How Social and Emotional Intelligence Makes Kids Better Citizens

Leslee Udwin is the founder of “Think Equal” a non profit whose mission is to create a global system change in education. Udwin discusses the powerful impact teaching young children emotional and social intelligence has on their role as citizens – in the country, world and their careers. She was voted by the NY Times the No 2 Most Impactful Woman of 2015 (second to Hillary Clinton), and has been awarded the prestigious Swedish Anna Lindh Human Rights Prize (previously won by Madeleine Albright). She has also been named Safe’s Global Hero of 2015, Global Thinker by Foreign Policy.
A British Oscar winning filmmaker Leslee is now a Social Entrepreneur. Her documentary “India’s Daughter”, has been critically acclaimed around the globe, won 32 awards (including the Peabody Award) and sparked a global movement to end violence against women and girls. The searing insights yielded by the 2½ journey making “India’s Daughter”, led Leslee to found “Think Equal” which calls for a global system change in education.

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My guest is Leslee Udwin. She is the Founder of Think Equal, a non-profit that has developed a curriculum to teach social and emotional intelligence to young children in school. Leslee was voted by the New York Times the number two Most Impactful Woman of 2015, second only to Hillary Clinton. She has been awarded the prestigious Swedish Anna Lindh Human Rights Prize, which was previously won by Madeleine Albright. She has also been named Safe Global Hero of 2015 and a Global Thinker by Foreign Policy. Leslee, welcome to the program.

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How Social and Emotional Intelligence Makes Kids Better Citizens

Leslee, thank you so much for joining me.

It’s my pleasure and it’s my honor, Karen. Thank you.

You’re welcome. I’d like to start by having you tell the audience a little bit about Think Equal and what Think Equal is.

Think Equal is a global education demand for a system change in education as we know it. It asks education ministers, parents, teachers to consider the fact that there is a missing subject when it comes to preparing and nurturing our children for the rest of their lives. That subject, we believe, is social and emotional learning. You can call it other things. Sometimes it’s called 21st century skills. I find that ludicrous because did we not need these competencies and skills in another century? We have always needed children who are prepared for life in a way that enables them to lead a life that is empowered and dignified and respectful of the dignity of others, that values others and enables them to lead healthy relationships. That, in a nutshell, is what the Think Equal program and movement is.

For social-emotional learning, is this a need in developed nations and developing nations? Is it needed more in one than the other in your experience?

In my experience and certainty, it is needed in every single country in the world. There was not one part of this globe that is immune from some form of discrimination. The violence that abounds in our world, be it gender-based violence, be it racial hatred or religious intolerance or based on cost or greed, all forms of violence, I believe with all my heart, are predicated upon one root cause and that is discrimination. You cannot have violence without discrimination. The bottom line is that in order to disrupt this cycle of discrimination and its committed violence in the world, in order to change mindset and make the kind of difference we need to see if we want a free, peaceful, prosperous, and equal world, we have to prepare our children and teach them social-emotional learning experientially. This isn’t some theoretical information that can be slopped into children’s heads. Their hearts have to be engaged.

You’ve developed a curriculum that teachers use to teach the social and emotional learning, haven’t you?

