At the onset of the article, let this not go unstated, that crime against women is real. While solutions that have been attempted to address the problem may not have yielded the best results, the partial or complete failure of such solutions does not change the fact that across the world, women are on the receiving end of criminality, of which, sexual harassment, both offline and online, is one of the many forms.
The past half a decade has seen numerous women go on a spree of ‘outing’ their sexual offenders by writing public posts about how the offenders offended them, describing the acts of offense in minute detail. First used as a term in 2006 by Tarana Burke, #MeToo as a movement flared up around 2016-17 when Harvey Weinstein was accused by several actresses of sexually molesting them and using his power to stall their careers when they did not play ball.
The movement came to India in its full-blown form when Tanushree Dutta, a former Bollywood actress, accused Nana Patekar, a celebrated and highly successful actor, of sexually harassing her during the shooting of the movie ‘Horn Ok Please’. While #MeToo frenzy burnt several people such as the likes of AIB comedians, former journalist, and cabinet minister MJ Akbar, etc, this article will seek to assess the long-term impact of the movement, by looking point-wise into those aspects surrounding #MeToo which we often fail to notice amid the noise and fury of the ‘movement’, along with certain illustrative real-world case examples.
Also, I am limiting my scope to women on men accusations, and not the reverse, because although there are/will be/ may be accusations of similar nature made by men on women (or women on women like that of Kaneez Surka on fellow comedian Aditi Mittal, and also men on men), the vast majority of #MeToo allegations have mostly been about women accusing men of sexual harassment.
Unproven Allegations
While most of the #MeToo allegations tend to appeal to the reader’s sense of emotion and sympathy, and generate a lot of resentment and anger towards the alleged perpetrator, what does not change is the fact that at the end of the day, in essence, #MeToo allegations remain nothing more than unsubstantiated accusations.
One can deliberate at length as to how women have to overcome immense social stigma to be able to come out with such stories, but ‘stories’ do not make an accused guilty, no matter how much of social stigma women have had to overcome in making the accusations. Therefore, while #MeToo allegations might warrant initiation of judicial proceedings against the accused, until the time the accused is convicted as guilty in a court of law, legally speaking at least, he is to be considered innocent. Accused, but innocent. Because he is not yet proven guilty.
This is not to say that all #MeToo allegations are false. Far from it, what this means is, just because a woman has made a #MeToo allegation against a man, does not automatically make a man a criminal.
False/Wrong accusations
I have deliberately used false accusations and wrong accusations separately here. False accusations would mean that there has been absolutely no approach of a sexual nature by a man on a woman, and yet, for reasons known or unknown, the woman chooses to accuse the person of sexual harassment. Wrong accusations are when the intent of a man would be misread and considered to be sexual harassment. This article touches on certain factors about how a particular type of false allegations can originate.
Wrong allegations are when a woman might misinterpret a perfectly harmless comment or gesture as a malicious one. For example, if a guy out of healthy attraction towards a girl, begins flirting with her, but the girl does not share the attraction, and resents his advances, but does not explicitly convey so, and ends up making an allegation of sexual harassment. In this case, the guy is not at fault, since, while the girl has not consented to his behavior, she has also not expressed reasonably strong rejection of the same. And in such cases, this is what the courts have maintained a feeble ‘No’ may be ‘Yes’.
Another type of wrong allegations (this need not be necessarily at workplace) is when a woman has sex with a man during an affair, with the man possibly making promises such as but not limited to marrying her in future, and the couple ending in breaking-up and the woman leveling allegations of rape against the man. The Judiciary has maintained in the past regarding such cases that refusal to marry after consensual sex during live-in is not rape. More examples can be given, but I restrict myself here because that is not the focal point of the discussion around the topic.
We need to take into account certain real-life factors here. Ideally, when a rape/molestation accusation is made, it is best that the woman making an allegation establishes forensic evidence for the same. However, a lot of times, this is not always possible. This, in particular, holds true for cases like rape after spiking a woman’s drink, or over-the-clothes molestation which does not end up with non-consensual penetrative sexual intercourse, where the woman will not be able to generate physical evidence of non-consensual sexual contact. At such times, the court relies on what is termed as ‘circumstantial evidence’ where the petitioner is made to describe the circumstances under which she turned out to be the victim of the crime she has alleged on the accused. In turn, the accused, the defendant, in this case, is to prove that the circumstantial evidence that the petitioner is offering, is wrong (essentially suggesting that the petitioner is lying).
Now, firstly, this will explain why a lot of rape cases do not end up in convictions, and if a tiny percentage of rape cases result in convictions, one can imagine how cases related to years and decades-old non-penetrative sexual molestation are going to end up in the court of law.
Do The Accused Continue To Be Considered Innocent Until Proven Guilty?
