Berkley Center

Background: Listening to Belinda Bennet, it is obvious that when she sees a problem, she finds a solution and mobilizes others to help. With a background in social work and mental health, Belinda’s career includes addressing sexual trafficking, alcoholism, domestic violence, and street children. Her gender expertise brought her to the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), where she spoke with Crystal Corman on March 11, 2015. In this interview, Belinda speaks of her parent’s inspiration and pivotal moments that determined her career ambitions. She also speaks about her 11 years working directly with Christian Aid in South Asia, especially working on social exclusion and the most excluded communities of India—the Dalits and Adivasis. Belinda also speaks about her work in Bangladesh.

Please tell me about your work at Change Alliance and its relationship to Christian Aid.

Recently Christian Aid has gone through a change and has registered a whole new subsidiary, a private limited company that offers advisory services. At Change Alliance we work with a range of stakeholders like civil society, government and private sector. This change came about, in part due to changes in laws governing international NGOs. Christian Aid has worked in India for about 60 years, but governments in South Asia want more trade agreements rather than to receive international aid. It’s also the result of the structural adjustment policies of the 1980s.

Change Alliance Pvt, is completely an Indian entity. Christian Aid appointed me as the CEO of this new entity as of April 1, 2013. I have worked with Christian Aid for 11 years. I started as the country head for India, and in 2007 I became the regional head of South Asia. Change Alliance has been given the mandate to manage Christian Aid’s South Asia programs. Right now we are in the process of building our profile and enhancing our client base to make use of our services.

What inspired you to work on social justice issues?

I grew up in South Tamil Nadu in a rural setting. My father was a minister for the Church of South India, and my mother was a school teacher. I think my orientation and ultimate decision to work for social justice issues stems from the lives of my parents. As a child, I saw half of a village wiped out by cholera. I remember seeing my father sitting outside of the house, waiting for people to come for prayers and blessings, especially on Tuesdays and Fridays (these are auspicious days in Hindu culture). I also saw poverty all around me. My parent’s didn’t have much, but they both had a job. My father actually was instrumental in helping the first generation of young girls in the village to go to college. Nobody from that village had gone outside of the village to study, but I remember people coming in my house and my father helping them to fill out their application.

In our community, the church used to be a hub where everyone is welcome. During summer holidays, we used to have lots of social activities and plays. My father really encouraged youth in our church to do dialogue and we had very strong youth groups. He would encourage asking lots of question about the church, God, and love. ‘Faith in Action’ was always the predominant topic.

My parents were my inspiration. My father used to say, “Our house is always open.” I remember coming home one evening from grad school after taking two night buses and arriving home by midnight. Once there, I realized the doors at home were not locked. I just walked in and saw many people sleeping! My brother used to invite children to come to our house to study since we had electricity. These children would come and study, and then sleep there! My mother used to feed them. My father used to joke that if a thief comes here, he will take pity on us and leave something! When I look back today, I realize that my parents never owned anything. They were so giving.

Another story: my parents went out to meet with families. Once my mother told me that a family’s cow had died; this is a huge loss for the family as it’s all they have got. So we went to comfort them as they mourned their loss. This kind of thing formed me. As a teenager, I went to a boarding liberal high school. For college, I went to a Christian liberal arts and sciences college. I joined the Student Christian Movement. This is where I first did a social analysis about why there is poverty in India and why there is gender discrimination. It was a long journey.

What areas did you study in school? What training brought you to today?

I did a bachelor’s in chemistry. My father did pre-university but he could not complete his college. He was the eldest son of a single mother. He decided to leave pre-university and take a job because of pressure to help his family. Since my father used to talk about chemistry so much, I studied this just to please my father. After finishing the degree, I decided this is not what I want to do.

They did not have career guidance at that time, but I did not know I wanted to do. I happen to hear about Madurai Institute of Social Work, so I decided to apply for social work for my master's. It was a huge jump from science! But I thoroughly enjoyed that course. I then went for my second masters in clinical psychiatric social work because I was so fascinated about people. I had a placement or internship in an organization Arulagam, founded by the Tamilnad Theological Seminary headed by a Methodist Missionary Ms. Jean Hay working with women undergoing trials usually referred to as under-trials. During that phase of the trials, the government recognized such homes as safe places for women to stay during their trial. When I finished my master's, they invited me to work for them. That was my first job. I learnt to appreciate the goodness of life and the small but important things in life. Ms. Hay’s selflessness and dedication inspired my young mind.