That’s correct, and more than a curriculum because in the two years of research where I had an education director whom I had hired and upward of twenty extraordinary thought leaders and visionaries in education, each one whom I approached and said, “Yes, we will join you,” I almost fainted every time because I was being so ambitious. I was approaching literally the thought leaders in social-emotional learning. People like Sir Ken Robinson and Dr. Marc Brackett, Dr. Robin Stern, Professor Richard Davidson, extraordinary people. That’s just four names out of twenty, all of whom are thrilling minds. While we researched what existed, we did find that there were curricula around the world, but what is the curriculum? A curriculum is an eloquent and wise theoretical framework and academic paper. It lists outcomes and objectives.
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Here’s the problem. In this field of early years, which is particularly where we target this learning, and we do so for a very important reason, neuroscientists tell us loud and clear that by the age of six, the hard wiring of attitudinal and behavioral character is set in the child’s brain. If we want to make a difference and modify behavior, modify attitudes, disrupt discrimination, make children empathetic and value each other, be inclusive, be able to solve problems peacefully, etc., if we want to achieve all that, we have to do it between the ages of zero to five. We focus on the early years starting with preschools at the age of three because we can’t get into the homes. We can get hold of the system of education and shake that up and ensure that this subject is implemented with as much respect, seriousness, gravitas, and intentionality as we teach maths. We ask heads of state and education ministers how on earth can you deem it to be compulsory to teach a child mathematics in an age in which we have calculators and computers and where we are about to have robots who can do all of this much better than human beings? How can you deem that to be compulsory and yet you deem it optional for a child to learn how to value another human being or how to lead healthy relationships?
There’s a real mismatch in these early years because up to now, we have treated those early years as some added extra, as the babysitting years or the years in which we are taking care of the kids while the parents can go out to work. We haven’t trained the teachers. We haven’t paid them enough or respected them enough in these early years. We often leave it to just practitioners, and so effectively, how can we give them these academic papers which list objectives and outcomes and say, “By the end of this year, I want your three and four and five-year-olds to be emotionally sentient and gender sensitive, empathetic, critical thinkers.” They look at us and say, “What on earth do you mean? We don’t even understand that language, let alone know how to mediate this learning.” What we’ve done is made a very tangible, prescriptive program, as well as a curriculum. The curriculum explains the objectives and our sources and pedagogy, but the program is the day-to-day actual roadmap that we asked teachers to follow step-by-step. We provide them with the books, 30 of them in each year, each level of this learning. We have four levels from the ages of three until seven. We give them the 30 narrative books which we’ve created.

Can you give me an example of some of the titles of the books, so the audience have a sense of what they are?

We have a book called Passing Clouds. This is a book that deals with emotions and ensures that children understand and accept that emotions are all okay, all valid, but they do pass like passing clouds. We have a book called The Girl Who Climbed the Tallest Mountain. That is a book that mediates empowerment and ensures that girls feel and understand that they can do anything they want to do. If they want to be a mountaineer and climb Everest, of course they can do that. Then we have a book called The Color of Your Skin. It’s a book which visually practically proves to us that none of us are black or white or anything in between that is not a shade of brown. We proved that when you put something black against the darkest skin imaginable, and we have the resources which teach this, that skin is not black. If we’re thinking positive factual language, that skin is dark brown. If you look at the palest child on the portrait of six faces that we show to the learners, the palest child is not white because when you put a piece of white paper against pale skin, it’s very clear that skin isn’t white. That skin is light brown.

We’re all shades of brown.

That is scientifically true. We prove it to the kids. After that, how on earth would a kid grow up and have a sense that someone dark skinned is unattractive or different to the degree that they need to be regarded as different or feared? We’ve had transformations reported to us from the pilot program that we’ve been running for a year now.

What are some of the skills that you’re teaching kids in terms of emotional and social learning?

We teach them empathy. Empathy is a very tricky thing to teach. You can’t wag a finger at a child and say, “Put yourself in that person’s shoes,” because that’s a theoretical exercise. Empathy is the business of the heart. Empathy is precisely what Aristotle meant two and a half millennia ago when he said, “Education of the head without education of the heart is no educational at all.” In order to teach them empathy, we have to do this experientially. We have to grab their little hearts and involve them in the story and the journey of a character that makes them see the world through the eyes of whoever that is. We have one book called Diego’s Great Idea. It’s is about a young boy in a wheelchair who keeps being excluded from the football game because he’s in a wheelchair and Diego feels incredibly empathetic with this guy. You can see that he loves the game of football. You can see that in his eyes. He comes up with a great idea, which is that we can include the young boy in the game and make him the referee, his wheels give him speed.

It’s learning of that nature that put children on an emotional journey. That is how you practice the empathy muscles. We also teach them problem solving. We teach them peaceful conflict resolution, emotional literacy, and we teach this through a magnificent program called the RULER Program which Dr. Marc Brackett and Dr. Robin Stern from the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence have cofounded. They’re both on our committee and this program is just stunning. It literally teaches emotional literacy and intelligence as well as self-regulation. There are two legs to this program.

Leslee, where are some of the places in the world where you’ve put this curriculum in and run it as a pilot?

