Time and again we have been confronted with the reality of sexual harassment in academia and debated endlessly about ‘how to prevent it?’ #MeToo is a culmination of these endless debates and yet we have not been able to do much about it.
When I first came across the Facebook post on ‘comparison between virgin brides and unopened coke bottles’ by Professor Kanak Sarkar of Jadavpur University, I was newly inducted into the field of academics as a professor and ashamed. Sarkar compared a woman’s virginity to a broken seal adding that ‘a virgin girl means many things accompanied with values, culture, and sexual hygiene. To most boys, virgin wife is like angel’. He was suspended indefinitely in mid-January and an investigation is currently underway.
Before I became a professor I studied as a research scholar in Jawaharlal Nehru University where I was elected to the Gender Sensitisation Committee against Sexual Harassment (GSCASH) as a student representative. Beginning from my days in GSCASH, I had begun to realise how harassment and sexual harassment are entrenched in academia.
Situation in Smaller Universities Hopeless
The #MeToo movement helped expose the power nexus which prevents complainants from coming forward, thereby allowing sexual harassers to get away. The movement has encouraged women to relay their accounts.
It requires immense courage for women to speak up, especially when the cases involve big universities and institutions. The fact that this is the reality of these ‘world class,’ prestigious universities is deplorable. Probing deeper into the academic system, the situation is almost hopeless and miserable in smaller universities and institutions.
Our Silence Strengthens Harassment
The experiences of female colleagues are almost the same everywhere, small scale colleges and universities.
Women are often subject to crass forms of humour which is derogatory and sexist. Common room encounters are filled with women encountering ‘awkward’ situations, which are both sexist and patriarchal.
The internalisation of patriarchy is so strong that often women simply brush it aside or smile it off in spite of being made uncomfortable by such ‘awkward’, ‘harmless’ jokes and comments. We play a prominent role in upholding this culture of silence and practice of tolerating.
We are after all trained as women to believe that ‘the fault is in us’ that men have the authority to get away with saying and doing as they please. We also shy away from making a fuss about ‘small’ things. If one dares to put an end to such jokes, men and women come together to taunt us for being too serious in life.
Amidst such an environment, sexual harassment is bound to flourish and we fail to recognise it.
We believe in upholding cultural etiquette and mannerisms – the onus of which again rests on the women. The feudal, paternalistic tendencies are so deeply rooted into our upbringing that we often fail to break free from these trainings – to realise that the onus does not rest upon us to be well-mannered all the time.
Need to Put a Stop to Seemingly Harmless Patriarchal Behaviour
Lack of professionalism in work spaces often results in promoting the idea that ‘we are one big happy family’. And we are not supposed to spill the beans on each other in families, right?
Families stick together, covering up for each other. Paternalistic relations therefore prevent colleagues from speaking out loud and clear in a professional manner against what is right and wrong.
Often, women, despite their experiences, their wisdom and potential are not given due credit when compared to men in the workplace. It is not surprising therefore how women are automatically made in charge of bodies like cultural committees, hospitality committees, women’s bodies since these are after all, the women’s department.
It is often assumed that the female colleagues would not be interested or have the time to do the other ‘responsible’ duties. It is easy to blame women for being ‘uninterested’ because women, unlike men have to balance their duties at home and work.
Unfortunately, the work space culture has not yet developed to accommodate the multiple responsibilities of women which prevent women from easily pursuing their careers as the male members. Try explaining patriarchy and gender to the men folk- especially in these places where we are yet to familiarise ourselves with these terminologies.
To begin with, unless we begin to put a stop to these seemingly ‘harmless’ and ‘insignificant’ practices, we simply move towards building a larger workspace culture which rests upon gendered stereotypes and patriarchal values. As women, it is our responsibility to stop tolerating these practices which is derogatory, sexist and intolerable.
(Dr Dipti Tamang is an assistant professor at the Department of Political Science at Darjeeling Government College. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)
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