What are undertrials? Can you explain your work at this home?

There is law in India called SITA (Suppression of Immoral Traffic in Women and Girls Act). Many women and girls were booked but the perpetuators always got away. I remember going and hanging around the court house. Pimps would come to take the girls away on the day of the verdict. Some of them will be under judicial custody in the Central Prison of Madurai. On Sunday mornings I went along with Ms. Hay to talk to these women and girls to tell them about our shelter, explaining that it is a safe place to go to after their verdict or after serving their jail terms. The women have a choice to come to our shelter instead of going back to the old life [of prostitution]. We used to talk to the girls when the trial was coming to counsel them about responding to the judge’s questions. The judge would ask these trafficked women where they would like to go. We explained our center so they could choose to come stay with us.

Because of my mental health background, I found that many women are vulnerable to sexual trafficking partly because they are sold by their brothers or fathers. I also found many of the women vulnerable in other ways, such as borderline mental retardation or young women running away from difficult home situation from a number of problems—incest to forced child marriage, escaping poverty for gainful employment. It all looked so wrong and the social protection measures were so lacking. The shelter also had a program for women who got out of prison or women whose husbands were serving a life term but the women didn’t have safety at home. The women could come and stay there, bringing their children. The stigma and exploitation of such women was so appalling.

While the women were at this shelter, they were taught several skills. We offered occupational training, mostly very traditional skills like tailoring, weaving, mat making, or doll making. We also used to have exhibitions to sell these items. The idea was for these women to become independent and be able to find earnings for themselves so they could put their children through school. It was amazing work—but also emotionally very draining. I introduced a new possibility of distance learning, as well as women and girls joining open school programs, both of which became very popular.

Were you also giving the women in this shelter pyscho-social support?

Yes. I stayed in the center itself and provided pyscho-social support or counseling. The shelter used to take women unconditionally as walk-ins. As I worked with people, they would slowly open up and share their stories. I heard many insightful stories about the extent to which people are pushed. I met a young girl, barely 13, who had run away because her parents were arranging her marriage with an older man in his 60s. Because of this, she ran away. She disclosed her situation to me and also told me that she had heard about our center through the pastor in her village. She pledged her gold nose stud, which is gold and all her life earning from grazing goats for a wage. She wanted to go redeem her only possession with the money she had earned in the shelter. We sent her to the village with another social worker. But I got a call from that social worker who had learned that she was already married to an older man. Now the village was upset and this worker called me to come help. I jumped in our van and went to the village.

After much protest and lobbying from women’s groups at that time, the Indian government had a new law that police stations cannot keep women overnight in lock up. It’s not safe for women. Once in the village of this girl, I referred to this law. I argued with the police inspector; he said, “How can you be more concerned about this girl than her husband and family?” I told him she is not legally married, only married in front of a temple. And she is 13. He got very annoyed with me. He said to me, “Leave her here and you go. Come back tomorrow.” I told him that I was not leaving and also, does he know this particular law? This got him more agitated, and it was already 11:00 p.m. Eventually, I was dropping names and I asked him to allow me to make a call from his police station to my lawyer. At only 24 years of age, I put up a brave front and we did not leave her there. She went back to school, and we fought this case through the legal system.

In this case, we realized this young girl had been forced to marry a man in his 60s, against her will. Because the cultural norms are so strong, no one would speak against it. Even the police office said, “How can you be more caring than her husband?”

What were some of the things you learned from working with trafficked women?

This experience brought me a lot of insight about understanding and becoming non-judgmental about prostitution, including how women are pushed into it. I learned about invisible structures that are so oppressive, denying women access to justice, choices, and a dignified life.

After this job, I taught social work in a college for a term. Then I worked in Government Rajaji Hospital the biggest public hospital in Madurai, my hometown, for five, six years in Advanced Centre for Health and Behaviour funded by the Indian Council of Medical Research, Government of India. At that time the government opened five such centers on health and behavior around India. We were researching many things and during 1986-88 HIV became a big public health issue. We interviewed every single person who came to the sexually transmitted disease department. In my entire experience at this center, seeing hundreds of women and men, there was only one woman who said, “If you ask me, it’s my choice. I have come to this profession [prostitution]. I don’t respect any men.” While talking with her, I felt that it really was a choice for her. She was the only woman who said by choice she went into prostitution. I felt she was defying the societal norm and was angry about how she had been treated.