We’ve done this so far in seven countries. They are Kenya, Botswana, Sri Lanka, Argentina, India, Singapore and Canada, so quite a wide variety. Some of those, as you’ll have noted, are low-income countries, some are middle income, and some are high income countries. We did this purposefully because we want to prove that this is not a problem of those people in less developed countries. This is a problem in every single country in the world. If I may focus on one statistic from Canada, which is so frightening and shocking. Canada is a country that is a developed nation that has high income, that is supposedly incredibly sophisticated, even feminist. It has a Prime Minister who is a self-avowed feminist. It has at least 50% women in Parliament. On so many levels, if you’re looking at gender equality in Canada, we should be assuming a healthy nation, shouldn’t we?
The shocking thing is this. In terms of rape reporting statistics, we know that in developing countries where dishonor, and shame are associated with rape victims, the report on statistics are abysmal and we can’t trust them because mostly girls and women don’t report. In Canada, you would expect that girls and women who are raped feel confident and free to report. The latest rape statistic reporting figure from Canada that I read showed that only 3% of rapes in Canada are reported. Of that 3%, only half or prosecuted. Of that half, only half again are convicted. What that means is that in a so-called sophisticated developed nation, if you are a man and you rape, you have a 99.25% chance of simply getting away with it. That is the moral crisis we are in as a world.

Is that statistic higher or lower than, let’s say, other developed nations such as the US or Italy or France? Is that common?

It’s not common. It is very much on the low side and it may well have to do with the fact that in Canada, there have been particular infamous cases where girls have been torn apart in terms of judge’s pointing to their behavior and character.

This emotional and social learning and intelligence is impacting and is lacking regardless of what part of the world we’re in and regardless of whether it’s a developed or undeveloped nation or regardless how socially progressive the nation may seem or not, that this is a worldwide crisis and problem.

100% and I believe it with every fiber of my being. I’ve seen evidence of it.

What inspired you to create Think Equal?

I came at this from a very unusual angle. Until two and a half years ago, I was a filmmaker. I was successful. I was happy. I didn’t dream that I would be turning my attention to anything else. What happened was that the last film I made, which I shot between 2013 and 2015 when it was shown, happened to be a documentary. In fact, the first documentary I’d ever made. I made that film out of a compulsion when I saw extraordinary sites on the streets of Indian cities. Those sites were unprecedented numbers of men and women protesting for over a month about a very brutal gang rape of a young medical student who had been gang raped by six men on a moving bus in Delhi.

That was all over the news. That was a very famous case.

Very few people didn’t recognize that case. The interesting thing is that right now, the only other massive protest that we’ve seen in India is raging on the streets and they’ve come out in protest against the gang rape of a young eight-year old girl who was held in a Hindu temple for eight days, gang raped then killed with a stone and had her body thrown in some field. This has become a major scandal because the perpetrators were Hindus and the little child, Asifa, is Muslim. Peace members of Parliament, lawyers have all rushed to the aid of the rapists and said that they must not be tried because there’ll be judgments against them or inclinations against them because they are Hindus and the girl was Muslim. They want this rape to be forgotten and hidden for political or religious reasons. We are in such a state of crisis as a world now. I don’t lose my optimism because I know what the solution is and I know that we’re getting there, so I do feel incredibly optimistic. Thank heavens I have this understanding to hang on to because I would be in utter despair. Nothing has changed in India since that case when I went out in 2013. It’s almost six years when she was gang raped and murdered in December 2012.

[Tweet “By the age of six, the hard wiring of attitudinal and behavioral character is set in the child’s brain.”]

When you made a film of this whole thing, and I know you’ve had some insights that led you to create your foundation, tell us about some of the insights that you had in doing that film.

The entire journey was a series of one reversal of expectation after the other. I interviewed the rapists. I managed to get permission. I went into this maximum-security prison hard jail in Delhi where they were incarcerated. I interviewed the rapists in this particular case and also a few others. I practiced on some others. I know that sounds bizarre, but the reason I did that was that I was raped when I was eighteen. I’m one in five women across the world who was raped. I was so fearful that I would physically assault one of these men that the anger from way back when I was eighteen would emerge and suffocate me that I decided to practice on others.
One of the others I practiced on had raped a five-year-old girl. What I anticipated, what the media told me to expect was that I would be meeting with monsters who are psychopaths, etc. Not one of the seven men I interviewed over 31 hours was a monster, not one. Two of them presented as sensitive human beings. All of them were polite. All of them were normal. This was a major insight and a major shock. I also felt absolutely no anger, not for one second, despite having been raped myself. The reason I did it was because it wasn’t appropriate. It’s the only way I can explain it. These men had been absolutely robotically programmed to think of girls in a certain way, and I would go further and say they were encouraged by society to do what they did.
The media, when they described them as monsters, what they’re trying to do is separate them, distance them from us. They’re trying to persuade us that we’re okay. We can be reassured. It’s only a few rotten apples in the barrel. These guys have a death sentence hanging over them. Once they are removed, we’ll be okay. The truth is these are not rotten apples in the barrel. It’s the barrel that’s rotten and the barrel is sociocultural thinking. It’s what teaches them how to view a girl, how to see that a girl has to have completely other ways of behaving than boys. They not only felt that this girl had it coming to her because she was out at night. She had gone to see Life of Pi at a mall and it was an evening screening which ended at 9:00 PM when it was dark. Not only what did she expect when she was out in the dark with a young man who wasn’t her husband or her brother, but they told me they had a duty to teach her a lesson. It’s mind-blowing, but we’ve taught them to think this way. Why are we surprised when they then go out and act on it?

