Niñas Sin Miedo, Project in Colombia for Rights of Children

The foundation was created on one of the social borders of the city of Bogotá, in the extreme east of the city, in the Municipality of Soacha.

In the Unisur shopping center where some of the volunteers meet before starting the point where about 15 girls wait for them to receive a workshop on managing emotions and recognizing the body and care

When completing the group,  voluntary girls took a bus to Barrio Los Pinos, located in commune 4 of Cazucá belonging to the town of Ciudad Bolívar, inhabited by about 70,000 people. Voluntaries divided the group in two, one of them going biking practice and another half going to the common room, of this neighborhood of uncovered streets whose landscape is joined with the hundreds of houses with regular and popular architecture characterized by bare bricks that cover the facades and hide the mountain.

These volunteers arrived there, from the work and personal search of Natalia Espitia, who in 2012 suffered sexual abuse in the streets of Buenos Aires, and she decided to get on the bicycle that took her to this neighborhood on the edge of the city of Bogotá bordering with Soacha, with the mission of preventing cases of sexual abuse and early pregnancies in the girls of this community through sports and using the bicycle as a vehicle for empowerment.

She was joined by artists, lawyers, and teachers who understood the importance of working with girls and preventing some of the 48 cases of sexual assault on children between the ages of 0 and 17 that occur every day in Colombia.

While the girls, 10 years old and older, joined the bike mentors to take a bike ride through the streets of their neighborhood on bicycles that have been donated to the foundation, and with which they learn to feel safe and brave.

The other group of girls joined the education line in the company of three volunteers/As a first exercise, the volunteers invited the girls to introduce themselves and then to an outdoor activity where they sang in chorus: “it was a fat, fat, fat watermelon that wanted to be the most beautiful in the world and for the world”

As six-year-old Paula Herrera defines it, "Niñas sin Miedo is the best thing for us to learn to ride a bike, learn that we should not be afraid and if one falls, get up again and continue fighting for dreams"

The first activity consisted of making cartography or a map of the emotions of the body. One of the volunteers gave them a drawing of two girls and there they had to locate emotions such as boredom, fun, or depression. With this exercise, they saw their bodies as the first territory of which they are part and they were able to identify the emotions at each point of their body to be able to better identify how to react to moments where these types of emotions come to the fore.

Activities like this make the girls feel that Niñas sin Miedo is a safe space where they can express everything that happens to them and what they feel. Like the case of Carol Herrera who, in the middle of an activity, remembered how a man tried to take her by force and reacted by telling her parents, who filed a complaint for harassment.

Do you want to know more? visit: https://www.ninassinmiedo.org/