepresented due to lack of inclusion, power dynamics and lack of trained survivor experts.

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This Fellowship Story

 

This space belongs to her. To them. To us.

This exhibition is not about adolescent girls and young women. It is by us. It is for us. It is of us. Here, you will not find statistics that numb you or stories that exploit you. You will not find victims asking for pity or heroes waiting to be saved. You will not find neatly packaged narratives that fit comfortably into reports and proposals

Instead, you will find threads.

Twelve threads, to be precise. They are not separate. They are not ranked. They are not competing for your attention. They are woven together, messy, tangled, frayed, and unbreakable just like the lives they represent.

These threads are the 12 Critical Areas of Concern from the Beijing Platform for Action. But here, they are not policy language. They are not abstract commitments made by distant governments. They are lived realities. They are daily battles. They are quiet victories. They are dreams deferred and dreams reclaimed. And they are told by the people who know them best: adolescent girls and young women who the 12 critical areas are older than them. So come see the thread, see the pattern, see us. This is our time, with hope, with fire.

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Acknowledgements

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Our gratitude goes to the young adolescent girls and women who shared their stories with this project, the Azadi team, and our friends at Collective Threads Initiative and Photographers Without Borders.