One of the busiest commercial hubs of the State capital MP Nagar is the most unsafe place for women in the city and contrary to popular belief, incidents of sexual harassment of women are hig hest during day time in comparison to the evenings.
Besides, nearly two third of the total cases of sexual harassment go unreported due to mistrust on official machinery. These facts about the prevalence of sexual harassment against women have been brought to light in a study conducted by a Bhopal-based organisation Sangini. In the survey that started in November last year 500 women from different socio-economic background and age groups were interviewed.
Sharing details of the survey at a workshop held here on Wednesday, Sangini’s Documentation and Research Officer Aparna told that the survey has raised questions about the commonly held views regarding safety of women and prevalence of violence against them.
“It has been commonly held that women are safer in crowded places, but the survey points in the opposite direction. Among the women who were questioned, most of the respondents said that they faced sexual harassment at busy places like MP Nagar. Similarly, many of the women have faced harassment while using public transport like city buses,” she said.
“The second belief that is commonly held is that incidents of sexual harassment occur more during the night. But the truth is that maximum number of such incidents take place in broad daylight,” Aparna said, adding that 31 per cent of the women who have been surveyed said that nobody came to help them when such violence occurred.
“The other important issue is that women are hesitant to discuss such acts of violence against them. Due to this, women suffer considerable mental trauma with long lasting impact on their personality and well being. More than 50 per cent of the women suffer from such problems,” Aparna noted stressing on the need of curbing such violence.
Notably, 65 per cent of the women that were surveyed did not report the incident of sexual harassment to the police. The reasons behind this were fear of harm to reputation and the belief that the police do not act in most of the cases.
Based on the findings of the survey, the organisation has also formulated suggestions for the government to control violence against women. It includes gender training of women with a feminist perspective to challenge male-dominance, gender sensitisation of men to break the deep rooted objectified perception of women and gender training of police and administrative officials.
Academicians, representatives of voluntary organisations and officials from Women and Child Development were present at the workshop.