But I heard so many heart-breaking stories from women. I heard stories of a father taking a girl away telling her that she needs to meet someone, then a stranger comes and money changes hands. Even when I worked as a counselor with the girls in the shelter, I heard so much anger in these girls. So much anger towards everybody, towards authority. They felt so let down. And in such scenarios, the father and mother do not come to visit. They tell a different story, that the girl has abandoned them. It’s really a trap! So the anger in these girls also involves her inability to confront her father for what he has done.

As I interviewed these men and women, inevitably there would be another story to the story. I remember, working on a case where this young woman was forcibly married to her maternal uncle, who was terminally ill with cancer. He was dying, and they made her marry him. She comes from a particular geography that is very orthodox where widowed women only wear white. When the husband died, they took away all the property and she was locked away in a room, almost like an animal. They will only throw food. We rescued her from that situation; she was 19 or 20 years old. She filed a case, which we helped her with. And again, the abuse continued! They said she is a widow. Why does she need money? As if she has no choice in life and can’t enjoy anything. I met this girl again a few years later. She told me that she will never forget. In that case, she got the property.I found that each individual came with their own story, and sometimes they were broken emotionally, mentally.

You’ve also worked on addiction. How did you get into that issue?

I went for my second master's and during an internship at a family counseling center I had to do some case studies. I was working with a senior therapist. Let me tell you about a typical case. In this family, the mother was a gynecologist and father was a scientist. All three of their sons had major psychiatric problem. The youngest one came to me and he was a multiple addict already. He was in high school. This young person had so much: intelligence, money, education, his parents but he felt his whole life was destroyed. At the end, he committed suicide and died. Seeing some of these things had profoundly affected me. I decided that I would do a massive campaign and for the next ten years or more, I worked on addiction counseling and my Ph.D. is in families of alcoholics. I also negotiated with a local hospital to open a counselling center for young people addicted to drugs/alcohol and their families. I name it Sugapradha—a feminine word means ‘towards health or life.’

You’ve said that one thing led to another in your life. What came next?

During this work, I came to understand the domestic violence angle. Violence against women was introduced to me when working with hundreds of young people, alcoholics and their families. There were so many myths about drugs and alcohol.

I also started working with hundreds of young people through the Madurai Kamaraj University’s National Service Scheme (NSS) Program. I had the idea (and found the funds) to frame 30 posters for an exhibition. On campus, I would leave the exhibition with volunteers to answer questions and direct people on where they can get help. The exhibit concluded with a workshop with students. The next day I found 10 people standing at my door. They wanted to volunteer! So I started a volunteer program for young people to channel their energy. Students choose a club, which basically helps people gain sensitivity to social issues. I worked with Prof. Raju who then volunteered to run a leadership program of sorts of these students: communication, team building, setting goals, and time management. This was from 1986 until I left Madurai to join Christian Aid in 2003. During all of this, I had three goals or core messages I wanted to touch: gender, say no to drugs, and communalism (dealing with social exclusion, caste). I then identified the particularly bright youth with potential and about once in six months, I would host a six-day leadership program for them in-house. I learnt young people are looking for opportunities, looking for mentors to have crucial conversations; many of them have low self-esteem. The biggest contribution of this program was helping young people make responsible choices, build their self-esteem, and be connected with issues outside of themselves.

How did you get into gender work?

I self-educated myself. I went for a lot of training to understand how gender operates. And then I myself became a gender trainer. I started gender training for organizations, communities, and industries.A newspaper called me to do a training for their staff. If you call it ‘gender training’ no one will come, so I designed a program called stress management. And they all came. The organization wanted to introduce women working at senior levels and they found much resistance. I was hired to help ease and give way for this among the staff.

So your counseling work led you to human trafficking, alcoholism, domestic violence, and youth leadership. What’s next?

I started a program for street and working children. As a part of the youth program, we took the students to a village. We found men and women working in a quarry. Men are paid double the wages there. In the heat of the day as they broke the large rocks into smaller pieces, I saw a woman working. She was covering her head and had her child, maybe a year old, standing in her shadow to stay cooler. In response, I thought these working women should have some places where they can drop their children off. So I started an urban poverty program called Shakti, which means “women’s power.” I imagined this particular organization should be by the women, of the women, and for the women. That was my dream. I invited a few women from the community and they joined with me.

This is also how I got introduced to the issue of discrimination and social exclusion. In the street children program, I realized every child on the street is coming from either the indigenous community or dalit community. Today it’s a very successful program touching many lives.

