Chonthicha “Kate” Jangrew

Chonthicha “Kate” Jangrewa is a young pro-democracy and human rights activist working on political rights and civil rights in Thailand. She is the co-founder and coordinator of Democracy Restoration Group (DRG), an independent organisation that works to build a strong movement to advance and promote political rights, civil rights, and democracy in Thailand.

As a result of the sexual harassment that young women activists face, Chonthicha Jangrew became involved with the Women Empowering in Movement Project of DRG, which aims to raise awareness about sexual harassment and gender discrimination within the movement and build a strong network of young women activists. She also supports the mental health and well-being of young activists while developing a protocol or system for protecting women in the movement against all forms of violence based on gender discrimination.

As of July 2022, Kate is facing 28 legal cases, including two for royal defamation. Kate was released on bail with conditions on 15 March 2022 after the Attorney General prosecuted her on lèse-majesté and computer crime charges for her involvement in “People’s Message”. She is required by the court to wear an electronic monitoring device (EM) 24 hours a day.

APWLD interviewed Kate in January 2021 and below is her story.

Becoming a feminist and women human rights defender

I was an environmental activist, but after the coup in 2014 in Thailand, I joined the political movement in Thailand to fight for our democracy, during which time I learned a lot about feminism.  

In any movement in Thailand, such as the environmental movement and the movement for democracy, women activists and participants face gender discrimination. Women in general face sexism and gender discrimination daily. This is how I became devoted to the feminist movement, and why I work to promote gender awareness and empower women leaders in our movement. 

Now I work for the Democracy Restoration Group, DRG. Our goal is to build a movement in Thailand to promote democracy and human rights, which, of course, includes women’s human rights. We learned a lot of lessons in our work. While women activists are found in all movements, we face gender discrimination in our own communities that demand democracy and the protection of human rights. 

This is our challenge. Sometimes, we cannot even participate in meetings that lay out strategies for our movement simply because we are women. We are assigned cleaning or secretarial jobs, jobs that are often perceived to be in the ‘female realm.’ This is gender discrimination and gender inequality in a passive form. Then there’s the extremely aggressive form of gender discrimination and gender inequality: sexual harassment against women activists. Women activists, especially those who are still students, are being harassed by men activists. We even have rape cases within the activist community. 

Outside our community, we also face sexual harassment and violence online from men who do not approve of our work or do not approve of our causes. From body shaming to unsolicited nudes, my Facebook account is subjected such attacks. Also, the authority who represses our movement uses sexual violence or sexist slurs against women activists in an attempt to scare us and shame us. 

This is the value of DRG’s work. We empower women activists and bring more people (especially women) into the fight against sexism in our society and our movement. We build a safe space and non-sexist culture in our community for women and people from the LGBTQIA+ community. 

We have had some successes. During the first two years after the coup in 2014, we didn’t have many female leaders in the movement. And now, we have a lot of female leaders in the same movement, meaning our work has yielded some results! This is a success for us. This goes to show that our women are strong. They will take every opportunity they can get, face the challenge head-on, and make way for themselves. 

More people in the democracy movement have become aware of women’s severely compromised rights. In our protests, more human rights activists, though they don’t necessarily identify as women, join the protests for women’s rights. Such things have never happened before. I think our organisation also contributed to this change and I count it as a success. 

Growing together with APWLD

I learned the GFMP (Globalisation, Fundamentalism, Militarism and Patriarchy) analysis from participating in the Womanifesto training. I brought the tool back to our organisation and used it to analyse the social, political, and cultural contexts in Thailand. Before adopting the framework, we used to think it was just the militarised regime we needed to fight against. In But patriarchy, fundamentalism, and globalisation are also linked, deepening women’s oppression. 

I learned methods from APWLD to develop our organisation’s strategies as per our goals. We provide a lot of capacity-building training for our activists, and we used APWLD’s knowledge and techniques during the training.   

I also learned about advocacy work with the parliament or any function of the state. Our campaign and advocacy focus used to be on the general public. We tried to raise awareness among common people. But we should also work to change policies, the law, and the system so that women’s rights can be protected. During Womanifesto, I saw another perspective, another way to achieve our goal. In the future, I hope to learn from APWLD how to take our advocacy work to the international level.  

In 2018, I joined the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) workshop hosted by APWLD because I was intrigued by trade issues. At that time, our organisation had a project in collaboration with labour activists, so economic equality and trade policy, were of interest to me. I remember meeting activists working with indigenous people, farmers, and migrants. It was a great learning and bonding experience for me. DRG launched many campaigns to address RCEP. APWLD’s workshop was definitely helpful in that it gave us the proper language to frame our campaigns, demands, and goals. 

I hope APWLD will create more spaces for its members to learn from each other’s movements and build regional and cross-movement solidarity.

Taking care of activists’ mental health

Our organisation and activists face numerous challenges. Take me as an example. I face approximately 28 charges against me, one of them punishable by imprisonment for 3-15 years. These charges and the constant sexual harassment I face have taken a toll on my mental health. Sometimes I feel burnt out. Sometimes I feel I have lost my strength. 

Luckily, I still have my organisation, DRG, and my colleagues. Though we are a small organisation with five or six full-time employees, they are all very supportive. We do have male colleagues, but all of them are feminists, respectful of women, and mindful of our difficult situations. My colleagues are also very aware of the importance of mental health. We provide support on health care issues. We have emergency funds for when our staff suffer from mental health issues, in which case they can apply to use the funds for psychotherapy sessions. The mechanism and our colleagues’ awareness of the importance of mental health help me a lot during my most difficult times. Solidarity with our sister organisations also helped me a lot. We try to raise our voice about sexual harassment, about the discrimination in our society, and in our social movements—in the community. I know that I am not the only one facing this. I am not alone.

I believe any non-governmental organisation or similar organisation should have the means to protect their staff’s mental health and well-being. We promote equality. We work for a just society. In the same principle, we should not leave our colleagues to struggle alone to deal with the high pressure that typically comes with this line of work. 

At DRG, we provide our activists with holistic security training, including physical security, digital security, and mental well-being. We use this to help activists who might be facing mental health issues. I worked as the security trainer for our activists, emphasising pro-mental health culture and policy. I invited all the student activists to create their own policies and culture in their own organisations to promote holistic security and wellbeing. I hope that in time, more and more organisations will begin to look after their people’s mental health and general wellbeing.