From the Editor's Desk

Dear Reader, 

Let us take you through a scenario. A survivor has reached out to Bembala. Crossing mental and physical boundaries, she has found the courage to take action and seek a reprieve. Step 1- done. And this is where we come in. We are here to hold her hand and help her with her choices, no matter what they are, even if it includes going to the police station. Step 2- completed… Despite the mental energy the survivor and the befriender have exacted in coming to a solution that benefits the survivor, the hurdles don’t end there. Going to the police to file a complaint sounds rather straightforward, but it is not always so, in the experience of many women’s organizations, including ours. To illustrate this point, here is an example of what happened to one such survivor:

A survivor we recently helped decided that she wanted to file an official complaint against her abusive spouse, and we accompanied her and her son to the police station. Our biggest hurdle that day turned out to be a jurisdictional issue. This wasn’t the right police station where the survivor could submit her complaint to. Her husband’s address did not fall within their “jurisdiction”!! We were then rerouted to a second police station, more than 5 km away, and we made the journey in the middle of the day. Amid our endless waiting, we were informed once again that we were at the wrong station. Jurisdiction struck again!

How can one be optimistic when the rules and regulations that are in place to help us, are acting as hurdles for us to cross, just to get across a complaint? This is just step three and it remains a huge deterrent for survivors to come forward. No one wants to endure the hassle of going up and down various police stations and narrating the same thing repeatedly. While being directed to the third police station, we were left wondering how the system could even function with such impediments. And after what seemed like an eternity, the survivor successfully lodged the complaint. We checked step three off our list.

Through the years, we have understood that the police and the legal system, while they exist to help us, have their hands tied up due to existing policies. Besides these jurisdictional runarounds, lodging restraining orders, or FIR’s or any sort of complaint, invariably runs into some sort of snag. While requiring proof that the abuse happened makes sense, proof that the couple are legally wed for instance is irrelevant, and constitutes one of the umpteen other legal requirements that need to be met before the police can show up to help. Protection against abusive partners also runs into lack of adequate policemen to do the job, and cannot be guaranteed endlessly.

While police sensitization to domestic violence related abuse, mental distress and the woman’s legal rights are on the rise, better implementation of the law, and perhaps even some sort of reform of current policies may need to happen. We hope that a dialogue between the officials of the law and members of women’s support groups can happen very soon, in order to hash out practical reform to the system, which is meant to work for survivors of abuse, and not serve as yet another source of distress in their lives.

Following the success at APSA, we had the incredible opportunity to interact with Jyothi and her team at Milana- an initiative built on the empathetic empowerment of HIV patients. The main focus of Milana is to give those affected with HIV, the proper encouragement and tools so that they can empower themselves and talk about the stigma around HIV and educate their community about it. Their operating ideology is ‘We are not alone’. We addressed queries about domestic violence, child abuse issues and other legalities surrounding it. It was a great breakthrough as they got to know about how our befriending works and how they can benefit from it.

In addition, we were roped in to talk to four 5th graders (of SNIS) about gender equality, a week before their program. They were a very inquisitive bunch and used their learnings from us to put a small show up on gender equality on the day of Fete. Bembala was very proud to have mentored these bright future citizens onward in their journey. 

Apart from conducting workshops, we also participated in some. Like the NIMHANs (National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences) discussion held in June with like-minded organizations, and the conversation held in June at Aweksha (a Bangalore based organization that is also involved in working against gender based violence and discrimination) as well. The NIMHANS seminar was focused around gender-based violence and mental health issues experienced by women with mental illness, intellectual and other disabilities. Whereas the Aweksha seminar was centered around the impact of domestic violence on the mental health of survivors. The importance of mental health and self-care is one of our biggest priorities and we’re always finding ourselves learning, reading and implementing more mental health care techniques into our methodologies.

Updates from Bembala:

In terms of survivor visitations at our Vydehi center this last quarter, we have had 14 cases (with 13 new cases and 1 revisit). There were 91 follow-ups and 2 Police station visits. On our helpline, we have had 43 calls of which 16 were from new survivors, 14 were enquiry calls and 12 were repeat calls from survivors.

Until next time!