2022 Campaign Report

 

The 2022 Campaign Report is online! Take a look at the pdf version of the report here.

Day 14: Domestic violence and access to justice: Regional perspectives

On the 14th day of the 2022 Prajnya 16 Days Campaign Against Gender violence, we organised the "Domestic violence and access to justice: regional perspectives" panel discussion. South Asian states have passed laws on domestic violence but survivors still struggle to access justice. This panel brought together the experiences of Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and India. Watch a saved copy of the recording here.

Panelists: Sara Hossein, Bangladesh Legal Aid and Services Trust; Saba Shaikh, Dastak, Pakistan; Ermiza Tegal, lawyer, Sri Lanka; Shazia Choudhry, Oxford University and Philippa Williams, Queen Mary University of London. The session was facilitated by Suneeta Dhar.

This panel is part of the project Surviving Violence: Everyday resilience and gender justice in rural-urban India funded by the British Academy Heritage Dignity and Violence Programme HDV190009. Research partners: Queen Mary University of London, Chaitanya-The Policy Consultancy, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Institute of Development Studies Kolkata, Nari Samata Manch and University of Oxford.

"It almost seems like the COVID  pandemic underscored the structural nature of gender inequalities within and across countries, and it essentially brought to light the invisible, unrecognised pandemic of gender-based violence, domestic violence and intimate partner violence. I hate the word shadow-pandemic; I think that domestic violence is not a shadow pandemic. That it was given visibility during this time by the UN and other agencies speaks of how little attention this issue has got over time", Dr. Suneeta Dhar said, as she opened the session.

Shazia Choudhry, Oxford University and Philippa Williams, Queen Mary University of London:

• "PWDVA (2005) encompasses the broader definition of violence; it is not just about physical violence, but also about emotional, psychological, financial and sexual violence as well."
• "There were also problematic attitudes in terms of lawyers, unfortunately. Survivors' opinions about lawyers were actually mixed. In a few cases, survivors found their lawyers to be helpful, didn't charge them high fees and followed up their cases. Survivors who accessed their lawyers through NGOs had fairly positive feedback about their lawyers."
• "There are huge barriers to accessing formal justice. And, as a result, women, therefore, are more likely to turn to the informal mechanisms that actually exist. And, the most commonly accessible and prominent body was the panchayat."

Sara Hossein, Bangladesh Legal Aid and Services Trust

• "I think some of the crucial points about our (Bangladesh's) framework is that although we have this strong, constitutional mandate for equality, we, of course, know that, there lives, alongside, a lot of very contradictory, continuing, persistent discrimination in terms of the legislation, and that we have a legislative framework which inhabits three different centuries."
• "One of the really challenging limits of our legislation, in addition to the exclusions already mentioned about people with disabilities and sexual minorities is the exclusion of divorced women from the ambit of the protection of the domestic violence law."
• "While there is an increased awareness of domestic violence as a wrong, for which remedies are available, there is very little awareness of what those remedies are and very little awareness of where you can go to access services for remedies and protection."

Saba Shaikh, Dastak, Pakistan:

• "Mostly, women in Pakistan resolve issues by going to the locals or elders in the community. If, for example, that doesn't work out, then they will reach out to relatives or friends within the community who can possibly link them to other possible options."
• "Women's rights of freedom and choice and movement are severely restricted in the name of modesty or protection and they consider to epitomize honour and therefore any sort of measure that they take for their rights seems like they are bringing dishonour to the family."
• "Oftentimes there are judicial pronouncements which reflect the negative bias; we have had a lot of cases and judgements where you see the judges are using their own sort of subjective morality instead of really looking at the law."