They do not. Rather the contemporary society treats an accused as guilty even after being proven innocent. Because in our society, sexual harassment of women attracts severe negative reactions against the men who are accused of it. It is generally expected as part of the Indian culture that a man shows a high level of respect for a woman’s modesty.
Also, the fact that there is a great social stigma that women have to overcome to come out with #MeToo accusations, means that such accusations are assumed to be true in the court of public opinion. And thence begins the social boycott of such accused men. Women will, in general, avoid interaction with the accused because they are men of ‘bad character’. The man’s employer will initiate actions such as sending him on a forced leave of absence/suspension or might choose to outright fire him.
When a company chooses to fire a man accused of sexual harassment, the company is perfectly within its rights to do so. At the end of the day, the company has an image to protect, and if it chooses to retain an accused just because he isn’t yet declared guilty by a court, there will be immense negative publicity that the company will garner which will affect its business. And the business of business is business. A company is not law-bound to retain any employee for any reason whatsoever, and definitely not if the association with an employee threatens its business.
Moreover, if a man is fired by an existing employer because of such allegations, he will find it even more difficult to find a new employer to work under. After all, when a firm to which he sweated for, itself does not wish to retain his services anymore, why would a new recruiter get him onboard, and bear the burden of the negative press baggage.
Which essentially begs the question – how fair is it on men to be suspended/dismissed from employment on the basis of allegations alone? What if he is the victim of false/wrong accusations, and yet has to suffer from the ignominy of a job loss and a loss of face in public? Even if he is innocent, court cases in India could drag on for years before he is acquitted. Thus, this presents a triple whammy for a #MeToo accused. First, the accused has to face the loss of employment and social shame, next, he has to incur expenses on court proceedings, and then, he will have to wait for years to have his name cleared if it is going to be cleared eventually.
The extreme distress that the person would go through might eventually lead the person to commit self-harm or might turn him into a criminal if he wasn’t one already.
Reduction Of The Shock Value Of Accusations
In the past, and even as of today, the general tendency of people in public is to trust the woman who levels accusations of molestation. But if a growing number of women begin to make false/wrong accusations as mentioned above, society will begin to get inured to them. And therefore, the outright advantage that women who make such accusations have today in the public opinion would substantially reduce. Which actually should be something that women should be worried about.
Think about a situation where a woman is actually being harassed by someone in a crowded bus and yells out at a man for molesting her. In today’s era, a man would have nightmares of being confronted by a lady in this way, because he knows that the entire crowd in the bus is going to back the woman, and might decide to avenge the crime on the behalf of the woman. However, this is because such accusations occur very rarely.
Every woman has stories of being ‘felt’ in crowded buses, but most men would tell you that they haven’t been up to such misdeeds, and since a minority of women choose to actually confront the molesters, the molesters often get publicly roughed up, often by men themselves. Imagine if we arrive at a situation where once a woman confronts a legitimate molester, the crowd instead of supporting her, begins to probe her allegations in public to ascertain their veracity before deciding whether to support her or her alleged molester.
Bias Against Women While Recruiting
The vast majority of men are mostly well-meaning people, who are perfectly respectful to women. It is such men who will be most apprehensive of #MeToo allegations. If a single accusation has the potential to have an adverse long-term career and social image implications, they will naturally gravitate towards trying to avoid the risk as far as possible, by limiting the interaction with the opposite sex at workplaces.
Moreover, recruiters will try to restrict the hiring of women because #MeToo allegations do not just affect the accused, but the company brand as a whole takes a hit. Moreover, men (who as of now hold most of the senior positions in the corporate world in most if not all countries) will also have apprehensions in mentoring women at junior positions, and thus, existing women employees will be at a disadvantage in gaining promotions as they will lose out on valuable experience-sharing.
The Non-Solution Which Worsens The Problem
The biggest issue of #MeToo is that not only does it not solve any problems, but it worsens existing problems and compounds them. Consider that most men and women who enter the workforce in their early 20s and work until the late 50s. Which means they spend the most sexually active years of their lives in the close company of the opposite sex – the sex which a significantly large majority of people are wired to feel attracted towards. And despite this, HR departments expect professionals to function as mutually asexual beings, something which is completely contrary to normal human nature. And hence, no matter how strict the rules are, workplace romances and flings are bound to happen.
Of course, the HR departments have in their defense the argument that the office is not a place where people should be seeking romance, since they are strictly being paid for work. The problem with this argument is that by the same logic, even school and college romances should be against the rules. Of course, the educational institutes do not pay students to study, the flow of money is in the reverse direction in this case, but then it is the child’s parents who pay the fees in most case, and therefore, parents would then have a complete say in the private life of their children, including whether they should be dating any of their classmates, and if yes, who it could or could not be.
