Week 2: The Barefoot Butcher
I started my second week here in Dharamshala with a long walk down the mountain from my temporary home at a bed and breakfast (that doubles as a plant nursery) to have breakfast and meet up with Tessa and TLA’s legal secretary, Tenzin. On a cafe patio across from a barefoot butcher, Tessa and I ran through what we’ve researched so far and prepped for our first meeting of the day: an interview with the Tibetan Women Helpline (TWH). As we headed to the “yellow house” to meet with the TWH, we realized just how many buildings here are, in fact, yellow, and in our search for the correct yellow house we finally came across the only animals we are allowed to pet here (or, at least the only ones we were not explicitly warned against): burros and ponies. This was mostly just exciting for me, as I learned that the joy I get out of poking an unsupervised burro’s nose is not quite universal.
The TWH was created in March 2020 by the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA) in close collaboration with the Central Tibetan Women Association (TWA) as part of CTA’s commitment towards creating a Tibetan community free of sexual abuse and exploitation and addressing issues of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) in the community. The TWH provides free, immediate assistance to Tibetans living in exile across India who experience SGBV. According to statistics provided to Tessa and me by the TWH, of the cases brought to them 63% are from Northern India, 89.8% of those experiencing SGBV are women, and 10.2% are men. Most cases they receive are cases of domestic violence (39.8%), but they also receive sexual harassment cases (7.1%), cases of destitution (also 7.1%), cybercrime, mental health, and child abuse (each 2-4% of their cases), and general inquiries that make up 25% of their reports but are never taken further.
Assistance provided by the TWH for victims of SGBV includes a safehouse, counseling, three months of an emergency fund that is supplemented with vocational training, and access to legal services if the survivor chooses to pursue justice through the court system. However, as has been explained to Tessa and me, Tibetans tend to opt for alternative dispute resolution, and there are several reasons for this. Tibetans do not generally have knowledge of Indian laws, pursuing justice through the courts takes a lot of time, wages are lost by going to court, travel is expensive, there are great linguistic and cultural barriers for Tibetans to work through, Tibetans are not often treated well by Indian police, and—because the Tibetan community is so tight-knit—there is often a pervasive fear that pursuing legal justice will result in the identity of the survivor being leaked, leaving the survivor subject to social stigma. So, alternative dispute resolution is the more popular option for Tibetans living in exile by a long shot, which is one of many hurdles in TLA’s mission to encourage systemic change in the community through legal reform. The availability of the legal recourse Tessa and I are drafting makes little to no difference if it is not utilized.
During our meeting with the three women who run the Helpline, Tessa and I learned about the myriad of difficulties the TWH faces in implementing the subject of Tessa and I’s current research: the POCSO Act. One challenge, as just discussed, is that even when survivors inquire about the recourse available through the POCSO Act, the survivors and/or families of the survivors decide they would rather handle the case themselves, rendering the protections and punishments in place through POCSO essentially useless. Another is that there is sometimes a long delay in reporting the cases, the effect of which Tessa and I dug into in our research later in the week.
Like the representative from the Women’s Empowerment Desk (WED) who Tessa and I met with last week, the women running the TWH agree that the POCSO Act is in desperate need of refinement if it is going to become of use to the Tibetan community. The POCSO Act is old and therefore does not cover developments in technology that have affected sexual offences against children. The POCSO Act is also short, only 16 pages in length to cover the offenses and punishments suffered by child survivors of SGBV, leaving much to be desired. The TWH stressed to us that identity leaking is their number one concern when it comes to protecting child survivors, and it may also be one of the main concerns holding back Tibetans from reporting POCSO offences. Exemplifying this concern is that in a livestreamed session of Parliament, members were discussing a child survivor in ways that were likely to or perhaps even did lead to a leak in identity. This needs to be addressed in the refined version of the POCSO Act, and Parliament’s involvement is not a concern Tessa and I had considered before this meeting. Another concern raised by the TWH that we had not previously considered is that many survivors do not actually know what sexual violence looks like and so they do not report the offence or offences until they feel their life is in danger or until the fact that what is happening to them is in fact wrong, which is often too late for medical evidence to be collected, weakening the survivor’s case. Finally, the TWH brought up the issue of how Buddhism affects reporting and the forming of POCSO committees, which I will address further in next week’s blog.