What I think is interesting is that part of what happened for you in doing that film was that it’s not that the apples are rotten, it’s the barrels rotten. We’re teaching, or a lack of teaching, people in society in a way that’s having them grow up with these ideas that that’s acceptable or all right. That’s a profound insight.

You’ve expressed exactly what I do believe is the case. I know that until and unless we start dealing with the root cause of this violence, until we stop thinking that dealing with the fallout and putting plasters on the wounds is meaningful, it’s necessary, but it doesn’t deal with prevention. That’s what we have to do. We have to prevent, and the only way to prevent is to change mindset. One final insight that was perhaps the most important one from the film was this. At a certain point, I was trying to discover what the common thread was between all seven rapists who I had interviewed. It occurred to me that of the seven of them, only one had finished secondary school. I immediately leapt to the complacent conclusion that it was lack of education that had a great deal to do with their brutal actions.
Within two weeks of filming that thought, I then interviewed their lawyers. Their lawyers are far worse than they are. The rapists sound like coming from angels compared to what the lawyers say. I have to immediately reappraise this quite naive thought that it was to do with lack of education or lack of access to education and understand that it may have been to do with contents of education, but it certainly wasn’t to do with access to education because the lawyers had the highest possible access that you can get and they were worse. That is precisely what then led me on this investigative journey of discovering what is education.
If we know we have to change the mindset, we know we can only do this with education. Nelson Mandela, who said, “Education is the most powerful tool we have to change the world,” had me reaching further into his work and his writing to try and understand what he meant by education. When I found this quote, I knew exactly what the answer is and where it lies. He said, “No child is born hating another human being because of the color of his skin, his gender, other circumstance. A child has to be taught to hate. If a child can be taught to hate, it can be taught to love.” That is precisely what led me to understanding that we need the missing subject to be brought in compulsorily into the early years’ education of children. That will change the mindset and we will create a new generation of people who don’t shoot up classrooms, who don’t go and plant bombs in clubs that have people who they don’t agree with. It’s the only way we can do it.

The name of your documentary, the one you’re speaking of is called India’s Daughter.

It’s on Netflix, so anyone can go and find it if you are in certain countries, but certainly the US and the UK and a number of other countries, it is on Netflix.

One of the things that you and I have talked about is this social and emotional learning isn’t just important to prepare children to be better citizens. It’s important to prepare them for their careers and for working in companies. Can you talk a little bit about that?

We know now, as a world, what is coming our way and that is an influx of artificial intelligence and robots who are far more capable of doing certain types of jobs than we are. The numeracy and literacy that we’ve been teaching our children almost exclusively and in the early years, that’s all we teach them, but that is precisely what artificial intelligence can do so much better than we can. Those jobs are going to be fulfilled by AI. The only thing that separates us from artificial intelligent robots is our social and emotional intelligence. That is what we’re neglecting. There was a time when we assumed that parents were doing this for their children. That was grossly naive for several centuries because suddenly since the industrial revolution, we have been teaching parents that the purpose of life is accumulation of wealth.
Whatever you happen to think about that, the fact is that has had the parents and parents going out working extraordinary hours, working more than one job and they’re not even present for their children in terms of that learning that we’ve been leaving it up to the parents. I would go further and say that the parents are incapable, even if they have the time and were present for the children, they were incapable of teaching it to them because they themselves are mired in discrimination. They haven’t been taught it themselves, how are they going to teach it? It can only come, I believe, from the school system and there’ve been extraordinary tests done. There are three aspects of our program which have in their own fear and in their own right being tested. Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence is our partner evaluating our entire program where the effect of learning is going to be multiplied at least by a factor of 30 because we’re teaching so many other things than just these three programs.
All of the results of the impact evaluation and the scientific testing have shown that number one, academic results shoot up when children are taught social and emotional learning. Number two, they are 88% less likely to get addicted to substances when they are grown up because there have even been longer studies. They are 90% more likely to be in employment. 86% less likely to be reliant on some type of national support, etc.

