Finding safety and like-minded individuals

Saadat

BFI team 2012-2016,

Bishkek “I have been in social justice movements since I was 18. Initially, I joined the disability rights and children’s rights movements, where I was lucky to work with amazing women. They could collectively and individually lead massive campaigns of their organizations, attract like-minded people and jointly advance the interests of their communities.

THANKS TO From the moment of my conscious and purposeful FEMINISM, life, I was told that violence is always perpetrated by I NOW drunk, inadequate strangUNDERSTAND ers. I can understand where my apam and tainem were MYSELF AND coming from. Based on their own experiences and MY INJURIES upbringing, they were trying BETTER... to give me good advice and protect me. Unfortunately, this warning didn’t work in my case. Having survived a rape, I found myself in a state of cognitive dissonance, because this violence came from people I knew. I endured shock from what happened, things I was told didn’t match with what happened to me. It was a turning point in my life, and I felt that I might not be able to trust anyone for the rest of my life... This incident made me look for a group that would support and accept me as I am, with the experience that happened to me. And, most importantly, I was looking for a group that wouldn’t blame me for what had happened to me. At that time, I was lucky to find a collective of feminists. After talking and listening to other women, young women and girls, I realized that this is not an isolated incident, but one of the many cases of violence that are often justified by society and rarely brought to justice.

Thanks to feminism, I now understand myself and my injuries better, and I realized that these injuries will not go away. They have become part of my experience, and all I can do is learn to accept myself as I am, fully and completely, and build my life the way I want it to be, based on the principles of non-violence.”

Zhanna

BFI, Bishkek 2015-2019

“When I became an activist, I was in a period of transition. I probably tried to run away somewhere to not stay at home and to not face violence and injustice every day. I had to surrender to something, so I completely surrendered to BFI.”