By Aisha Lovely George, Executive Co-ordinator and Counsellor, Hidden Pockets Collective

Hidden Pockets Collective is an India based charity Trust, running projects in Karnataka, Bihar and Kerala. We educate young people on their Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights. The collective believes in alternative approaches that aim to achieve justice, not just legal in nature, but a comprehensive approach be it using technology, collaborative research, or awareness-raising.

Our Vision:

India where every young person has access to the right information, rights, and care they need to make informed and shame free decisions about their body and has good quality of life.

Our Mission:

We provide non-judgemental information on sexual and reproductive health and rights to young people so that they can make decisions about their body and have improved quality of life. No matter who they are, we care for young people.

Our prominent presence on the internet (on various platforms) has made us the one-stop center for young people who need safe, judgment free, and accurate information on Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights. We do quality evidence generation on issues like abortion, Access to Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights, Comprehensive Sexuality Education, and Decriminalization of Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights work. We work with advocacy groups in India and International coalitions. We currently produce high-quality educational content and digital campaigns in English, Hindi, Malayalam, and Kannada.

There is a considerable stigma attached to Sexual and Reproductive health in India. Women don’t have the freedom to express their Sexual and Reproductive health needs. Through our experience, we have seen that many women have very little knowledge about their sexual and reproductive health and rights. Most of the women are not very comfortable discussing about their reproductive health and they wait till the last moment of the crisis to reach the doctor.

Through our work we have also seen that young people (age 18- 35 years) across India, struggle to access high quality, safe abortion and reproductive health care due to persistent social stigma, cost, and misinformation about their reproductive rights, including the legality of abortion and the abortion process. The accurate sexual and reproductive health information that does exist is mostly in English which excludes a majority of people outside of elite, urban centres from accessing it. Due to the social stigma surrounding abortion, in our experience, it is rare for single young people to discuss their abortion experience, leading to a delay in accessing abortion services and unneeded risk and stress for women and their partners. It also leads to misinformation which risks lives unnecessarily. Without accurate, accessible information young people feel forced to take risky, and potentially deadly decisions to access abortion services- buying illegal medicine off the internet, using untested and unregulated abortion methods, and relying on information from peers and chemists — who may not have accurate information themselves. A 2019 study on unsafe abortions in nine Indian states, including Bihar published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) found that an estimated 67% of abortions in India are unsafe, with young women 15–19 at the highest risk of death.[1]

Hidden Pockets Collective is trying to reduce the stigma and fear among people by providing accurate information about sexual and reproductive health and rights to young people. For the past six years, Hidden Pockets Collective has been working on safe abortion in India. In Karnataka, India, we ran a safe abortion campaign (Abortion is Care) in 2020. The campaign was in Kannada which is the target population’s local language. Similarly, we are currently running a Hindi-language campaign in Bihar. We chose to conduct campaigns in the local language to understand better the deeply ingrained stigma and myths surrounding abortion among the rural population. In addition, we believe that the local language campaigns will provide the youth with a clear understanding of their Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights. Hidden Pockets Collective ensures that young people have access to accurate information in their preferred language and medium. Also, recently we created a crowdsourced video song featuring Srishti Dixit (Instagram influencer) on women’s reproductive health.

In the long term we would love to create a generation of youth who are equipped with the information they need to take care for their bodies and advocate for their rights. By producing content that uplifts essential information on sexual and reproductive health and rights, we hope to move one step closer to normalizing conversations around sexual and reproductive health and rights for young people across India.

[1] Unsafe abortion and abortion-related death among 1.8 million women in India 2019 Ryo Yokoe, Rachel Rowe, Saswati Sanyal Choudhury, Anjali Rani, Farzana Zahir, Manisha Nair 10.1136/bmj-2019–001491 BMJ Global He