Report by CREID Intersections series Religious Inequalities and Gender. Nov 2020. The theme of this special collection of papers, the lived experiences of women who belong to religious minorities, has been a blind spot both in international development policy engagement and in much of the international scholarship on women, security and peace.
Caste references in Human Rights Watch's World Report 2020.
22nd EU NGO Human Rights Forum - The Impact of New Technologies on Human Rights
The Dalit Solidarity Network – Finland (DSNFi) celebrated its tenth anniversary as an online celebration on 16 November 2020. The celebration brought together more than thirty participants from Nepal, India, UK and many parts of Finland.
A survey of domestic workers revealed across six northeastern Indian states, a large majority of maids, cooks and other domestic staff worked seven days a week and were not given a single day of annual leave without having their pay docked.
The focus of this report is to use evidence-based information to highlight the issue of child labour in the sugarcane sector within its key socio-economic intersections such as gender, caste, migration and structural inequalities in the Indian agriculture sector. Children are pushed into hazardous labour due to structural poverty amongst the harvesters, most of whom are Tribals, Adivasi and Dalit. The intersections of migration, debt bondage, gender-based risks and structured social inequalities such as that of Dalits and Adivasis together play a role in making the problem of child labour more complex. All of these cross cutting issues must be kept in mind when addressing child labour in the sugarcane supply chain and in other agricultural crops in India.
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.
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“the ‘Beijing Platform for Action’… laid the roadmap for ‘gender mainstreaming’ in public policies, recognising the distinct disadvantages faced by women from marginalised communities.”
"oppression and discrimination experienced by members of the community have been multidimensional – from brutal physical, emotional, psychological and sexual abuse to everyday microaggressions, leaving a haunting imprint on the psyches of the people."
A comprehensive report on the status of Dalit women in Nepal has been released by IDSN member the Feminist Dalit Organization Nepal (FEDO) with support from IDSN and Womankind. The report details the situation, challenges and recommendations within poverty, education, health, safety, political participation, Dalit women in the media and Dalit girl children in Nepal. It is clear from the report that while progress has been made, immediate and sustained action targeted at Dalit women in Nepal is crucial.
In IDSN’s 10th December statement on the occasion of the 70th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we share our dream that one day love and respect for human rights will prevail over brutal caste oppression and injustice.
The National Dalit Movement for Justice (NDMJ) is formulating guidelines, for the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment in India, on how to prevent caste-based violence in schools as part of its campaign of achieving zero discrimination.
The Concluding Observations of the May 2018 review of Nepal, by the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), includes dozens of remarks relating to caste-based discrimination and several strongly worded recommendations on fighting it. Read the full IDSN analysis
Dalit children being made to sit and eat separately from other children, being beaten, abused and forced to do humiliating tasks, form part of the cases uncovered during the ‘Zero Discrimination in School Education’ campaign in India. These cases are highlighted in the report ‘Exclusion in Schools – A Study on Practice of Discrimination and Violence’ by the National Dalit Movement for Justice (NDMJ-NCDHR) and the Centre for Social Equity and Inclusion.
Seven-year-old Laxmi Nepali of Bhagwati Aulagurta VDC of Jajarkot district wakes up early in the morning and rushes toward a nearby school. While most of the children of her age carry books and other educational materials, she is seen holding a sack on one hand and a hammer on the other en route to Nepal National Secondary School. For the sake of Rs 100, she crushes stones into gravels in front of the school from early morning. Though it is not her wish, she is obliged to do so to sustain her life. She completes crushing a sack full of gravels from 7 am to 9 am in the morning. “I give this money to my parents and they will buy me books and new clothes,” Laxmi said.
Raksha Ram Chamar (Harijan) from Madhesi Dalit community has been awarded the first Darnal International Award for Social Justice
Founder President of Feminist Dalit Organisation Durga Sob today said that despite the promulgation of the new statute, women were still unable to exercise their rights.