Posts by Neena Bhandari

Why rehabilitation is as vital as rescue for child trafficking survivors

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Photo Credit (captured via video link): ©Neena Bhandari

By Neena Bhandari

Sydney, 29.03.2021 (IPS): Twelve-year-old Babloo’s (Name changed) parents, who worked as daily wage agricultural labourers in the eastern Indian state of Bihar, were finding it difficult to feed their family of six. They had recently lost their eldest son to sudden illness, when a distant relative convinced them to send Babloo with him to work in a city. He promised to pay Rs 5000 (US$70) a month, a significant amount for the impoverished family.

The relative took Babloo and his 14-year-old cousin from the village and handed them to a trafficker, who took them by rail to Jaipur, capital of the western Indian state of Rajasthan, nearly 1200 kilometre away from their home.

“We were locked in a small room. The windows were sealed and there was no natural light. There were 10 other children already there. We were made to grind glass stones and then stick the stone embellishments and beads on lac bangles from 6am till midnight everyday”, Babloo tells IPS via Zoom from his village in Nawada district in southern Bihar.

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How incarceration further disadvantages Australia’s Indigenous

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Photo Credit: ©Neena Bhandari

By Neena Bhandari

Sydney, 15.02.2021 (IPS): Keenan Mundine grew up in the Aboriginal community social housing called The Block, infamous for poor living conditions, alcohol and drug use, and violence, in Sydney’s Redfern suburb. At the age of about seven, soon after losing his parents to drugs and suicide, he was separated from his siblings and placed in kinship care.

“I felt robbed of my childhood. I didn’t feel safe and it made me struggle with my living conditions and mental health. I couldn’t concentrate at school and got into lot of trouble. I spent sleepless nights contemplating what my situation would be if my parents were still alive. At the age of 14, I ended up on the streets and tried to work my way around it”, Mundine tells IPS.

Today, he is using his own lived experience of navigating the criminal justice system that helped change the trajectory of his life to devise creative and innovative solutions for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people so they can break free from the cycle of violence, police and prisons.

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Gender bias stymies women’s progress in STEM

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By Neena Bhandari

Sydney, 11.02.2021 (Scidev.Net): While women play a critical role in science and technology, women career scientists still face gender bias, accounting for only 28 percent of engineering graduates and 40 percent of graduates in computer science and informatics, according to UNESCO.

On the sixth UN International Day of Women and Girls in Science today, 11th February, UNESCO has published one of the chapters on gender in science entitled To be Smart the Digital Revolution will Need to be Inclusive from the UNESCO Science Report scheduled for publication in April.

The chapter highlights that women are not benefitting fully from employment opportunities open to highly educated and skilled experts in cutting edge fields, such as artificial intelligence. Also, women founders of start-ups struggle to access finance, and in large tech companies they remain underrepresented in both leadership and technical positions.

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