Hi, this is Imran Ahmed, founder and CEO of the Business of Fashion, and welcome to the BOF podcast.

This week we go back to one of the most powerful talks from Voices 2019.

Tricia Shetty is a social activist and lawyer from Mumbai, India.

She is the founder of She Says, a non-profit organization working for

women's rights and gender equality through youth and civic society engagement. She is a president

of the steering committee of the Paris Peace Forum and was an Obama Foundation scholar at

Columbia University. Just to note that some listeners may find the content of Tricia's talk upsetting as it addresses the difficult topics of sexual assault.

Here is Tricia Shetty on human rights and human wrongs at Voices 2019.

In December 2016, I received a call from a father.

He had heard about us through his friend's child

who had attended one of our gender sensitization seminars.

This is through the work that I do back home in India

as a social activist working on gender rights

and providing survivors of sexual abuse access

to redressal agencies and justice. So I received this

call. Father's four and a half year old child had stepped out of her home, crossed the road to go buy

chocolates. And the store's relative, who was there selling her chocolates in that process managed to rape her. She came back,

and by the time they reached out to me, they asked me for help. We spent the next several,

several months running around from police stations to hospitals to courtrooms. In the hospital, I remember there was stray dogs and cats just walking around.

The hospital staff would call her, this child, who barely came up to my knee,

oh, referred to her, oh, was that raped child?

Can someone just, like, you know, keep her aside, wait for her.

...