Yodhas in the making; don't mess with them

Hyderabad: Joy of Sharing Society is on a mission to provide free self-defense training for girls to tackle sexual harassment. Around 600 under-privileged girls were trained for four months in Hyderabad.

Fed up with the recurring assaults against women, girls, including infants, Joy of Sharing Society aims at bringing about a fundamental change in society and wants women to fight for their protection.

Choosing self-defence training as a primary tool, they started teaching techniques like punches, blocks, combination of kicks, advance practice of kicking and other simple and strong techniques for girls to make them become courageous and stand for themselves.

The NGO has been conducting 3-4 sessions weekly for 6 months at a selected orphanage or in government schools since 2018 March. They started teaching self-defence techniques in orphanages at the beginning with an objective to reach all the sections of society, counting from under-privileged to every section of community and later expanded its service through Yodha Movement.

"Yodha Movement is an innovative 'Self-Defence Art' programme founded in 2018 to help young girls from sexual violence, abuses, physical attacks, sexual harassment by training them to defend themselves and to bring awareness of sexual abuse among people. Our vision and mission is to achieve this by training young girls with the art of Taekwondo and teaching youngsters or adults of the values one should have for the betterment of the society and making the country a safer place.

Our work is not completed till girls are strong and can protect themselves without help of others." said Raghu, Founder, Joy of Sharing Society It's a movement now "Motivation is more needed to make women strong and support from men, family and society is more required.

We cannot stop atrocities on women by simply training them in self-defence. To address the problem at fundamental level, change in men's perspective is needed. With that objective, Yodha campaign transformed into a movement.

To promote awareness on how self-defence techniques, they help girls save themselves and motivate each and every individual to learn how to safeguard themselves.

Joy of Sharing Society campaigns for the Yodha movement in different ways. The team of Joy of Sharing grasped the pulse of youngsters in various colleges for the Yodha Movement. They formed committees in colleges through social media to pass their message in clear and louder.

Along with it, they produced short films, conducted sessions on Yoga and meditation for girls. Girls are trained in channelising their energies in proper way.

"Yodha can be a man or woman who is committed to safety of women. Yodha will be the one who teaches his/her kids how to respect & protect women," says Sai Priya, a 'Yodha' herself.

"Now, I can go alone anywhere, I don't fear because I have courage to fight and strength to handle any untoward situations in life. With the motivation of Joy of Sharing, I learned how to protect myself and also others in need," says another 'Yodha' Tonishka, expressing her confidence and also thanks Joy of Sharing for the support and service.