Women In Academia, Institutional Workplaces & The Society – Harassment & Ways To Curb It

Women: Harassment & Ways To Curb It

By Swaswati Borkataki with Joyeeta Bhattacharjee

No matter how progressive we claim ourselves to be, our society is deeply replete with misogyny on a cross ideological plane. Misogyny starts at home and we swallow few spoonful of it every day, which translates into derogatory remarks, sexist comments, judgement regarding how a woman dresses, how she walks to whether she ‘looks’ a virgin or not!

Though we might pat our backs for not thinking on those lines then I think we should pause for a moment and think about each and every moment where we have directly or indirectly witnessed any form of harassment on women. How many times have we ignored them, considering them to be trivial and insignificant. How many times have we asked our colleague at the workplace or our student or classmate to not take subtle forms of harassment seriously?

Well, we do that. Because as a society, we are otherwise very tolerant, especially when it comes to women. And by the way all those slogan shouting progressive liberals who leave no chance of garnering footage and publicity too, shy away from actually speaking up against harassment of women. Because everything looks easy when we have to shout from a distance. How many of us really have the guts to get down the drain and clean the clutter ourselves? Why should we after all? Unless it directly affects our being and break our bones we refuse to budge!

This is so much the case in institutional workplaces and academia. I had written about my own life experience of facing a traumatizing episode of mental and sexual harassment once.

I had to take to writing because no one was willing to listen to my story. People do not consider harassment to be crime until the victim is actually raped and/or murdered. When I had to bear the brunt of the harassment, I knew no one would stand up for me, and I was so right!

My colleagues in fact conspired against me and sided with the perpetrator when after several months I decided to raise my voice against the mental trauma that was eating me up. I knew that I was not alone. There were millions of women across our society like me who were compelled to keep mum as a result of innumerable reasons.

I knew it then and I know it now. And it is with this aim and motive that my friend and I decided to hold an intimate webinar where we decided to invite a few panelists and participants who would share incidents faced by themselves and others and also to think about remedial measures to curb such incidents in the future.

While I shared my story, we were glad that the webinar was well attended and all of us participated in the discussion to devise strategies to curb harassment. While harassment of women was the chief focus area, it was not limited to that and also extended to harassment of non-binary genders.

In fact, one of the panelists who himself belongs to the trans community and proudly accepts his reality, shared his own experiences and that of his known trans men and women who have faced brutal episodes of sexual harassment and mental trauma all their lives.

While the Panelists discussed the plausible causes of harassment becoming so common in society, all of us agreed on the fact that children need to be corrected from the time of their childhood and made aware of gender sensitization.

Parents, relatives and near and dear ones should be extremely careful so as to provide a healthy upbringing to the child where he/she grows up and seeks to build a gender-neutral society as much as it is possible.

Some of our students too shared their experiences of harassment and it also came to light that women and transgenders may not always be harassed by men. In fact, they may be tortured and harassed by people belonging to their own gender.

For example, a woman commenting on another woman’s way of dressing and asking her to behave in a particular manner or teasing her is also a form of harassment.

With regard to solutions, we came up with the idea of building Support systems and reaching out to like-minded people who sincerely want to work towards gender equality for both binary and non-binary genders and build a more harmonious society where all of us can live together in peace.

# Swaswati Borkataki is a Ph.D. Scholar in JNU and Joyeeta Bhattacharjee is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Work, Assam Royal Global University.

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