It’s both fitting and ironical that there is no better way to describe what’s happening now, other than to say sexual harassment is ‘trending’. The details of the high profile indictments that have happened so far, mostly in the U.S., have helped blow the lid off the silence and complicity that allowed powerful men to be impudent sexual predators. In India, this manifested in two things — a scream of women unburdening themselves of their victimhood through the #MeToo campaign, as well as a list on Facebook calling out men in academia as serial sexual abusers.
Even if the shock in this public list was about its shade of vigilantism, the substance of it is in the nature of abuse detailed. These accounts of what happened and how, often substantiated by publishing screenshots of private conversations, highlight the utter lack of clarity on what is appropriate behaviour in a world where social media has shrunk the boundary between the public and the private.
Question of definition
To begin with, the very definition of sexual harassment has to be updated for the digital age. Where does “icky” behaviour end and sexual harassment begin? Does sending a Facebook friend request constitute sexual harassment? Does the answer change if that request was from a doctor you consulted? In Pakistan this week, the Oscar-winning film-maker, Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, complained online about a doctor sending her sister a Facebook friend request after she consulted him for a treatment. Her tweet went viral and the doctor was suspended from duty. It isn’t ideal behaviour on the part of the doctor, but is it harassment enough to warrant a serious disciplinary action? When bosses and subordinates are Facebook friends, can a personal update on that media be referred to at the workplace? The dystopian future where everything is judged purely by reactions on social media is upon us now. Unless institutions and organisations get down to the task of writing clear rules of engagement, they heighten the risk of improper behaviour as well the need for knee-jerk measures for damage control.
Second, with our demographic spread there is an urgent need to codify what is permissible social behaviour. What rules do millennials live by? And are non-millennials familiar enough with those rules? One of the experiences quoted against a professor named in the Facebook list, for instance, is an account of a party in which there is close physical intermingling of the victim and perpetrator after everyone left. In India, especially, where we simultaneously straddle the extreme ends of a regressive and progressive society, where does the line of harassment lie? In this story, the perpetrator goes on to touch the victim inappropriately. It is non-consensual, therefore it is harassment. But if she were to initiate legal proceedings, the circumstances leading up to the infraction lay open the possibility of that old line, “she was asking for it”, being thrown back at her.
Third, who bears the burden of evidence? The millennial view seems to suggest that it is up to the perpetrator to prove that his behaviour was not appropriate. But how does one prove a negative? Especially a generic negative, where the name of the accuser and the specifics of the crime are also unknown. What happens when some of the accused are dead, and therefore unable to defend themselves or clear their names in any manner? If an innocent person’s name creeps in, it is condemned to stay there. Women, and feminists should also worry that a long list which indicates that most men are sexual harassers, without grading the degrees of infraction, could simply be reduced to mean no men are sexual harassers. In the future will victims, who want to follow the “due process”, be subject to even higher standards of scrutiny and evidence collection if it becomes too easy to make allegations of abuse?
Fixing the process
Sexual harassment will continue to trend, and it is only a matter of time before many such lists appear. The Bollywood list, the bureaucracy list, the corporate list. Despite the flawed nature of the exercise, it cannot be denied that the genesis of the list and the support it has received are a result of the apathy that institutions as well as the judicial process have shown to victims of abuse who have tried to follow the “due process”. The case against R.K. Pachauri, former head of TERI (The Energy and Resources Institute), is ample illustration of how victims are stonewalled and powerful perpetrators protected, often by even senior women in the team. This, then, really is a final warning to men in power as well as the institutions that they represent. If the “due process” exists in order to deny justice to victims, then the gloves are off, and everyone’s fair game.
veena.v@thehindu.co.in
