She’s a Tamil Hindu who works with locals and Sri Lankan refugees. Thillainathan says religion and culture don’t always match. She believes that men and women don’t inherently have different karmas, because in Hinduism the soul has no gender. But the critical question to ask is: how can religion influence culture to overcome the issue of women being mistreated? Her answer is that the level of men’s religious education has to rise. ‘They don’t understand their own religion, because if they did they wouldn’t be causing harm to women, to anything, because Hinduism says not to do this,' Thillainathan says.