Ermiza Tegal, lawyer, Sri Lanka

• "During the COVID pandemic, for example, and the lockdown restrictions, we only noticed that advisory services was what was possible. And then, all of the actual services required, even to come out of the house, to come out of your environment of abuse or environmental violence was not possible for women."
• "Sri Lanka also needs to be considered in its socio-political context of violence and impunity so there's a long history of violence, even today, with the Prevention of Terrorism Act being used against protestors in Sri Lanka."
• "Laws are really imperfect tools because they are products of our socio-political systems and we recognise this when we work with it. The Domestic Violence Act sits amongst laws that are very unfair on people, and they don't recognise the experiences of women, like cyber violence, care work is not recognised, abortion is an issue that still needs to be addressed, marital rape is explicitly recognised."

About the Speakers:

1. Sara Hossain is a Senior Advocate at the Supreme Court of Bangladesh, practicing in the areas of constitutional, corporate and family law. She is a partner at the law firm of Dr. Kamal Hossain

and Associates, and also serves pro bono as the Honorary Executive Director of the Bangladesh Legal Aid and Services Trust (BLAST). She is currently a Professor of Practice at SOAS, University of London. She is a Bencher of the Middle Temple. Sara was educated at Wadham College, Oxford (1988), and called to the Bar from Middle Temple (1989), then enrolled in the High Court Division of the Supreme Court of Bangladesh (1992) and the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court (2008). She has been involved in landmark cases and campaigns on gender equality (‘fatwa’ violence discriminatory rape laws,sexual harassment), prohibition of corporal punishment in schools, protection against torture and freedom of expression. Sara has received awards for her work from the Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights, the US State Department (Women of Courage), ‘Ananya’ magazine (Top Ten), and was selected as a World Economic Forum Fellow and an Asia 21 Fellow.

2. Saba Shaikh is trained as a lawyer and also holds a degree in public policy. She works as a human rights advocate with over 14 years of experience in implementing and improving response strategies for those facing abuse, gender based violence or denial of their fundamental rights through provision of legal aid, training and community awareness. She is currently the Executive Director of Dastak Charitable Trust, an access to justice center for women and children that, among other programs, runs the only private shelter in the country for women and girls at extreme risk of violence. Saba has executed projects for a range of international organizations including Oxfam, Open Society Foundations, DFID, KIOS Foundation, and USAID among others. Saba is an Atlantic Council Emerging Leaders of Pakistan (ELP) Fellow 2012, Asia Society (India Pakistan Young Leaders Initiative) Fellow 2013 and US State IVLP Fellow 2019.

3. Suneeta Dhar is a Gender and Development Specialist with over four decades of experience on advancing women’s human rights. She has worked with community based civil society organizations as well as with international organizations. She is an external member of a few Internal Committees on Sexual Harassment of government and civil society organizations. Suneeta holds a Master’s degree in Social Work from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, and has been a recipient of the Fulbright and Advocacy Institute Fellowships for Development Practitioners. She has co-authored research studies, training manuals, and papers on women’s safety, gender and SDGs, transformative governance and women’s rights. Suneeta was recognized by Apolitical’s 100 Most Influential People in Gender Policy in 2021.

4. Philippa Williams is research and teaching intersects political, economic and development geography, with a focus on everyday political life in India and its transnational community. More specifically, she interested in questions concerning how the state is experienced, how citizenship is articulated and how marginality, particularly in the context of violence/nonviolence is lived and increasingly how digital technology is mediating everyday political life in India. In the UK research she has also explored the lived implications of the Indian emigration state and the UK government’s hostile immigration policy for recent South Asian migrants.She is Primary Investigator on two live projects:1) Social media and everyday life in India with Lipika Kamra examines how WhatsApp is shaping everyday political life from the family to political party and the nation. The initial phase of this research was funded by WhatsApp. We are now embarking on a second phase focused on lived experiences of digital privacy in India.

5. Shazia Choudhry is Professor of Law and the Jeffrey Hackney Tutorial Fellow in Law at Wadham. She is also an Academic Bencher and Associate Academic Fellow at the Inner Temple.Her research is focused on gender, human rights and violence against women and seeks to examine various dimensions of these areas from an interdisciplinary and feminist perspective. In doing so she employs doctrinal, theoretical and empirical methods. Her scholarship sits at the interface of criminal law, human rights law and family law.She has published three books. 

