Video Volunteers

Video Volunteers (VV) runs India's only reporting network that's focused exclusively on providing broad coverage from the poorest, most media-dark districts in India. We currently have 206 individuals trained across India's most diverse and marginalised communities, who all earn a living as a VV Community Correspondent (CC). Our goal is to grow our network to ensure India's poorest and most conflict-ridden districts have a video producer and news outlet.

The names in this video have been changed to protect identities.

A marriage proposal came for her. She met the family, liked them.They liked her.
When the boy’s family demanded a dowry, her parents refused. And then started the torment. Community Correspondent Chanda Bharti from Uttar Pradesh reports.

She refused to elope with her fiance’ to be.

“If you go on the streets and beg for money, they will give you more money than you’d get from my dowry. If you don’t have the guts to marry me how dare you ask me to elope?”, she asked. She refused to be treated like an object to be bought, sold, traded, or discarded at whim.

But his machismo wouldn’t let him be at peace with this refusal. She would have to ‘pay’. He raped her with his friends, in her own house. He then fed her poison and left her for dead.

She survived and testified against him. She was attacked again- this time they tried to cut her tongue, to silence her.

But she refuses to be silenced. She is Nirbhaya. Fearless. And She is rising for justice. She stopped them from stopping her to live her life the way she wanted.