Week 4: Revision and Reflection
This week, Kate and I spent almost all of our time editing. We compiled our (very long) spreadsheet full of research and ideas into a final draft of POCSO-Plus on Monday and then spent the rest of the week rewriting what we’d already written. (In one particularly funny ten-minute span, Kate and I, without realizing it, kept editing the same sentence, one after the other.)
To make sure that we hadn’t contradicted anything in the CTA’s already-existing guidelines about how to deal with sex & gender-based violence (SGBV), I read through them again. Released in 2020, the guidelines are very progressive—arguably more progressive than most U.S. legislation because the policies are premised on a written acknowledgment that they exist within the context of a patriarchal society—and have been helpful for Kate and I, as we write new recommended guidelines about sexual violence against children. One of the major things we’ve been working on in our POCSO-Plus legislation is establishing a redressal mechanism for victims, which does not exist in the original POCSO Act and is sparse in the Indian Penal Code (which primarily deals with the punishment of perpetrators rather than the restitution of victims). However, the CTA’s 2020 Guidelines do establish a redressal mechanism for victims of SGBV, and through the study of that mechanism, Kate and I have been able to draft a similar one for child victims of POCSO-related offenses.
After work on Wednesday, I took a hectic nighttime walk to a small Tibetan restaurant on the second floor of an unassuming building, where I ate the best noodle soup of my life. Thenthuk (the dish's name) is a hand-pulled noodle soup, which I devoured with steamed momos (think: dumplings). At a whopping 300 rupees (the equivalent of around $3.50 USD), it was simultaneously one of the most delicious and least expensive meals I have ever eaten.
On Thursday and Friday, after we’d finished our big draft of recommended guidelines (in the end, we wrote about twenty pages of new legislation), Kate and I wrote a condensed version that we will eventually present to prominent members of the CTA for their consideration. Our presentation is an organized list of problems related to sexual violence against children within Dharamshala's community of Tibetans-in-exile (acquired through our various interviews), followed by an organized list of solutions to those problems (acquired through lots of legal research). Our larger draft of recommended guidelines will be attached to this presentation as an addendum.
We will probably spend a little more time refining these nearly-completed drafts, but will soon move on to our next project: researching the legal status of Tibetans in India, which I’m especially looking forward to. The first month of this internship has given me some of my life's most complicated and emotional education, and I can’t wait for more.