Sexual harassment happens everywhere but officially it hardly exists, and this is not because of under-reporting, writes ANUBHAV PRADHAN, and suggests solutions
That sexual harassment happens in most institutions of higher education in India is common knowledge. However, what makes this claim simultaneously untrue is the morally self-righteous discourse masking the pretensions on and around sexual harassment in colleges and universities. In other words, everybody knows sexual harassment happens everywhere and almost all the time, but officially it hardly exists.
As is often assumed, this is not simply a case of under-reporting. Recent history is witness to an increasing number of such incidents being reported and ‘action’ in some form or the other being taken. Almost all colleges and universities have Internal Complaints Committee as mandated by The Sexual Harassment at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act of 2013, and regular inspections — internal as well as external — are held to ensure that the mechanisms of this Act are functional.
The problem, instead, is not as much in the lack of mechanisms as it is in the entrenched attitudinal malaise which plagues almost all the affirmative social justice measures of the Indian state. That sexual harassment happens is to do with the manner in which mechanisms are conceived and mandated, not with the lack of mechanisms per se.
In, for instance, Jamia Millia Islamia, a university notorious for imposing bans on its students, the institutional indifference to sensitisation and outreach is apparent in the harassment most female students face on a daily basis. looking back at an incident from her MA in this university, a female doctoral candidate relates that on her way back to the hostel after an evening examination, a group of teenaged school students followed her, making lewd comments, and one of them groped her. When she complained to the hostel authorities, they promptly banned hostellers from using that particular route instead of initiating an outreach programme which would have engaged with the men and boys who harassed hostellers in that locality.
Similarly, in the University of Delhi, the exclusive focus on containment of female students blinds authorities to the necessities of dialogue and participation. Avipsha Das, an M Phil scholar with Jawaharlal Nehru University, reminisces that no programme or event related to sexual harassment was ever organised by her hostel authorities while she was in Delhi University’s Ambedkar Ganguly Students’ House for Women. Instead, she adds, authorities, from the Provost to the Chairperson, would discourage participatory dialogue on women’s safety on the streets, advocating stricter rules to contain hostellers’ movements outside campus.
A college is both a workplace and not, for while it does employ teaching and non-teaching staff, the students in it pay to obtain a certain knowledge capital, and cannot be conceived in the same manner as employees in, say, a ministerial secretariat. Moreover, students are socially conditioned and disciplined to conform to certain behavioural patterns in colleges, and are in that respect disadvantaged in the vertical power hierarchies of the colleges.
So, the Act itself is woefully inadequate when considered against the specific requirements of educational institutions. While it defines the safety mechanisms to be provided by employers, not only is it dated in its concept of sexual harassment and is negligent to the needs of men and other genders, its ambit also fails to successfully encompass the relationship between a college and its staff and students. Finally, in its current form, the Act does not specify any participatory, democratic engagement between employers and employees on sexual harassment, and this tends to make it not just dated but also regressive in the context of educational institutions.
This has been painfully apparent to all those who are involved in questions of gender safety and law in our higher education paraphernalia. For instance, prior to the implementation of the Act, the University of Delhi’s policy on sexual harassment was framed by its Ordinance XVD, which mandated a participatory, parliamentary model against sexual harassment and the skewered notions of gender norms and entitlements which make it rampant. All colleges were supposed to have Gender Forums, wherein student and staff representatives were elected instead of being nominated, and the body so constituted was charged with the vital work of sensitisation and outreach. While very few colleges followed this aspect of Ordinance XVD, the provision still allowed for a dynamic, comprehensive mechanism on and against sexual harassment.
Now, the mechanisms are institutionally warped by tokenism on redressal strategies. The system runs on the goodwill of individuals, principals as well as presiding officers; where this is lacking, it runs only in name. The lack of any institutional obligation to involve the larger student and staff body leaves institutions free to nominate members without larger consensus, make committees qua committees for the sake of favourable display during inspections. Sensitisation too is undertaken as an isolated exercise in bureaucratic self-satisfaction: Seminars are arranged, resource persons invited, photographs taken and reports written, with little actual grassroots intervention amongst the majority of the student and staff body outside the limited bounds of such events. Ideally, colleges should be active centres of community outreach as well, involving their neighbourhoods in such collective sensitisation, but the prevalent knee-jerk focus on surveillance and redressal is blinkering our reach to the roots of the problem.
A more self-reflexive and participatory policy, therefore, is the need of the hour. Internal Complaints Committees in colleges must go beyond mere tokenism and acknowledge that the roots of harassment are in our pervasively misogynistic culture, and to tackle that a continuous, holistic outreach strategy is needed. They need to realise that even though the Act is not entirely suitable for educational institutions, it provides leeway to generate additional code of conduct as and when thought suitable.
They need to step outside seminar rooms and engage with all stakeholders — students, staff, locality residents — so that our colleges and neighbourhoods can be better, safer places for all. Otherwise, the truth of harassment will continue being an uneasily perpetuated untruth.
The writer is a doctoral candidate with Jamia Millia Islamia. He has worked on law and women’s safety as part of the Internal Complaints Committee of Bharati College, DU.The views expressed are his own