Building Women Empowered Communities for Governance A Social Work Perspective

This article explores the various nuances of women's experiences as they negotiate their victimised status to move towards empowerment. Feminist social work has to explore the existing agency of women and work towards their empowerment, by creating spaces to listen to their voices, developing capacity to articulate their issues and build strengths to deal with oppressive conditions which inhibit their potential for participation in governance. This article is an attempt to develop such a model of practice drawing from existing work in the field being done with women in North East India and Dalit women activists.