After our time speaking with the incredible women at the TWH, we headed to meet the Tibetan Settlement Officer of Dharamshala: Kunchok Migmar. The Settlement Officer, to my understanding and in American terms, is more or less the elected head of local government for the CTA. As the Settlement Officer holds an inherently political and elected position, I won’t dive deeply into what was discussed regarding POCSO, but we learned that there are 45 Tibetans settlements spread across India, that there are 3 schools and around 15 monasteries that fall under the jurisdiction of the Settlement Officer, and that the younger generation of Tibetans is starting to shift from preferring alternative dispute resolution to seeking legal justice, which was great news for TLA’s hope of creating systemic change.
Tessa and I spent the rest of the day working from a café before heading to a special performance by the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts (TIPA) for CTA’s Department of Religion and Culture (DRC). Even though the performance was for the DRC, Tenzin had a friend who was able to get us tickets to the show, and Tessa and I got to watch musical reenactments of Tibetan folktales...I think. My favorite part of the show (and Tessa’s) was a comical tale that involved two men in a yak costume (one as the head, one as the rest of the yak) battling a man acting as a nomad who had been tricked into wrangling said yak by a farmer couple...I’m pretty sure. Tessa and I also learned about an interesting project by the DRC in which they are creating a digital library of important religious texts that were all carried from Tibet by Tibetans escaping into India. There is a vexing legal issue that has been encountered with these texts that I found incredibly interesting. While the Office of His Holiness the Dalai Lama and the DRC would like to digitize all these religious texts to preserve and protect them, once the texts are uploaded to the digital library, they are in the public domain as they are thousands of years old documents so any copyright that the Office of His Holiness and the DRC can claim has long expired. However, some of these texts are sacred tantric texts that, traditionally, one can only access upon receiving permission from His Holiness the Dalai Lama and spending a full month in a deep meditative state to prepare for reading the document. Even after this process, one has only earned access to one page of the document. So, disregarding the separate challenge of how to scan these tantric texts when it takes a month of meditation and permission from His Holiness to read even a page, scanning and uploading these texts to the digital library puts them in the public domain, resulting in a violation of Buddhist tradition, wherein the problem lies. To date, there is no solution for this particular intersection of copyright law and Buddhism. Perhaps in a future blog I will have an answer.
I spent the next few days doing research and making a brief foray up the mountain into the neighboring town of Dharamkot, which is primarily an Israeli settlement of ex-militants who left Israel years ago for India in search of peace (read: cannabis and reiki). After dinner, I headed back through the woods at dusk only to encounter yet another monkey who wanted to rob me, but this time I was rescued by Ellie, an English woman on a Royal Enfield motorcycle with a gift for finding damsels in monkey distress just in the nick of time. So, instead of a trip to Delek Hospital for rabies shots I got a motorcycle ride back to my bed and breakfast, a much better end to my evening.
Friday morning began with another breakfast in the eyeline of the barefoot butcher, this time preparing for a meeting with the principal monk of Namgyal Monastery School to discuss his experience regarding the effectiveness and implementation of the POCSO Act. This proved to be perhaps the most interesting meeting Tessa and I have had so far and led me down a rabbit hole in my research, to be addressed next week.
Tessa and I ended our week by having delicious Kashmiri saffron tea with Sunanda, one of the most hospitable women I have ever had the pleasure of meeting. We met her earlier in the week shopping for pashminas and scarves and other gifts to bring home, and she graciously invited us for tea over the weekend. We sat with her for over an hour enjoying our tea and getting to know her and her family's business and love of trout fishing, and left feeling as though we had perhaps made a friend for life from how warm and welcoming she was.