Sexual Harassment is one of the biggest problems our women are facing today in different sectors of life. We rarely pass through a week without a reminder of these kinds of incidents which should be termed as “social problems”.
It is a growing problem and all are trying their best to combat this problem by adopting new policies and measures. The definition of sexual harassment varies from person to person and from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. The definition of Sexual Harassment in simple words is “any unwanted or inappropriate sexual attention. It includes touching, looks, comments, or gestures”.
A key part of Sexual Harassment is that it is one sided and unwanted. There is a great difference between Sexual Harassment and Romance and Friendship, since those are mutual feelings of two people. Often Sexual Harassment makes the victim feel guilty, but it is important for the victim to remember that it is not her fault; the fault lies totally on the person who is a harasser. Sexual Harassment affects all women in some form or the other. Lewd remarks, touching, wolf whistles, looks are part of any women’s life, so much so that it is dismissed as normal. Working women are no exception. In fact, working women most commonly face the backlash to women taking new roles, which belong to male domains within patriarchy. Sexual Harassment at work is an extension of violence in everyday life and is discriminatory, exploitative, thriving in the atmosphere of threat, terror and reprisal.
Many times fear is involved in Sexual Harassment because it isn’t physical attraction, it’s about power. In fact, many Sexual Harassment incidents take place when one person is in a position of power over the other; or when a woman has an untraditional job such as police officer, factory worker, business executive, or any other traditionally male job.
It has also been observed that there are lots of sexual harassment incidents taking place in the workplace, but the victims fear to report the same to the higher officials or the concerned authorities. They fear to file a complaint against such offenders who does such heinous acts. The fear is due to the fear of boss, fear of guilt in the society that they might have to face, fear of being thrown out of the job or being demoted, fear that it will jeopardize their career as in it will put a blot on their resume and would render them un-hirable. Some women have lack of knowledge- they do now know what exactly qualifies a sexual harassment and fail to report the same.
Every country is facing this problem daily. No female worker is safe and the sense of security is lacking in them. There are certain developments in laws of many countries to protect women workers from Sexual Harassment.
Sexual Harassment is major problem in school, college’s universities and institutions, and its percentage is increasing day by day. Surveys on college campus show the number of respondents reporting have been sexually harassed ranging from 40-70 percent. Only two percent of campus harassment involve a professor demanding sex in return for good grade. Most cases involve male and female students.
