Scholarships that are helping to change the world
Part four: empowering vulnerable communities in India and Bangladesh
Oxford graduates are doing some incredible things out in the world today. So far in this series we have shared stories of alumni who are helping to tackle major environmental challenges (think flooding in Nepal and human-wildlife conflict in India), but from part four onwards we’re going to be celebrating the work of graduates who are making a difference in other ways: by protecting marginalised communities, strengthening global democracy and much more.
Each person we meet in this series was supported through their studies by a donor-funded scholarship, which enabled them to focus on developing skills and knowledge for their future careers free from financial worry.
So, without any further delay, let us introduce you to Michelle.
Michelle Mendonca: ‘Human rights violations are too grave to tackle one at a time’
Michelle has worked as a lawyer in the human rights sector for almost two decades. In 2018 she moved from Mumbai, India to Oxford to study for an MSt in International Human Rights Law, supported by a Commonwealth Allan and Nesta Ferguson Scholarship. The experience transformed the way she thinks about her work, and she now focuses on providing support to NGOs in India and Bangladesh that help marginalised communities vulnerable to human trafficking and child labour.
I started out working in the corporate sector. I was working on banking operations when I met a friend who told me about children living in the brothels of Mumbai. It was horrifying to learn that in my own city children were being raped every day for profit, so that’s when I joined the human rights sector.
My initial work included helping the police with rescues, supporting the children and testifying in court, but over time my focus shifted more towards advocacy and training. I realised that taking children to court is such a gruelling ordeal, there needed to be more work done on sensitising prosecutors and judges. So I shifted my focus towards mainly running sensitisation sessions for them in different parts of the country.
This work also gave me the opportunity to advocate for policy changes, such as obtaining orders that said that children and women who wanted to go back to their home countries should not be detained in India simply because of delays in their court testimony. Their right to return home had to be given priority and their testimony had to be taken speedily.
I applied to Oxford because I wanted to be able to look at my work in the framework of the global human rights sector. That was largely what attracted me to the course — not just to do the little bit that I was doing but to see how it fitted into the bigger picture.
Oxford deepened my knowledge of many areas that I had been working on for a long time. Although I had been working with women and children for many years, I don’t think I had read deeply about their rights before, so that was very helpful. I also took environmental law, which I see as being connected as environmental issues also exacerbate trafficking.
Climate change makes vulnerable communities a lot more vulnerable, so they are forced to take up exploitative work. In Bangladesh, for example, the rising water around Daulatdia led to the closure of some ferry berths, and so trucks were being stationed there for longer than ever before. It became home to a thriving brothel primarily because the truck drivers increased the demand for sex work there.
Since the Oxford programme I’ve focused mostly on providing technical support to groups in India that work with children at risk of child labour, and with groups in Bangladesh that work with children who are at risk of commercial sexual exploitation. The benefit of working in these two countries is that their governments are keen to reduce poverty and exploitation, and I’ve helped groups to strategise and plan efforts to reduce the unique barriers to accessing services that marginalised groups face there.
I’ve always been inspired by Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s statement that ‘we are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.’
— Michelle Mendonca
Legal systems throughout the world tend to deter victims rather than perpetrators of sexual violence. Survivors must travel across long distances, suffer disruption to their lives and often brave intimidation and stigma to have their day in court. Many survivors have told me that the most trauma they endured after their trafficking experience was their testimony in court. They often wonder, even if their perpetrators are convicted, whether the trauma and ordeal was worth it.
When I’ve shared these concerns with prosecutors and judges, I found that most of them recognise the toll on survivors but lack clear guidance on how to protect them. Listening to survivors and those that work most closely with them, I was part of efforts to bring these concerns before the Indian Supreme Court. This case resulted in victims of human trafficking being able to testify via video-conferencing and will help judges and prosecutors to shield survivors from trauma and enable truthful testimony.
What initially motivated me to apply to Oxford was the desire to provide cutting-edge legal support to people who needed it most. But in the last few years conversations with survivors have convinced me that, while easing access to justice is an important goal, what’s uppermost in their minds is a better life for their children. One way to achieve this is by improving their access to tangible government support.
In India, part of my work has included providing support to groups working to widen access to healthcare insurance, which serves as a protection against extortionate loans. Many marginalised communities and children are forced into labour when they borrow money at extortionate rates of interest for emergency healthcare costs. Inability to repay forces families and children into labour. Many groups have been successful in getting government officials to run healthcare camps in remote areas. When I’ve visited these villages, I’ve heard from countless community members how they have not only received healthcare access, but their experience has provided other community members with hope that their families and children won’t be forced into a future they dread.
I am also part of efforts to provide support to groups in Bangladesh that work with street children and with children who live in brothels. They yearn to access education and skills but often lack a birth certificate that is necessary for school admissions and access to government social services. Apart from depriving them of other opportunities, this lack of a birth certificate can expose them to child sexual exploitation as their age can be falsified with impunity. Easing access to birth registration for street children as well as children who live in brothels is an important first step to provide them with options for a dignified life.
The Oxford degree has made me much more rights-focused. Before I was looking at the issue more in terms of charity, in other words helping people who were in need. But now I’ve realised it’s not charity, it’s a matter of rights; it’s about individuals having rights and the fact that these rights are protected by law — they are not simply at the mercy of the government or well-intentioned individuals. That was one of the changes that the Oxford degree really helped me to make, and I think it’s an important change, when you have a paradigm shift in how you look at the people you are supporting.
Oxford also really helped me with my strategising and writing skills. I don’t think I would have been able to study there without the scholarship — it was a lot of money to put away and without it I would probably have had to take an educational loan, which would have deterred me.
I’ve always been inspired by Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s statement that ‘we are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.’ What I find most rewarding is to support game-changing work at systemic levels: I hope to do more that directly and tangibly impacts people on the ground in a way that is scalable, because human rights violations are just too grave to tackle one at a time.
