I Am SAMAJ: Saritha Irugalbandara (she/they), youth advocate from Sri Lanka

Young people are often dismissed as sensitive or soft, as too idealistic. I agree. But I also think this sensitivity speaks to our natural sense of justice and ability to care deeply. These are superpowers, not weaknesses.

Saritha Irugalbandara (she/they) is a youth advocate from Sri Lanka working on gender justice, youth engagement, and movement building to end sexual and gender-based violence.

Sexual violence beyond statistics

“Sexual violence in Sri Lanka is shaped by a complex interplay of social control, institutionalised colonial ideas about sexuality and bodies, and the politics of ethnoreligious conflict. It is a deeply entrenched form of discrimination and even punishment in both public and private spheres that is prevalent across all social strata.

Based on existing data and reported cases, 1 in 4 women in Sri Lanka experience physical and/or sexual violence, whilst 1 in 5 experience intimate partner violence. About 90% of women and girls in Sri Lanka face sexual harassment using public transport. In higher education institutions, over 16% of students report sexual violence during ‘ragging’ (hazing). Tech-facilitated violence has surged since the pandemic, with a reported 460% jump in 2020 alone, with a significant impact on children. Statistics on conflict-related violence are unclear due to fear of intimidation and arrest by security forces, although stories of sexual violence against people of all genders at the hands of state entities are commonplace in the Northern and Eastern provinces that were the epicentre of a 30-year conflict.

As a youth advocate, I feel the statistics, while damning, do not fully capture the extent, prevalence, and culture of normalisation of sexual violence in Sri Lanka. Seven decades after independence from successive colonial occupiers, Sri Lanka holds onto its colonial institutions whilst militaristic nationalism has crept into state and social functioning. This means that bodies, especially those that are gendered, racialised, and politically minoritised, are regularly in the crosshairs of persons and agencies vying to exercise social control.”

Justice remains out of reach

“Sri Lanka lacks a national conversation around sexual violence. Most visible discussions about policy and legal reform remain high-level and revolve around ‘protecting’ women and children through punitive justice systems. Even amongst civil society, empowerment is measured through visibility; an empowered survivor is one that reports a case, pursues legal recourse, or publicly divulges the harm they endured. Sexual violence is thus imagined and reimagined as interpersonal harm, as opposed to the consequence of unchecked patriarchy and a catalyst for deep societal fissures and the breakdown of the social contract. Justice remains one-dimensional in the public imagination and out of reach for a majority of survivors, for whom visibility is too high a cost with no guarantees of resolution.

The lack of a nuanced national conversation is in part due to religious hegemonies that disrupt progressive movements and wield significant social and political power. Restrictive notions about gender, bodies, and reputation are continually reproduced to dissuade, dismiss, or even further harm people who seek justice for sexual violence.

Hegemonic institutions further compound these barriers. Fear of further harassment at the hands of the police prevents many people from reporting sexual harm. For Tamil-speaking communities, language and racial discrimination at enforcement agencies presents a historical hurdle. LGBTIQ+ people are at heightened risk of intimidation, harassment, and sexual violence at the hands of enforcement agencies with little to no recourse for justice. Women and children’s desks remain under-resourced, while women officers themselves face sexism and harassment within these institutions.”

Youth engagement must go beyond tokenism

For Saritha, meaningful youth engagement is not symbolic, it must challenge power, create space for learning, and strengthen collective action.

“Youth engagement is diverse in Sri Lanka, ranging from grassroots organising and community support networks to leadership in focused movements for legislative and institutional reform. However, youth involvement in decision-making is still sequestered to formal politics and lawmaking, which is often mired in party politics and privilege. Thus, there is a serious issue of marginalised young people being constantly underrepresented within decision-making bodies.

Youth engagement can also become tokenised in policy spaces. I speak here from personal experience, too, of being dismissed as too idealistic but still being invited to spaces ‘for youth representation’. This results in youth engagement being co-opted and subsumed by both governmental and non-governmental systems, restricting our organic movement building and replacing it with activities tied to broader, agenda-driven goals that tend to miss the ground realities of sexual violence.

Many of us experience sexual violence since youth; for many of us, the first instance of being sexualised or violated was in our childhood. It is as generational as it is structural. Rethinking sexual violence as a shared experience with a domino effect is crucial if we are to find sustainable solutions.

Grassroots initiatives that bridge intergenerational knowledge and perspectives are spaces to begin rethinking safety at a time when Sri Lanka is grappling with an economic crisis, reconciliation questions, and technological advancement, all of which are accelerating sexual violence. Youth engagement should also include continued learning and exploration of dismantling patriarchal cultural biases, particularly shedding colonial baggage around bodies, violence, and authority.”