When they’re taught emotional and social skills?

That’s right. We know already what the effect of this is even before we get our results. We know because we’ve had teachers across 147 schools in seven countries feeding back to us the stories that would make your heart stop withdrawing.

Leslee, those statistics you were quoting, are they from Yale or are they from somewhere else or they just a combination of places?

A combination of places. There have been many studies, so there’s one, the Perry High School longitudinal study. Then there’s a James Heckman study. I don’t have the details all in my head to be 100% accurate with which studies they were that I’ve quoted from about, but I have a document which I’d be happy to show anyone who wants to see it.

I’m curious because it seems like it would be in corporation’s best interest to see this social and emotional learning put in place. Have you had much response from corporations in terms of this in sponsoring this and supporting it?

We have had a few very generous individuals, people who I will never ever be able to thank enough. Indrani Goradia, an extraordinary woman, amazing human being who has supported this work. We’ve also had the Ford Foundation support us and Open Society and UBS Optimus without whom, we would never have survived in this work. We haven’t yet had corporations, but it makes a whole load of sense for them to do this and we would be more than happy to have them bring the learning to their city or district or country. It is so cheap to implement this. I’m going to give you one example of how the cost beneficiary ratio works and how cheap this is. If a corporation came to us and said, “We are a bank, or we are an organization. We make cereal bars for health. We care about this. We care about the children of New York State or we care about the children in America and we wanted to be the sponsors of this work in x location,” we would have them be the ones who bring it. We would have them on our books. We own the books, we own the materials and we give all these materials away for free. We not charge for this so that governments will take it and they only have the printing costs and be able to scale it up almost immediately. We would then have them be the ones who are seen on the books, covers, on the lesson plans on all our resources. They would deserve to be seen as the ones who have revolutionized the health of the next generation in that particular part of the world.
In 3% of Sri Lanka, which is one of our big success countries, we’ve been working with Sri Lanka on this for two years and we were piloting the whole of last year and this year again, piloting levels one and two. Sri Lanka changed its laws in response to this plea of ours and has now mandated this program of social-emotional learning from the age of three. Next year, we are rolling out to Sri Lanka’s 19,000 preschools with this program. It’s very easy to train in because it’s incredibly clear, simple and prescriptive and it’s very easy to roll out. 90% of Sri Lanka’s three-year-olds go to preschool. That means that from next year, we will literally be educating a new generation of Sri Lankan citizens.
[Tweet “It is the right of every child to be prepared for life.”]
Let’s look at another statistic in Sri Lanka. 54% of women experience domestic violence. What is the cost of bringing Think Equal to Sri Lanka? Take the government cost of one victim of domestic violence over the course of one year. That figure that the government itself says that it costs the government to deal that violence gives Think Equal with all its materials, all of the training, every aspect of what is required to 6,000, three-year-old children. It’s not on over one year because those materials last for a decade or more. They’re brought out once a week each book and each lesson plan, and as long as they are looked after they can last for years. It’s a no-brainer. Why wouldn’t we spend a pittance on preventing violence and instead spend a fortune on dealing with it?

You have some very famous people advocating for Think Equal. I know you said Meryl Streep has supported you and Helen Mirren. You’ve got some people who have heard this message. Can you talk a little bit about some of the people that have come on board to support this?

In the case of extraordinarily committed impassioned planet-sized hearts like Meryl and Helen, Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn, they’ve all dived in here as a result of the film somehow because the film was a prominent spark in the conversation to end violence against women and all of these extraordinary people. Each one of those has been exceptionally committed to the film and has come and opened a screening for me or a premier. Because India’s daughter segued into Think Equal, they were understandably as committed to this proposed solution as they were to creating awareness about the problem. It’s been a very natural segue from one into the other. We have extraordinary politicians. We have education ministers. We have ex-president of Malawi, President Joyce Banda, and Lord Rumi Verjee who is one of the Lords in the House of Lords in the UK, an extremely brilliant and the liberal peer. The fact that this program is quite unique and it is the first time that this is being proposed as a cure, to some degree, there has of course been a program here and there, but this is a comprehensive new way of basically saying there’s a missing dimension in education. We need to do our duty of care to our children and bring it in because nobody else is capable of doing this to the extent needed to create a peaceful and equal world.

