As a society why are we so quick to protect the men accused of sexual harassment?
JNU happens to be in news again. A woman seems to have spoken up against sexual misconduct again. We have resorted to finding an excuse for the men again. Women in the country continue to lose their trust in the system, concept of due process and the society again. Until and unless we as a society get down to solving these issues we will all have to sit down and watch feminist movements like #metoo and Times Up again and again.
It was a regular Thursday night in JNU with students carrying on the protests and conversation on the new rule for attendance being mandatory till a student who has been missing for the last few days came back and withdrew from her PhD program citing professor Atul Johri’s inappropriate behaviour as the reason. This simple, courageous act of speaking out against somebody of that stature and somebody who has that amount on control on something considered most important for an academic – their degree – has opened doors for the #MeToo movement. Raya Sarkar’s list was celebrated by many feminists and critiqued by many others but one cannot ignore the important role it played in encouraging the conversation of sexual harassment within academia. 8 other students also stepped forward later.
What doesn’t come as a surprise is the reaction this situation received from not just the society but the authorities. Before I go deeper into saying out loud what has already been going on in our minds, I want to delve into what makes men like Atul Johri predators. We’ve seen the world talk about what makes a woman ‘characterless’ and therefore, prone to assault, her choice of clothing, number of male friends, the hours that she was out etc. It is about time someone spoke about men in the same tone and what is it about these men that make is so difficult for us to see them as assaulters.
Social Hierarchy plays an important role in setting the image for a certain person, we as human beings are taught to assume that if someone is in a position of authority and influence then they must never be capable of wrongdoing whether it is Atul Johri, a professor at JNU or Arunabh Kumar from TVF or somebody like Tarun Tejpal, we are biased to argue in their favor as an instinct.
It is hard to accept that people we look up to or who we’ve been told to reach out to in times of need are capable of committing heinous crimes. This is also the reason why we avoid having this conversation. When it comes down to politics it gets even worse, it goes to the extent of us finding reasons and setting up rallies to legitimise what our leader has done, Kathua case being the latest example where 2 BJP ministers went to the extent of attending a rally in support of a man accused of raping an 8-year-old girl.
Not very long ago, I found myself in a similar dilemma when a popular comedian, Aziz Ansari was faced with allegations of sexual harassment. It is even harder when the accused happens to be a friend or family. Indian families work in a way where we are encouraged to not air our dirty laundry in public and to silent. Many cases of physical and sexual assault go unreported because of the same. Women in India are so ingrained to not speak up about these issues so much so that the highest courts in our country feel that criminalising such assault can harm the harmony of a family. No matter how many abhiyan’s to protect women X or Y government leader comes up with, the spaces for women will not get safer until we make speaking up for women safer.