6. Ermiza Tegal has a Masters in Law from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London. She has 15 years of litigating in public law, fundamental rights, land, labour and family law. She has served as a legal expert on State advisory committees on law reform. Her recent advocacy and research work involves law reform relating to family law, domestic violence, protection for victims of torture, counter terrorism and human rights, gender based violence and a people’s land policy. She is a founder member of Muslim Personal Law Reform Action Group advocating muslim family law reforms. She is also currently a visiting fellow with the Harvard Law School Program on Law and Society in the Muslim World and a member of the Feminist Collective on Economic Justice in Sri Lanka.

Day 13: Tamil Nadu Domestic Violence Support Services: A Mapping

We are pleased to bring you a new Prajnya resource: the Tamil Nadu Directory of Support Services for Violence Victim-Survivors. This data was compiled for a mapping exercise of the Surviving Violence project (http://survivingviolence.org) and has been edited and updated by the Prajnya Team. At present, the directory includes information about five categories of support services for victim-survivors of violence, namely:

1. Swadhar Home

2. Family Counselling Centres

3. One Stop Centres

4. Protection Officers

5. All Women Police Stations

We will continue to add, update and will share a Tamil version soon. In the interim, do use and share the Directory at https://cutt.ly/tnhelpeng Thank you!

Day 8: Stand in Solidarity or Sit in Silence! Poetry Reading

Images  by: Selvaraj 

On the 8th day of the 2022 Prajnya 16 Days Campaign Against Gender Violence, we partnered with Mockingbirds and InKo Centre and organised a poetry reading. This year, we had Srilata K, Kutti Revathi, Aaliyah Banu, Manushi Bharathi and Amrin Khalil reading their poetry.

The poetry reading covered a wide range of themes like body politics, domestic violence, religious identities and rights of transgender persons, to name a few. A few of the poets were also of the firm view that their work does fundamentally stay rooted in the idea that "personal is political".

“You see, Women must fight to be alive

The world isn't a nice place

For a woman, even the air she breathes is luxury

Something that is given to her

Something she will be held accountable for” 

- excerpt from Aaliyah's work, "The Angry Poem"

Kutti Revathi, in her conversation with Saradha U, for the TNM piece noted that, the performers provided the audience with a holistic perspective on the voices of women, with each poetry providing a different perspective, and acknowledging that the efforts made by the poets to put their voices out there is not easy (Saradha, 2022, as cited in The News Minute, 2022)

You may read the elaborate coverage of our event by Saradha U for The News Minute here.

Day 5: Local Committees, Remote Justice

On the 5th day of the 2022 Prajnya 16 Days Campaign Against Gender Violence, a discussion on "Local Committees, Remote Justice" was organised. In this structured discussion on Local Committees, their challenges and awareness of them, the Tamil Nadu Labourers' Rights Federation and Gramavaani presented the findings of a survey they conducted to gauge awareness of Local Committees in Tamil Nadu. This was followed by a presentation by Prajnya's Rajaram Research Fellow Preeti Karmarkar of her research on Local Committees in Maharashtra. The session started with videos in Marathi, Hindi and Tamil on workplace sexual harassment which you can find here. You may find a saved video of the recording here. 

