The project SAGE facilitates a self-help group counseling programme for female adolescent survivors of gender-based violence (GBV) among university students in the city of Surabaya. Many young women face competing pressures when it comes to sex and virginity.Social and cultural expectations dictate young women should stay with one partner during her lifetime. They are pressured to have sex with their boyfriends but are immediately seen as no longer respectable once they have done so. The differing power relations place young women in abusive relationships. Authorities however, view them as adults capable of solving their own problems, leaving them without any recourse.

Fifteen peer counselors, including 6-7 survivors, are trained to carry out the group sessions and act as a crisis centre for other young women across the city. They mentor other survivors in how to organize self-help groups and provide a model for universities on how to address the issue of violence in dating. A survey on youth sexual behaviour is conducted to advocate for evidence-based responses from the universities and government agencies. Attention is also given to lesbian, bi-sexual, and transgender women who are typically left out and neglected. It is assumed they do not experience GBV since their dating relationships also involve other women.

The participants’s self-confidence increases. They are able to advocate for their rights to legal. One participant succeeded in bringing the perpetrators to court and they received punishment and academic sanctions. On the self-help group, the participants continue their support to each other outside the group. At the internal organization level, SAGE  helps to boost organizational self-confidence to replicate the self-help group method for women survivors of domestic violence in The Healing Garden Project, a project that is supported by Grand Challenge Canada.  

During this program, Savy Amira used two approaches. First, Feminist Therapy-Counseling method that believes in and respects survivors integrity to empower themselves and be able to free themselves from violence. Second, Narrative Therapy which is a method of therapy that puts failure outside the self, that that current persisting narrative about women has been disempowering women and positioning them as victims of gender based violence and the importance of creating their own narratives that are more empowering to them. 

As an organization, Savy Amira also learn throughout the implementation of this project that working with women survivors, we need to understand their psychological conditions, pushing too hard may increase resistance. When survivors decided to walk away from us, does not mean they quit and learn to lose nothing if survivors decide to stay in the decision that we know will put them at risk. 

“In terms of management of funding, Voice Global is also very flexible or  I do not mind to say the most flexible donor to accommodate the changing of the project plan to  beneficiaries, political and social  condition” – Savy Amira on Final Report