HR departments, by making sexual relationships (true love, casual flights, one-night stands are for practical purposes, sexual relationships) as something to be avoided at all costs on the floor of the office, often miss the human part of the resources that they deal with. A lot of people advocate narco-analysis of accused when it comes to #MeToo allegations. What they fail to realize, is that it is legally impermissible to do so. Narco-tests cannot be conducted on a person with the objective to use the person’s statements during the test as evidence against themselves
In a court of law, the defendant in most cases will have a much stronger case as opposed to the petitioner. This is due to the following reasons:
- For cases where allegations have been made several years post the incident, the defendant has the option of plausible deniability. And if the defendant consents to having sexual intercourse with the petitioner, he can always claim that the act was consensual, since the victim was going about her life for all these years without feeling the need to complain. Even the Prevention of Sexual Harassment (POSH) Act aims to punish sexual harassment of women and not consensual sexual contact between colleagues.
- Convictions in such criminal cases need to necessarily happen only when there is unimpeachable forensic evidence. Unless acts such as groping and molestation have been caught and recorded on CCTV or the woman can physically demonstrate that she and her molester’s body contain physical evidence of resistance offered despite the molester continuing the act after an initial denial of consent, the petitioner will not be able to get the accused convicted.
- Casting Couch has been known to be a phenomenon existing in multiple industries, but mostly in the film, modeling, and media industry, and is a point that I would cover in slightly more detail. The POSH act (this applies to India, there will be equivalent of this law in most other countries) does address the concerns of ‘quid pro quo’ sexual demands and ‘hostile work environments’. However, this again is difficult to prove. For example, a movie director who compels an aspiring movie actress to grant sexual favors in return for casting her in a role might just include in the contract to be signed the line “This contract has been signed without the pre-conditional grant or receipt of any sexual favors”. Once the aspiring actress signs a contract which states this line, she invalidates any scope of proving any sort of sexual harassment accusations against the director in future. Further weakening a court case for the actress in this instance would be the fact that the actress initially went about ratifying the contract which involved working with the alleged abuser for extended time-frames and ending up earning financial compensation in several million in whichever country’s currencies the event occurs.
- Moreover, she will also not be able to demonstrate the denial of consent, especially if the allegation is made several years later, and at that time, she had complied (even if without consent) to the act. At the worst, this would be considered an act equivalent to prostitution, and in the case of casting couch in the film industry, a very highly compensated act of prostitution. Another way how the dynamics of casting couch would pan out is, instead of the director offering roles for sexual gratification, they may choose to simply ignore the aspirants who do not offer sexual gratification for roles. What I am implying is, at the end of the day, the casting director is at a much stronger position in this power game if you wish to call it. And all he will need to do to insure himself of allegations is to shift the responsibility (for lack of a better word) of initiating the casting couch on the aspirant actress than bear it on himself.
What happens when allegations are not proven true? This will happen in a very high percentage of cases, considering the fact that the accused will almost always be at a much better financial position than the accusers. And therefore, the accused will have access to much better lawyers, will have a much better influence in places where it matters.
Indeed as we see in the Harvey Weinstein case, two of the six rape charges have already been dropped, while the rest are under investigation while his appeal against them continues. If the accuser is unable to prove her accusations true, she will risk facing defamation charges. Thus, while a #MeToo accuser will be already incurring litigation costs on her personal basis, once the charges do not stick, she will then have to compensate the accused for making the complaint in the first place. Which will then backfire on her, because now, she is not an accuser anymore, she now is a difficult woman to work with who has a past of leveling allegations which did not stand in a court (in common parlance this is what passes as false accusations). And then her personal employability will forever take a severe beating.
The above argument does not in any way mean that the complainants should be intimidated by the defamation suits. If the complainant is sure about the validity of her accusations, why should, technically, she be afraid? And if she has made false accusations, why should the accused not be allowed the judicial recourse to seek compensation for the damage that he has had to face due to the allegations?
Another aspect is, the behavior of women who have been accusers and supportive of the movement has often been questionable. For example, Asia Magento, one of the actresses who leveled allegations against Harvey Weinstein, has been proven to be an offender of a similar nature. Another case is the very public Twitter spat between Mallika Dua (daughter of the #MeToo accused Vinod Dua, the handling of whose case was quite curious) and Sona Mohapatra, another accuser herself, a glimpse of which can be accessed through the following link:
In A Nutshell
While the #MeToo movement was supposed to deliver on the promise of safe workplaces for women, as we have seen here, it is no substitute to the judicial process as the verification of allegations which normally happens in a judicial process is not part of the movement.
As such, the movement does not hold any solution to the problem of sexual harassment of women at workplaces but rather has the potential to bring along adverse side-effects on an individual level for men and on a near-systemic level for women.
Thus, anyone, who has not just the well-wishes of women in general at heart, but a rational anchor to the same, should feel heartened that the #MeToo movement has globally lost relevance as quickly as it gained, and only hope that it does not erupt again, at least in its current form.