What Would You Say to Her? is a community-based digital campaign that invites you to participate by posting your messages of unity, collaboration and solidarity with women and gender-diverse communities who have shared their experiences of displacement and gender-based violence. We invite you to respond to their stories and connect as agents of change-–because we believe compassion and connection are as essential to sustainable development as food and water.
Trigger warning: this page contains sensitive content which some individuals may find distressing.
Our campaign
What Would You Say to Her? is a Footage Foundation advocacy campaign that invites you to connect in a safe, compassionate space with women’s, in all their diversity, stories of displacement, prejudice and gender-based violence (GBV). We invite you to ask yourself, when you reflect on these stories: What would you say to her, if she were with you now?
At Footage we believe that everyone deserves to feel seen, heard and worthy. We use narrative and expressive approaches to connect women, gender-diverse people and marginalized groups as agents of social change. What Would You Say to Her? encourages multilateral, intersectional, compassionate responses to the deeply affecting human stories that demonstrate the experiences and realities of our time.
Our feminist research interventions show how sharing stories in a supportive space nurtures self-compassion, diminishes shame, and fosters belonging. For us, storytelling is more than just sharing experiences—it’s a tool for healing, learning, and serves as a mechanism for compassion, connection, and transformation.
Who is “Her”?
Footage participants are some of the most marginalized girls, women, vulnerable and gender-diverse communities in the world. They have fled persecution from dangerous hostile governments and conflict zones, experienced displacement, abuse and exploitation. They tell their stories to make us see and hear the truth, asking us to not turn away.
Our research with those who have been forcibly displaced and experienced gender-based violence powerfully shows us that while feelings of rejection and dislocation can inhibit connection, feelings of equitable “human” treatment are paramount for building belonging and fostering connection. Time and again, we unknowingly—and sometimes to avoid the pain of reality—dehumanize those in crises and conflict. Moreover, we know that dehumanizing people is how fear and separation are perpetuated. Yet, participants in our programs consistently express their desire to be seen, treated, and valued the same as those who are not displaced — as “human.”
The narratives shared are from our courageous participants across the globe, including those forcibly displaced from countries such as Afghanistan and Ukraine, as well as from survivors of violence from places such as Russia, Kazakhstan, Syria, and Cameroon. We invite you to reflect and respond compassionately to those who have shared their wisdom, humanity, and stories of survival and resilience. By participating in this campaign and sharing your compassionate messages, “seeing” those whose stories you respond to, you not only intensify your own compassion, you strengthen our ability to raise awareness and advocate with leaders and policymakers to adopt and implement laws and policies to prevent and address gender-based violence.
New stories will be uploaded each week to this page. Using the form below, you can respond to any of the stories. We welcome text, art, poetry, voice recordings, videos or any other creative format as responses.
Important Information
Most of the narrative accounts generated over the years by Footage navigate sensitive topics, please take care of yourself when engaging with the campaign.
When responding to the question: What would you say to her? Footage recommends focusing your response on one story at a time.
Please remember to include the name of the participant whose story you are responding to in your written response or file name. All names have been changed to protect participants identities.
We may share your responses on social media and in our communications to promote the campaign. If you would prefer not to have your response shared, please check “no” in the consent option below.
Through What Would You Say to Her? we aim to expand our community, and create a global gender-diverse network, listening and engaging from a space of empathy and love.
Please follow the journey on our social media accounts and share it with your friends, family and networks. Now is the time to hold together. #WhatWouldYouSayToHer?
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The ugliest thing was when we left our country, our families, our schools. We left everything behind us.
And the worst of all is when you hear some of your friends, just, died.
We never thought about leaving our country, but unfortunately we had to.
We came to Turkey and felt humiliation, but thanks to God for everything, no matter what.
When we came to Greece we stayed in a tent and felt more humiliation.
But under all these hard things nothing can keep you from loving and being in love.
Nothing can stop you from having hope, you have to fight to live.
Although I live here I am a very lucky girl because I found the love of my life here in between all this.
He’s the one who gave me hope and helped me to fight to make my dreams come true.
It’s very important for people to find someone to love, help and support them.
To help them to be strong in difficult situations.
I wish everyone a happy life and to never give up. -
I'm not a political activist. I'm just somebody who is interested in politics. I am more politically active than the average citizen because my previous experiences had allowed me to be, because of my specific positioning and my sympathising of that experience. I am not the political activist. What you need is something almost heroic or something. We need to step into this life stuff. I wasn't sure if I fit those criteria. I was like: Am I ready to give up my life for a political course? Is this a political course that I would give my life to?
A second part was, clearly people around don't care. Clearly, at least 60 percent of people around don't care. If I had felt that people cared and were just afraid to do anything, or face something, then maybe. As like, I am afraid too, but maybe I'm a little bit less afraid because I'm a little bit more reckless or a little bit more politically active or interested in that. Maybe then I would have decided to stay and continue.
And there was the third point that one of my friends had made. It's not going to change anything, at best you'll get 15 days in administrative detention if you continue going to protest. There was also this growing anxiety about what could you do? I am a dual citizen, I worked and studied in the West. My second country is also an authoritarian state, and the experience of me studying in the Western country was just a relative breadth of oxygen because there, again, once you touch on some of the subjects that get police repression here, you get repression there as well.
And then there was the sense of urgency, because in the very first days of war, we did not understand, at least, I, nobody, understood what was going on. Flights were cancelled and companies were leaving. There was this whole panic around bank accounts. All these people were losing all of their money. We did not understand how things were going to change and the situation was evolving day to day. People leaving, me thinking that I have the opportunity to leave, the window was closing, you know. Maybe in one week or two weeks I wouldn't have the option to anymore or that would be very, very expensive to leave, or very difficult.
I had the very sudden understanding that the life I had built for myself there, it was not going to be the same. The foundations had completely shifted, changed. If I had had a different experience, if I had had a different mindset, a different understanding of the world, a different understanding of myself, I could have, yeah, continued to live there, but I couldn't bear to live there. So I decided to leave. And also, there was a message from my friend who is like me. ‘It's time to leave’. And I was like, OK, it's time to leave, it's time to move on. She loaned me money for my flight tickets. I didn't have enough to fly out. So she bought the tickets and I had 48 hours to pack up my life. Once again, probably the sixth time I was leaving in six years, something like that, 48 hours to go, gather my stuff and say goodbye, see the last faces and things I wanted to visit. One of them was a queer bar and it was one of the places I had felt comfortable when I arrived and I was like, OK, this, this is how I'll remember this place. I went out with friends and I said I was leaving the next day, and I still had a lot to pack, but I wanted to go back. And the same was also difficult because I understood if I was leaving, I wasn't sure if I was ever coming back.
I cannot bear to stay here and participate. If I cannot do anything to change, staying here and continuing to live here is in some way or form participating for me. It’s participation because I had the opportunity and the choice to leave it, which was not the case for all of the people who do not have the opportunity, trust me. So for me, since there was a choice, there was this sense of possibility for me to leave. It meant that there was a choice and that I had to make a choice.
Make it count.
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