Working with boys as young as ten who have committed heinous and non-heinous crimes, psychologist Srishti Sardana is exploring ways to help them reintegrate into society minus the stigma or recidivism. This has led her to narrative therapy - developing an alternative story that focuses on the child’s strength and resilience. This, in turn, equips them to overcome the social injustices they face — including poverty, illiteracy or neglect at school — when they return to the community.

Where are you from?

In 2010, I escaped from Presidency College in Chennai to work with sex workers in Kamathipura, Mumbai’s oldest and Asia’s second largest red-light district. The people there, including the police unfortunately, thought I was looking for sex work. They refused to believe I was a university student engaged in research for my degree in psychology. They incarcerated me, but there was no FIR lodged against me because I knew my rights. An individual cannot be charged without any evidence of a crime. Nevertheless the examination by the lady constables was rather crude.

I had decided to become a clinical psychologist at the age of 15. They say that every human being has the anima (female) and the animus (male) component. Every female has the opportunity to capitalise on the masculine instinct if need be, and every man can capitalise on the female instinct. The tendency to care or be affectionate is a feminine instinct and the tendency to aggress is masculine. I was more driven to my animus and kept rejecting the constant need to behave like a girl wanting to become a woman. In some ways I was trying to be like my father. There was a latent aggression in me but I was normative to society. My parents are righteous people. My father is a senior microbiologist. Rather than mental health, he would have preferred a less fringe discipline for his child.

What have you done?

It was only when my clinical psychology practice deepened that I returned to the anima. I’ve sort of negotiated with what’s acceptable because of the positive reinforcement from my patients. Caring comforts me. My mother’s forthright primary care became the value for dissemination.

I’m a therapist at the observation home that NGO Prayas Juvenile Aid Centre runs in partnership with the Indian government for roughly 50 boys aged between 10 and 16 who have committed both heinous and non-heinous crimes. Given the scarcity of resources, we have no choice but to house boys who have been indicted of murder and sexual offences alongside the thieves and burglars. We have just enough money for their food, shelter and clothing, and to keep them momentarily secure. The magistrates prefer to send the boys to us because we keep them free of institutional abuse.

For me, it’s a phenomenal opportunity to further the social reintegration of the homeless, beggars, abandoned children. I feel a sense of resonance with the fringe. Empathy is not equivalent to stepping into someone’s shoes. To see his worldview you just need to listen to him. Listening is a lot about letting the individual be. I have to shed my preconceived notions, and sometimes my clinical training, to listen in a nonjudgmental manner. I’m not looking for illness or clinical symptoms. In the process of listening, empathy grows because you’re able to appreciate those constraints and socioeconomic environments from which these offenders are developing.

And neuro-anatomically, their prefrontal cortex is still developing. So you can still rewire their brain to think and behave in a particular way.

There was an 11-year-old boy brought to the observation home who couldn’t stop crying. He’d been charged for murder. He said, “I had no intention of killing.” So I asked him, “What happened?” He explained that it was all festive around Id and he wanted a chocolate that cost Rs 10. He saw someone wearing a gold chain and thought of snatching it to sell and buy the chocolate. He had never stolen before. While yanking the chain off he cut a nerve in the wearer’s neck and was charged for the murder. My job is to ensure he doesn’t walk out with that guilt of unintentionally killing somebody. Even after the therapy, when he steps out, his jhuggi-jhopri community would have already stigmatised him, taunting him and his family. By forcing him to return to his village, where there is no employment, the community ends up reinforcing his offensive behaviour. This is how recidivism develops. The child starts to believe, “Well, anyway I am stigmatised and there’s nothing else I can do, so let me go ahead and make a living out of it.”

The boys I work with are exposed to narcotics, surrounded by criminalised loops where the mother might be a sex worker and the father an alcoholic, brought up in communities where people have to offend to survive. So when you ask the juvenile offender, “ Bhai, kyu kiya tumne ?” the default answer is, “ Bhook lag rahee thee mujhe .” And when you ask, “Why did you do it?” the answer often is, “I have a sister at home who needs to be married. My father isn’t around. My mother needs to work in a few houses. She gets a minimum wage.” We’re talking about 12-, 13-year-olds. Society expects the boy to take care of the family. So they keep on offending, keep on surviving.

The boy who perpetrated the crime is a co-victim. I’m not saying this justifies his crime. But it does indicate that he does not perceive fear, nor does he perceive society as a positive place to live in. If he’s not feeling guilt or remorse, at least explore the possibility that he might be ill.

I want to explore the mechanisms of intervention as opposed to mechanisms of penalisation. You can penalise the one you’ve caught but what about the others who are free. We are ignoring the larger force behind these few incarcerated boys.

There are no effective aftercare programmes and Prayas has identified this gap.

The Juvenile Justice Act states that psychosocial rehabilitation and social reintegration are critical to the tenure of stay of the juvenile offender, but I don’t know of any institution that offers effective therapeutic intervention. It’s just been easier to get rid of them as the courts let them out within six months or earlier due to the resource scarcity. They are believed to be totally fit to reintegrate into the community, but they usually find themselves back in a gang of older men who train them in organised crime.

I collaborated with Louise Carmichael, a psychotherapist who has worked on emotion release counselling and narrative therapy for over three decades with the Australian Aboriginal Congress. She’s worked with David Denborough at the Dulwich Centre, which has done some profound work in creating narrative therapy programmes. They couldn’t make inroads in India as psychosocial rehabilitation was largely unknown here.

At Prayas, Louise and I developed a mechanism of intervention based on narrative therapy wherein you collect the stories of the people you’re working with (in our case, the twenty boys). We are listening and rescuing the words of these boys in such a way as to create an alternative story that’s focusing on their strength and resilience. As the facilitator, I’m looking for those particular words that indicate my values, dreams and aspirations, and develop an alternative story to a reality of hopelessness and helplessness. I will then read back to you this alternative story as part of a reflective process. So you hear your own story but from an alternative viewpoint. It’s nondirective and effective. If I ask a boy about his story, he’ll either get traumatised or he’ll be on guard. But by discussing a game of cricket we started asking questions such as “Who would be your coach?” or “Who would be the Captain of your team?” or “What are the important elements in it?”, thereby bringing to fore the inner resources they didn’t realise they had in them until then. By the end of the week, they develop their own batting team against the social injustices they face, including the poverty, illiteracy or neglect at school that they would have to overcome when they return to the community.

Where are you going?

We are looking at replicating the use of metaphors and symbols in narrative therapy with other child populations. If we’d been working with girls, we might like to use the tree of life from roots to fruits. It involves the staff members. The programme is carried out within a week. We were involving a large number of boys alongside the staff members, thus making it sustainable beyond our presence.

During a management committee review, a member of the Magistrate panel spoke to some of the boys. The group feedback was that this was the first time anyone ever listened to their stories and they only picked the good part. One boy said, “When I listened to my story, I realised there were so many things that were inside me that I was not able to say earlier.”

Narrative therapy is powerful because it centres people as the experts of their own life. The philosophy is best described by the Australian aboriginal activist Lilla Watson, “If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”

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