How can people support this?

They can advocate, they can help us to lobby, they can ask their education departments and authorities. In the states, education has evolved and you have a State Education Ministry as well as the federal one. They can advocate with parents. This needs to be demanded because it is the right of every child to be prepared for life. When you look at those rapists I interviewed, you have to ask the question, “Who should have intervened in their early years to ensure that they didn’t see girls in that way?” They may not have raped if that had happened, I would say they would not have raped. It’s not just on one side. When we talk about gender equality in our program, we also take great care and emphasis on boys and ensuring that they don’t grow up to commit suicide.
There’s a massive epidemic of young male suicide in the world and it’s rising every year. The reason is because we have also not done our duty of care by our boys in terms of saying, “You’re allowed to feel stress, you’re allowed to be emotional. It’s okay to feel.” We’ve almost done the opposite and put such stress on them. They can advocate. They can lobby. They can donate. I have to say that because we have got 22 countries wanting to take this program and start it. We can’t give it to them because we have limited capacity. We have to be responsible and disciplined and only do what we have bandwidth to do.

You had 22 countries who have said they would like this curriculum but they’re on hold because of lack of funds?

100%, absolutely.

I’m curious if you have approached the US at all and what the structure is in the US for putting in a program like this.

It is highly possible to put this program in anywhere because the majority of this work gets done between the ages of three and five. Generally speaking, children don’t start public school until the age of five. It’s not like in certain countries, there’s not going to be room for it in the curriculum. There’s always room for it. Where the will is there, it can be taught. I have been having discussions with the Mayor’s Office in New York because Bill de Blasio has announced 3-K Program. The discussions are going well but they’re going slowly. I have been on a trip to California and we have potential partners in Oakland, in San Francisco. We also have potential partners in Detroit. We can’t move forward. I’ve brought on a CEO to put systems in place for us and ensure that we can scale with absolute responsibility and health.
As the Founder, I’m very hungry. I wanted to go everywhere but we have to be very disciplined because the one thing we must never do is compromise the quality of what we’re doing because we’re overstretched. The interest is there. The understanding is even there. In the last few years, Jim Kim, Head of the World Bank, Tony Lake, Head of UNICEF, have both announced that the key to human development is the ages of zero to five. They’ve announced that, people have got it now. What they haven’t yet got is the tools. They are getting very excited when they see these brilliant tools that I can call them brilliant because I haven’t created them. They have been created with the input of these world visionaries so they are utterly brilliant. They are very excited about that. When we come into a country and do a pilot, we need to get these books printed. It’s not very costly at all, but we do need capacity of people who will look after that pilot from our quality control point of view to ensure. You can’t just hand material over and hope for the best. That is where we need funding and that is where we need support.

Leslee, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you so much, Karen.

My guest has been Leslee Udwin. She is the Founder of Think Equal. Leslee is also a British Oscar-winning filmmaker and a social entrepreneur. Her documentary, India’s Daughter, was critically acclaimed around the globe and won 32 awards including a Peabody Award and sparked a global movement to end violence against women and girls. You can find out more about Leslee and Think Equal at www.ThinkEqual.com.
Important Links

• Think Equal
• Passing Clouds
• The Girl Who Climbed the Tallest Mountain
• The Color of Your Skin
• www.ThinkEqual.com
• Indrani Goradia
• Ford Foundation
• Open Society
• UBS Optimus

About Leslee Udwin

Leslee Udwin was voted by the NY Times the No 2 Most Impactful Woman of 2015 (second to Hillary Clinton), and has been awarded the prestigious Swedish Anna Lindh Human Rights Prize (previously won by Madeleine Albright). She has also been named Safe’s Global Hero of 2015, Global Thinker by Foreign Policy.
A British Oscar winning filmmaker Leslee is now a Social Entrepreneur. Her documentary “India’s Daughter”, has been critically acclaimed around the globe, won 32 awards (including the Peabody Award) and sparked a global movement to end violence against women and girls. The searing insights yielded by the 2½ journey making “India’s Daughter”, led Leslee to found “Think Equal” which calls for a global system change in education.