In a recent interview given to the Birmingham Young University (BYU) Radio, the newly appointed Higher Education Commission of Pakistan (HEC) Chairman Tariq Banuri claimed that the gender gap in the access to higher education in urban centres of the country was “pretty much gone”. The former University of Utah professor said that the percentage of female students attending higher education institutes in Pakistan had increased from 40 percent to 50 percent over the course of the past twenty years.
Though encouraging, these statistics obscure the reality of women’s higher education in Pakistan. Gender gap in the Higher Education Institutes (HEIs) of Pakistan is a qualitative not a quantitative issue. There remains an enormous gap in how boys and girls studying at the same campus experience education. Sexual harassment at the HIEs of Pakistan is a rampant phenomenon and incidents of harassment on campus have sprung up in universities across Pakistan. This is a fact that HEC’s own sexual harassment policy document acknowledges.
It is interesting to note that in most of these cases, the personnel implicated are faculty members or university administration employees who abuse their power to attain sexual and financial favours from students. This greatly limits the educational experience of female students, as they are forced to confront an educational environment that is deeply discriminatory and even suffocating. The HEC has formulated a very elaborate and impressive sexual harassment policy for HEIs but since the HEIs in Pakistan have autonomous organizational structures, this policy remains largely unimplemented.
According to the HEC anti-harassment policy guidelines, every university campus should have a specialized anti-harassment cell, consisting of an appointed Harassment Management Officer (HMO), a computer specialist and an assistant to collect and address harassment complaints. It is also the responsibility of the appointed HMO to track any cases of abuse on campus, provide adequate counselling to the victims and consult the Vice Chancellor of the University to convene a hearing committee if a formal complaint is filed, which should consist four faculty members, four non faculty members and two students.
Almost no campus in the country has a permanent specialized anti-harassment cell. The current modus-operendi for universities upon receiving a formal harassment complaint is to formulate anti-harassment committees on a ad hoc basis with no student representation. The majority of members sitting in these makeshift committees are either from the faculty or the university administration. So for example, when a few months ago, cases of harassment emerged in the Karachi University (KU), their administration made an ad hoc anti-harassment committee only after the cases became public. The anti-harassment committee made their judgement according to the ‘moral norms of the society’ instead of the HEC guidelines.
The KU case became public and gained traction so they were forced to see it through to the end. In numerous other cases complaints are simply shut down because the harasser is being protected by a powerful figure in the university. This dynamic played out at the Pakistan Institute of Fashion Design (PIFD) in April this year, when some female students complained that one of their faculty members was taking photographs of them without their consent. The students attempted to lodge a complaint against the relevant faculty member but the Vice Chancellor ignored them on the issue and told them that male faculty members deserved ‘respect and reverence.’ The university’s students had to resort to protesting against the VC and the relevant faculty member before the university took notice of their issue.
HEC’s anti-harassment policy is predicated on two foundational principles; deterrence and education. Apart from a few private elite universities, most institutes in the country do not even deem it necessary to educate students on the issue of harassment. On the contrary the attitude of these institutes is completely the opposite. Last year when some girls at the Government College University (GCU) formed an informal group aimed at spreading awareness on issues of sexual harassment and started calling feminist academics to the campus to initiate discourse on the issue, they were accused of ‘group baazi’ and ‘inviting strangers’ on campus. This is the treatment meted out to students when they take the initiative and that too an initiative directed at fulfilling what is otherwise the university’s responsibility.
The situation is paradoxical. On one hand, an increasing number of formally lodged harassment complaints against faculty members and university administration are flooding in (these complaints being just the tip of the iceberg) and on the other hand you see HIE administrations across the country investing themselves in efforts to prevent what they call ‘the moral decay’ of the students by imposing dress codes on female students, lockdowns at female hostels and policies of gender segregation on campus. Take the ridiculous example of the Abdul Wali Khan University, the site of the lynching of student activist Mashal Khan who was involved in protesting against the varsity administration over allegations that the varsity employees were misbehaving with female students in the hostels.
The administration, instead of moving in a more progressive direction moved to bar, early in January this year, male and female students from sitting together on Campus. Another absurd case came to light when student protests at University of Engineering and Technology (UET) Taxila revealed that the female students were not allowed to leave their hostels after 3:30 pm in the afternoon. The list goes on but at this point it is safe to extrapolate that we are in the midst of a crisis.
When cases of harassment emerged at Karachi University (KU), their administration made an ad hoc anti-harassment committee only after the cases became public. The anti-harassment committee made their judgment according to the ‘moral norms of the society’ instead of the HEC guidelines
The HEC has played an excellent role in getting girls to campuses but now it also needs to play a more proactive and direct role to ensure that nothing intervenes with these student’s experience on the campus. Merely grafting a policy is not enough when for the implementation of that policy, you have to rely on the same actors on campus who are predominantly either involved in aiding the culprits or the culprits themselves.
The HEC boldly needs to bypass university administrations and take on board the most important stakeholder; the female students to form student based anti-harassment societies. Only through this form of direct collaboration with female students, the primary stakeholders can we move towards creating effective mechanisms that curb the tide of sexual violence experienced by women on campus. Only by taking such steps can we then legitimately claim that the gender gap in Pakistan is ‘pretty much gone’.
The writer is a freelance journalist
Published in Daily Times, June 26th 2018.