Ramona Vijeyarasa: Dr, Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Law

About my work

In early 2018, I identified a new problem. There was no global index to tell us whether laws work for women as they should. While there are many well-known gender equality indices, none could tell us which countries have the best laws for women, or how poor performing countries can do better.

I wanted to address this by creating a legal index. Yet my experience in international women’s rights law was only one part of the solution. I embarked on a challenging journey to pursue an interdisciplinary, cross-faculty academic collaboration to find an answer. After much consultation and knocking on the wrong doors, I found a way to use machine learning, software engineering and law to advance women’s rights.  I developed a partnership between Law, Rapido Social from the UTS Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology (FEIT) who work in pursuit of social justice and the UTS Connected Intelligence Centre with their world-class expertise on data visualisation and data analytics. A unique collaboration across law, engineering and data science.

This partnership and the Gender Legislative Index was tested through the development of a prototype in June 2019. Thanks to the UTS Deputy Vice Chancellor for Research’s ‘Outcomes to Impact’ prize that we won in October 2019, we were able to redesign the index to ensure possible users could get from it what they needed. A Social Impact Grant provided an opportunity to include the review of over thirty Australian laws. The GLI was made public in its current form in early 2021 as a legal interface that can appeal to end users as diverse as  an activist in Indonesia to an Australian legislator to a global policy-maker from the World Bank. 

A memorable win

I was in Vietnam in 2010 collecting data for my doctoral thesis on victims of trafficking. Spending time in the field, I could not help think that an already stigmatising experience of being trafficked would be even more stigmatising if the government was naming trafficking a ‘social evil’, also bringing under this umbrella of ‘social evils’ people living with HIV and drug-users. Yet there was no academic literature on the issue or any policy to address it. There were also no accounts of victims’ stories. I began exploring this unchartered territory in a body of work that sat outside of my doctoral thesis, published first in 2010 in Culture, Health and Sexuality. I brought my academic take to the issue, borrowing from scholarly work on stigma in other fields (e.g. men who have sex with men) and applying that lens to human trafficking. As my publication was disseminated, key international agencies – the International Organisation for Migration, the leading global organisation on migration and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) – picked up on my arguments and, citing my work, echoed my views. My recommendations influenced UNODC in Vietnam to push the Vietnamese Government to withdraw from its social evils approach, implement support measures for sex workers, review its regulations for sex work and actively foster gender equality. This came at an opportune moment when the Government of Vietnam was ready to take note and change its policy by paying particular attention to avoid re-stigmatisation and bringing a gender equality lens. Today acknowledging the risk of re-stigmatisation is part of any best practice approach to supporting victims of trafficking while specific actions to mitigate it can be seen from Ukraine to India. When asked what motivates me as a researcher, I often reflect on this experience that began with an observation and a scholarly article.

Bio: Ramona Vijeyarasa is the Chief Investigator behind the Gender Legislative Index, a tool designed to promote the enactment of legislation that works more effectively to improve women’s lives. Her work innovatively combines law, engineering and data science to reinvigorate decades-long debates about the law’s role in addressing gender inequality. Ramona joined UTS in 2017 as a Chancellor’s Post-Doctoral Research Fellow. She is currently a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Law and the Juris Doctorate Program Head. Ramona is editor of International Women’s Rights Law and Gender Equality: Making the law work for women (2021) and author of Sex, Slavery and the Trafficked Women: Myths and Misconceptions about Trafficking and its Victims (2015). 

Her upcoming book, The Woman President: A study of law, leadership and legacy on women’s lives based on experiences from South and Southeast Asia will be published by Oxford University Press this year. Ramona is the 2020-2022 Women’s Leadership Institute Australia Research Fellow and has research grants and awards from New York University, the Australian Academy of the Social Sciences and the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Ramona’s research is informed by a decade working in civil society.

Websites

Gender Law Index site: https://www.genderlawindex.org/ 
UTS profile page: https://profiles.uts.edu.au/Ramona.Vijeyarasa