Soon after several women publicly alleged that Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein had sexually assaulted them, the hashtag #MeToo went viral on social media. Thousands of women (and men) are still recounting their experiences of sexual harassment. Now, an initiative on Facebook by a young student of law has sparked off a massive debate on sexual harassment in academia. She invited students to name Indian academics who have sexually harassed them. She wrote that an “overwhelming number” came forward with “evidence in hand” informing her “that a professor sexually harassed them when they were a student/are still in the institution”. The list on Facebook names 69 Indian academics and their institutional affiliations and is still being updated as more claims are being made. Besides this, an editable Google spreadsheet containing more than 75 names, which contains descriptions of complaints against some names but not others, is doing the rounds. These lists have generated both supportive and critical responses. While many women have found this a useful platform to break their silence, many others are asking, why name and shame? Why not register formal complaints?
On Kafila , a group blog, prominent Indian feminists wrote that they were “dismayed” by the initiative “in which men are being listed and named as sexual harassers with no context or explanation.” “Due process” is important, they said, even if it is “harsh and often tilted against the complainant.”
Why a list?
The list is important for many reasons. For the first time women have found a common platform to collectively break their silence, especially in academia where there is an un-breachable power structure between student and teacher. Since the most powerful are often invested in this conspiracy of silence, breaking the silence does not transgress institutional procedures as it is only in a self-critical and sensitised atmosphere that women can openly exercise their agency to lodge formal complaints.
The list also aims to fix standards of conduct within academia. Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley, among others, have instituted guidelines for student-teacher interactions which also prohibit consensual relationships between them. The understanding is that if there is abuse of power, harassment, or even if consensual relationships turn sour, the damage is inevitably borne by the powerless student.
Addressing criticisms
Criticism is largely about crowdsourcing, the method used to compile names. This method is not unheard of as a step towards action. For instance, a collection of testimonials from the LGBTQ community preceded the Supreme Court verdict extending the fundamental right to marry to same-sex couples in the U.S. A forum called Creating Change was in charge of archiving these testimonials and this eventually led to the victory in Obergefell v. Hodges. We need both quasi-judicial bodies such as the one in Jawaharlal Nehru University (Gender Sensitisation Committee Against Sexual Harassment) and preventive mechanisms like the code of conduct manuals in Harvard and Berkeley to further the cause of gender justice.
Some say this list shames people. In fact, doubts over the veracity of names on the list arise because of misreading the list as a note of complaint instead of acknowledging its potential to encourage the setting up of legal support structures. Complaints of shaming could only come from those who are uninitiated in the language of gender justice, not from those who know that complaints of sexual harassment against powerful people are often those that have been preceded by massive and sometimes long-drawn campaigns for fairness and transparency.
Neither is this mob justice, which refers to “the act of a group of people taking law into their own hands and enacting violent justice on an alleged criminal.” The term in the Indian context has been closely used in relation to riots, lynching, etc. This list does not propagate the use of any violence, nor does it attempt to enfeeble the essence of the rule of law. It simply seeks an evaluation of legislative norms to accommodate certain concerns that have been ignored until now.
The logical response to this organic eruption of testimonials is to fill the gaps in institutional support structures instead of hitting back at the campaign even if some of the allegations have not been established.
Abhiruchi Ranjan and Aishwarya Bhattacharyya are pursuing their PhD at the Centre for Political Studies, School of Social Sciences, JNU, New Delhi
