Therapeutic techniques work on the assumption that the cause of distress is only within the individual. However, an individual’s mental health is also affected by various forms of systemic discrimination. So for Dalits, therapy involves narrating trauma from one therapist to another, in the hope that they will eventually find a caste-sensitive professional.
In August 2020, Global March Against Child Labour released an evidence-based report, providing an overview of the situation of child labour with a gender lens in sugarcane harvesting in India. The report highlights that children are pushed into hazardous child labour due to structural poverty among harvesters, most of whom are from Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes, also referred to as DBA (Dalit, Bahujan, Adivasi/Tribal) in this article, because of exploitative hiring practices resulting in debt bondage. It was found that traditional gender-based norms contributed significantly to child labour by normalising unequal wages and unpaid family work.