Week 2: Work Contacts and Wider Context
Our second week in Dharamshala began with more interviews. First, Kate and I met with the Tibetan Women’s Helpline (TWH), an office Tibetan women living in exile can call if they’re experiencing Sex and Gender Based Violence (SGBV). We spoke to the TWH about domestic violence (DV) within the community of Tibetans-in-exile in Dharamshala, as well as about the one POCSO case they’ve dealt with since the helpline was established in March 2020. They told us about the many reasons it’s so difficult to help victims of SGBV: a lack of knowledge of India’s laws, large amounts of money and time, language and culture barriers, and a fear that their identity will be leaked to their small community prevent victims from both going to court and reporting their cases in the first place.
The TWH’s job is to raise awareness; they don’t force survivors to go through the court system. Instead, they just try to help. The TWH maintains a shelter for victims of domestic violence where they can stay for up to a week after being rescued from their homes. The helpline also dispenses emergency funding to women who don’t have the money to maintain a life outside the home of their abuser.
We also spoke in length about the POCSO case the TWH had about three years ago, and about how difficult it was to resolve it. A young girl, sexually harassed at eight, was alone with her memories of her assault for two years before her mother, who was not living with her in India, reported the assault to the police. Under the POCSO Act, cases involving sexual violence against children should last no more than one year, but because of the significant language and culture barriers between Indians and Tibetans-in-exile, her case took a year and a half. The girl, now 11, still meets with the TWH for counseling services.
After this meeting, Kate and I rushed to the next, a sit-down with Dharamshala’s Tibetan Settlement Officer. There are forty-five Tibetan settlements in India, and each has an officer who’s a member of that settlement. Settlement officers are elected by their settlement, and work under the CTA. He spoke to us about the POCSO committees in the monasteries and schools of Dharamshala, and about how important he thought it was to establish new CTA guidelines about sexual violence against children.
For the next three days, Kate and I dove into research, trying to unearth case law and legislation that would help us write recommendations for these new guidelines. In our conversations with the WED and the TWH, we heard about so many instances where the POCSO Act wasn’t enough to earn justice for sexually abused children—the Act is a mere sixteen pages, was written in 2012, and has many gaps in its coverage. Everyone we’ve spoken to has emphasized that the guidelines need to be more comprehensive; that they need to be updated to respond to new difficulties that places like the WED face in implementing it. Because of this, we are trying to create recommendations which will both comply with the directives of the POCSO Act and cover new ground. We plan to finish these recommendations (or, as Kate and I have coined our shared document, “POCSO-Plus,”) by the end of this coming week.
On Friday, Kate and I met with the principal of a monastery school, to ask whether the school had ever experienced a POCSO case. Although the principal said they hadn’t, he also said that his monastery may not be representative of the many across Dharamshala. Despite the brevity of our meeting, Kate and I spent a while in the school, and got to look in on classes. First, we saw the youngest students, all around four years old, doing their daily exercises; when we peeked in, they were all attempting to stand up from a seated position without using their hands, and laughing as they fell back down. We next observed a computer class, and then saw two different classrooms: one where students memorize Tibetan manuscripts, and one where they learn English. The former classroom, true to its purpose, was filled with cushions and low desks so that the children could sit on the floor in a Tibetan style as they memorized Tibetan works; the latter held western sitting desks, because the classroom was for learning a western language.
In the principal’s office, along with a collection of beautiful old books, was a large oil painting of different images of the Dalai Lama superimposed on top of each other. In some, he laughed; in some, he wore his glasses; in a few, he wore a eggshell blue cowboy hat. About a hundred smiling Dalai Lamas looked down at the principal’s desk.
Earlier in the week, after work, Kate and I went to the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts (TIPA) to see some traditional Tibetan dancing. The performance, which was about an hour long, was accompanied by a live band. Although we could not understand the lyrics to the songs, which were all sung in Tibetan, we were entranced by the music and the movement, and laughed at the comical rendition of a nomad woman and her husband tricking young nomads who came across their land into wrangling their Yaks for them so that they could more easily make butter.
The performance was also attended by the CTA’s Department of Religion and Culture (DRC). The next day, when we mentioned to our boss that we’d caught the same performance as the DRC, he told us about the case he’s been working on for them: over the last few years, the DRC has been trying to digitize their documents, which include important religious texts which were rescued from Tibet by Tibetans escaping to India. However, some of the texts are Tantric documents which deal with magical techniques and rituals. One must obtain permission from His Holiness the Dalai Lama and meditate for a month to see a single page. The issue is obvious: how will these pages be scanned? Although this question hasn’t been answered yet, our boss is working with the DRC to find potential solutions that both honor the sacred nature of the texts and ensure they can be preserved in digital form.
At the end of a long week, Kate and I went shopping. The very last shop we entered was run by a woman named Sunanda, who invited us to come back and have tea with her the next morning. We went, and for an hour on Sunday morning we drank a delicious Kashmiri Saffron tea and heard all about Sunanda’s travels around the world.