Meanwhile this alcoholic counseling program was growing with TVS Sri Chakra Tyres and TVS Rubber and some of their allied units asking me to reach 5,000 to 6,000 workers as part of what they called a family-counseling program. How many people can I counsel? So I decided to train others to do this work. That became a NGO later.

With all of these things going on, how did you come to work at Christian Aid?

In 2003 I was ready for a change. I had all these volunteer activities going on and became a consultant working with local, national, and international organizations on social justice, gender and poverty concerns for a decade. The time was right and, I applied to Christian Aid. My work with them for the last 11 years has been very focused on the issue of social exclusion—from patriarchy, from the caste system. I saw that massive anti-poverty programs don’t deliver because they are not designed with group-specific strategies. In design, there is exclusion.

My team analyzed exclusion whenever there was a humanitarian response. We looked to see how excluded communities were involved/considered on the receiving end. We documented how humanitarian responses can be inclusive and gender sensitive. Let me give you an example from the tsunami that hit Tamil Nadu. In this fishing community, there is a cultural practice to collect a tax based on who is in the home. We found that men and boys were worth more or taxed more. After the tsunami, this cultural practice continued; donors came to the community with resources and handed them over to the community to distribute. They would know best how to distribute. But to our horror, if a household was headed by a woman, it received less. We documented this exclusion and were able to change the policy in India. We did a lot of work on the national disaster policy so it would be inclusive and gender sensitive.

Your work on exclusion is also about culture. How do balance working for social inclusion that means altering cultural practices?

This is the biggest challenge. We found that in the Red Cross code of conduct, there is something called neutrality. People were applying this by saying, “Oh! This is their cultural practice so let us not touch anything.” This is what people interpreted as neutrality. As an example, after a tsunami, we saw pregnant women belonging to the dalit community turned away from common shelters. We also noticed that the power structures were becoming stronger, trying to take most of what was coming as relief.

So thinking beyond the immediate crisis, how do you continue to work with such groups? We choose to amplify this issue through writing and research. We came up with an idea of a social equity watch. This is something like a planning tool using participatory methodologies. We ask “How inclusive are these change makers? How inclusive is civil society? How inclusive are government programs?”

Where there is an emergency, we use this as a kind of baseline survey. In the case of the 2004 tsunami, I met with partners in Chennai in February. I asked the civil society partners, “How inclusive is your mapping? Are you sure you didn't leave any village out, because in India we have this two village system (there is a primary village and a second which is the dalit colony).” The partners were a bit upset, thinking I didn’t trust them. I asked them to go back and do the same baseline again. A partner found that eight villages in our area did not receive anything from the first day. They are all dalit. This shows that social exclusion happens by default.

It sounds like you have to work persistently, even with local partners, to ask them to consider different types of exclusion.

It requires just hanging in there, and pushing changes in practices, changing mindsets, bringing evidence. The social equity audit basically asks partners to hold up a mirror to themselves. We found that in organizations working with dalits, all the foot soldiers are from the dalit community but there were very few as senior managers or in leadership. Same thing with women. So what was different in our approach is that we wanted evidence so we can talk about it.

We say we are working for the most excluded but after working with them 60 years, we can’t produce one leader! We don’t have NGOs or institutions headed by them. So we at Christian Aid decided that in emergency situations we need strong, big partners but we also want small partners—including those headed by typically excluded community leadership. Actually, this approach changed our thinking. If the civil society is the voice of the voiceless, how do we create opportunities for them to learn, widen their scope of work?

You work regionally with Christian Aid. Can you tell me about your work in Bangladesh?

Last year we went through a strategy review since the previous strategy was expiring. Much of the work in Bangladesh is on livelihood programs. We also do emergency response and disaster risk reduction. We worked with a regional program with the support of the European Commission on human rights and building the capacity of human rights defenders in Bangladesh, India, and Nepal. Again how do we make the justice system work by empowering the communities, organizing them, finding champions within the system, and through evidence, make the system accountable?

As a Christian organization, how does Christian Aid work with partners?

We work with everybody aligned with our vision and values and with a heart for the poor. It’s an inclusive approach. We also work with faith-based partners like Christian Commission for Development in Bangladesh. It’s a network of churches working together in development—and Church of Bangladesh

How do you see religion in your work in Bangladesh?