Shaped by curiosity and questioning

Saritha reflects on what has shaped their journey: “During my high school years there was a ‘nude scandal’. I went to a co-ed private school, and images of a few girls, including a few of my friends, were circulated via a WhatsApp group by boys in several grades. School authorities were eventually notified of this. What followed was a campaign of victim-blaming against several girls, notably by teachers and middle administration. Some were suspended for refusing to divulge whose else’s images were circulated, and we would soon hear and see a number of teachers openly harass these young children, taking any opportunity to berate them to other teachers in staff rooms. Little to no punishment was dealt to the boys that circulated the images and they graduated without any serious reputational damage.

This incident is one I keep returning to, over a decade later. Motivation, to me, is nurturing my curiosity and questioning what I know and what I think I know, about violence and sexuality and politics of the body. What do survivors want? How do we begin to untangle victim-blaming from its roots in purity culture and colonial ideas about the body? What can safety look and feel like for young people? What does protection mean in Sri Lanka?

Compared to over a decade ago, the conversation around sexual violence is more expansive, with feminist movements and allies attempting to shape a more critical, intersectional understanding of sexual violence and discrimination. Curiosity is what has gotten us here, and I believe it is this curiosity that we should be nurturing in young people as we invite them to take space in collective movements to address violence.

The dismissal of young people’s sensitivity and presumed idealism comes with forgetting what it was like to be young and trying to make sense of new knowledge, of knowing what injustice feels like but not having the language to articulate it. In my opinion, strengthening youth movements requires supporting them to identify how their natural sense of justice is deeply political. Mentorship and friendship are key, and are what make young people feel heard and motivated to continue difficult work. It also involves letting them make and learn from mistakes, providing soft places to fall apart when things don’t always work out. This expectation for perfect activism is a burden we place on young people when we should be looking to them for what is possible.”

Rethinking institutions and accountability

Saritha believes institutions must do more: “Successive governments and existing institutions continue to treat sexual violence as interpersonal and individual harm that can be neatly connected to a singular motivation. This is not surprising given the context of Sri Lanka. However, evolution is possible and there is a window of opportunity within a shifting political climate that has promised ‘system change’.

Governments must take the lead in initiating an inclusive national conversation. This means interrogating the historical legacy of sexual violence in Sri Lanka and its varied impacts on diverse groups and their lived realities. A cross-sectoral approach to addressing sexual violence is also crucial, given that it is not just a legal issue but related to public health, economic rights, social development, education, and access to justice. Legislative reform and policy work must then reflect this cross-sectoral quality. Accountable systems require thoughtfulness grounded in sharing power and responsibility.

More investment in support architecture is crucial, particularly mental wellbeing and support services. Confidential, non-carceral support is often more accessible for affected persons and specialises in providing trauma-informed services to manage longer-term impacts of sexual violence. A starting point for this is to rethink safety and empowerment within institutional frameworks. What could be explored instead are resourcing community–law enforcement collaborative efforts where sexual violence is understood as a public and community safety issue, local knowledge and ways of redress are empowered, the power dynamic between police and communities is more equalised, and law enforcement becomes more accountable to the public they serve.”

From regional solidarity to collective liberation

Speaking about youth networks and regional collaboration, Saritha shares:

“South Asia as a region has the world’s largest youth population. The region is also marked by rising inequalities, leaving a majority of this population vulnerable to multiple intersecting crises. Pushing for change can thus feel disillusioning or impossible as power distribution remains uneven.

Recent political shifts and upheavals in the region were youth-led, indicating young peoples’ unwillingness to accept a decaying status quo. However, sexual violence remains un-political even within popular movements despite its increasing prevalence. Movements like SAMAJ are key spaces to build collective power and highlight the political nature of sexual violence in a context where social protections are being stripped and hegemonic institutions are attempting to escalate social control over marginalised populations.

Solidarity movements which centre justice and improve access to it are crucial for a region that is figuring out a myriad of such contradictions. They give young people much-needed space and solidarity to arrive at realisations of how personal safety and sense of justice are connected to collective liberation.”

“Young people are often dismissed as sensitive or soft, as too idealistic. I agree. But I also think this sensitivity speaks to our natural sense of justice and ability to care deeply. These are superpowers, not weaknesses. It is what brings us to this work. It is what motivates us to challenge old systems and also reimagine better ones; it pushes us to explore what justice looks, sounds, and feels like beyond what we have inherited.”

#IAmSAMAJ and I want to continue building collective movements that challenge sexual violence and reimagine justice beyond what we have inherited.

Sources

Statistics referenced in this interview are drawn from the Sri Lanka Women’s Wellbeing Survey 2019 (Department of Census and Statistics and UNFPA) and the UNFPA Sri Lanka study, *Sexual Harassment on Public Buses and Trains*. Other statistics reflect the interviewee’s cited sources and perspective and could not be independently verified through publicly available reports at the time of publication.