Men's Rights Campaign

Panel Discussion with Mr Shonee Kapoor and Mr Amit Deshpande

Abhayam- the Centre for Gender Empowerment conducted another successful informative discussion on men’s rights on April 22, 2021. The webinar had an impressive panel of Mr. Shonee Kapoor and Mr. Amit Deshpande. Mr. Shonee Kapoor is a legal evangelist with Tripaksha. He handles cases of S.498A, domestic violence, divorce, annulment, adultery, maintenance and child custody. A warrior of the labyrinth of Indian matrimonial system, he also provides counselling to people suffering adversely from the Indian matrimonial laws. Mr. Amit Deshpande is a men's rights activist from Mumbai and has been involved in social activism since the past 7 years. He is one of the founders of Vaastav Foundation, a one of its kind organisation that focuses on the well-being of boys and men.  The session was moderated by Ms. Shweta Nair whose able articulative skills made the cognition of the questioning genuinely seamless. With a quick round of introduction of our panellists, the moderator kept flowing in questions ranging from basic understanding to those requiring much more nuances, such as the ones dealing with toxic masculinity and patriarchy, the need for gender neutral laws, the extent of insensitivity being pervaded in our society towards the fake cases being imputed on them, amongst many others.
With utmost discretion and prudence our panellists brought clarity to the concerns and underlined the elusive reasons which have conditioned the society in a way that it should not be in today’s era. Further, certain incisive insights were also given on the concepts where there is very lean granting of Medicare funding for male specific ailments in comparison to female ones, which is why there is awfully less awareness for prostate cancer than breast cancer or cervical cancer in our society. As both the panellists have worked in the arena of familial cases, their narration of ordeal of those husbands facing fake Domestic Violence allegations was quite unanimously resounding. The session was supervised by our faculty coordinators, i.e., Ms. Sheetal Kapoor and Mrs. Amrita Rathi, and concluded with final remarks given by both the faculty coordinators.