Bangladeshis are very religious people. Based on my understanding of Bangladesh, people are first a Bengali and second, a member of their religion. There is a strong Bengali cultural identity and language identity. But something is changing because of the rise of fundamentalism in Bangladesh. Every time I go there, I am shocked. There is a 24/7 Peace TV with constant religious offerings. People are very religious, and people are very simple. In my last 11 years visiting Bangladesh, I hardly saw women covering their head (with hijab). But now, I see lot of women wearing the black hajib. And on my last visit, I saw two women on the street wearing full cover in blue, similar to what women wear in Afghanistan. Suddenly half of them are covering their head. So all are this things are visible changes you see.

How does Christian Aid approach gender in its work?

In our previous strategy, we included sex-disaggregated data very deliberately. Then we asked, how many women head the organizations you have? I wanted to go further on gender. We are also in the process of writing a paper just for our own understanding on gender and intersectionality. We also included gender in a paper on social exclusion. I feel that since last year, the organization is interested in doing more gender work. Since I’m now leading the massive transitions in establishing Change Alliance, I’ve passed that work onto a colleague at Christian Aid. The gender policy has two aspects—developing a strategy for the organization and second, how do we look at gender in our programs? In the South Asia region we already have a Gender Task Force. It adds more intellectual rigor in our discussion and deliberation. We’re doing a peer-to-peer review of our country annual reports and looking for gender words in the documents.

I am encouraging my country managers to have some country indicators. For example, I want to know if each country program has a gender policy. Then in turn, we ask if each partner has a gender policy. Next, we see how the gender policy is resourced. How many women-headed organizations does a country program have? Such things are in the making. Christian Aid is doing big time work with religious leaders. As a first step, we are having a consultation next month in the U.K. working with Christian religious leaders on the topic of violence against women. The goal is discuss how to be sensitive, how to speak out, and how to use the spaces they have to communicate messages about violence against women. We also need to work with other religious leaders. First, you need an institutional capability for that. For example, currently we do not have the capability to talk with the right wing Hindu religious leaders. But in India the whole women’s movement got fragmented or lost its energy. So first we need to ask ourselves, “Do we have the institutional capacity to talk to an imam while having a Christian faith-based identity?” A few efforts in the past involved Muslim religious leaders to use the mosque for awareness programs and trainings. A certain level of wisdom and institutional capability is needed—but we need to begin!

I feel that in all religions, when left to an individual’s limited interpretation, religion can become a very oppressive tool. In the private space of marriage or family, there may be no room for questions. So I think influencing culture and religion go hand in hand. I find that Bangladeshi women are pious with simple faith. Today, many Bangladeshi women migrate to Saudi Arabia as domestic workers. There is no social protection for them and though there are some people talking about it, the Bangladesh government is reluctant to bring it up with the Saudi government. The current patronage balance is not to the advantage of women and the poor men who migrate for work. But I sense that the religious influence from Saudi is coming back into Bangladesh.

What major gender issues are there in Bangladesh?

Violence against women is a big issue—but hidden. As far as I know, the domestic violence bill has not been passed. Worker’s rights is also important, especially since so many women become domestic workers. Migrant labor policies and practices are not women-friendly. I would say in Bangladesh there is a benign patriarchy. Everybody uses the proper development language, but everywhere you go, you see patriarchy. For example in a meeting, if a senior person say something that needs a debate, nobody will contradict that person. I see this as benign patriarchy at work.

Where do you see exclusion in your work in Bangladesh?

If you look at education, Bangladesh is doing better than India; that’s the reality. In all the social indicators Bangladesh is doing much better than India. In An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions, the author compares the growth between Bangladesh and India. He points to caste as one of the reasons Bangladesh does not have the barriers that India does. But I see that many of the migrant dalits live in isolated communities in Dhaka life is deplorable. And as many Hindus fled after the war, the most marginalized community stayed in Dhaka. Most of those Hindus are coming from the most excluded dalit communities. Christian Aid and our partners are beginning to work with these communities. We are profiling the issues and seeking redress. There are some positive signs.

You are speaking at a few events at CSW. What are your thoughts on the event so far?

We have a lot more work to do. Yes, in the last 20 years, the focus on violence against women has made some inroads. But changing public opinion and cultural beliefs will take a longer time. This is the core issue we are struggling to crack. We have a long way to go. In the coming years, I think we should give full attention to the economic rights of women. That is something I am going to speak about today (panel titled “Technology and Economic Empowerment of Women in Fragile States). I also know that economic liberation will not fully liberate women. Are we able to change the norms of the society? We should more and more work with men and boys.