The discussion began with a short overview of a study conducted on the Level of Awareness on ICC/LCC among women workers, facilitated by the Tamil Nadu Labour Rights Federation (TLRF). TLRF largely works with the unorganised sector, where the ICCs and LCCs are poorly implemented. Gramvaani, a partner of the project, tried to take this campaign to a larger audience. Richardson, of the organisation, mentioned that, initially while the issue was brought to the forefront, there was no data to supplement the same. Post this, testimonials were collected from labourers and a survey was shared in 2020 to serve the purpose outlined earlier. The survey results showed that 27% of the respondents were construction workers, followed by 22.7% engaged in the agricultural sector, under the MNREGA. The responses showed that 80.5% of the respondents had not faced harassment in their workplace. This was a contradiction to the experiences from the field, where interactions with labourers show instances of harassment (though they may be hesitant to share the same). TLRF also filed RTIs in three districts to know the situation of LCCs and found that of Madurai, Virudhunagar and Dindugal, only the district administration of Dindugal provided details of the LCC. During the course of the discussion, Latha from Dharmagiri district also highlighted the experiences of women engaged in several unorganised sectors (construction, garment, health workers and women working in pharmacies) with respect to workplace sexual harassment. Additionally, she also highlighted the experiences of students in schools and colleges, particularly during the pandemic.

This discussion was followed by Preeti Karmarkar, a Rajaram fellow, who highlighted the functioning of Local Committees in Maharashtra. The study employed using a feminist socio-legal approach to gather data. The striking finding across the entire study area is that there is not one complaint from the unorganised sector in the LCs. The complaints from the organised sector that the LCs have received have been primarily against the employer. When the LCs received complaints, they conducted inquiries and gave recommendations. Additionally, Preeti also highlighted the challenges faced by the LC members, and further explained the methods through which LCs could be strengthened. Dr. Anagha Sarpotdar also supplemented the discussion with her experiences from the field.

About the Speakers:

1. Dr Anagha Sarpotdar: Social Scientist by Training Specialising in Work Aimed at Combating Workplace Sexual Harassment and she is a Consultant, Trainer, Author, Researcher, and does Workplace Sexual Harassment Inquiries (Based in India, Mumbai)

2. Preeti Karmarkar: Managing Trustee at Nari Samata Manch, she is trained as a Social Scientist and Gender expert, Preeti is associated with Nari Samata Manch since 1998. She has 22 years of experience in social development field in the areas of grassroot mobilization, project development and Management, M&E, policy as well as investigative research and NGO management with national and international exposure. She is an experienced gender trainer and provide consultation for gender integration in programme. She also provides training/consultation for implementation of Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013 and work as external members for renowned organizations. Earlier she has worked at Women’s Studies Centre (University of Pune), YASHADA and BAIF Development Research Foundation.

Day 5: Collective Responsibility, Collective Action

Rapporteur: Farheen Nahvi

On day 5 of the 2022 Prajnya 16 Days Campaign Against Gender Violence, Women in Global Health hosted its third regional town hall on the Prevention of Sexual Exploitation, Assault, and Harassment (PSEAH), which focused on the Asian region, in collaboration with the Prajnya Trust. 

The event brought together representatives from CSOs, governments, international organisations, and activists to continue the conversation on the need to develop regional collaborative mechanisms and reaffirm our commitment to eliminate SEAH. 

The keynote remarks were delivered by Dr. Poonam Khetrapal Singh, Regional Director for WHO South East Asia; and Ms. Anis Haroon, the Sindh representative of the National Commission of Human Rights, Pakistan. The event was moderated by Ms. Anupama Srinivasan, Assistant Director at REACH, India. 

Other speakers and panelists included:

• Ann Keeling, Senior Fellow, Women in Global Health

• Dr Sabrina Rasheed, Scientist, ICCDR,B; and lead for the Bangladesh chapter of Women in Global Health

• Ms. Veenu Kakkar, Gender Expert & Trainer; PSEA consultant with UNICEF

• Mrs. Rizza Pamintuan, PGH Women’s Desk

• Sigma Huda, President of Bangladesh Women Lawyers Association (BNWLA); Founder & Secretary of Institute for Law and Development (ILD)

• Arfa Kamal, HELP Foundation Kashmir

• Ms. Sangeeta Rege, Director, CEHAT (Centre for Enquiry into Health and Allied Themes) 

Watch the video of the event here.