Sexual harassment is a deep and pervasive problem in the modern world. Sexual harassment entails the use of actions and words, of a sexual or sexist nature, by an individual to bully, intimidate and/or coerce another. In the workplace, colleagues and superiors of a victim of sexual harassment use this tactic to either balance the power dynamic or to coerce sexual favors from the victim in exchange for material benefits such as promotions, job security, service delivery etc.
For the longest time, sexual harassment was never treated as a legal problem, it was, at best, a social problem. The tide turned due to the Suffragette movement launched by the first wave of feminists and the western world began to grant women political rights at the start of the 20th century. The grant of political rights to women and them being treated as legal subjects and not as legal objects, eventually led to sexual harassment being criminalized in modern law by the turn of the 20th century.
However sexual harassment has proven to be notoriously difficult to counteract through legal means because of lingering established patriarchal social power structures which depower the victim into silence, lack of physical evidence after perpetration of the act and a lack of jurisprudence on the issue of consent. Due to low reporting, actual and reliable numbers and statistics on the instances of sexual harassment are also not known. However, it is common knowledge that it is heavily perpetuated by men and that women are mostly the victims of it.
One of the most recent responses to this structural misbalance has been an (almost) international feminist movement launched by women, two of the most famous being campaigns being: ‘#MeToo’ and ‘Time’s up’. Taking benefit of the interconnected world of today and the tools of social media technology, women all over the world, even in Pakistan, have broken their silence and gone public with the instances of sexual harassment they have faced, to show the world how common the problem is.
In Pakistan, quite recently, social media in Pakistan went into a storm due to allegations of sexual harassment by Meesha Shafi, an acclaimed singer, against Mr. Ali Zafar, another famous singer and actor. This has led to many boycotting Ali Zafar’s latest movie installment ‘Teefa in Trouble’ which is launching in Pakistan.
A while back, a series of tweets by the activist film maker Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy exposed a male doctor in the Aga Khan University Hospital who Sharmeen claims had harassed her sister. The act of harassment itself was a Facebook friend request sent by the male doctor to the sister’s account, after he had treated her for an emergency at the AKUH.
The current Prime Minister of Pakistan, Mr. Imran Khan, has also faced allegations of sexual misconduct and harassment by Ayesha Gullalai, an MNA who was nominated to a reserved seat by PTI. Ms. Ayesha Gullalai claimed to have received lewd texts and inappropriate requests from Mr. Imran Khan and other PTI party leaders.
In each of these cases, a common thread is apparent; the victims brought their claims to the court of public opinion for rectification of the wrong they allegedly faced before they approached a legal forum (if at all). The reactions on social media and the traditional media on each of these instances varied in scope and depth but ultimately two opposing positions emerged.
On one hand, it was argued by the supporters of the accused that if any sexual harassment has occurred, it must be dealt with legally and be proven through physical and testimonial evidence. Till the person is not convicted, one cannot presume his or her guilt, since the victims could be making false assertions and the accused might be completely innocent. Majority of those who have made this opinion are not surprisingly men and feminists have termed the people who make such arguments as privileged rape apologists.
On the other hand, the ones who supported the victims or were feminists have argued that since there is a structural power imbalance between the victim and the accused caused by established societal patriarchal power structures and since these type of actions are hard to prove under the existing legal schema, the victims should be believed and the perpetrators should be punished, if not through the law then at least by society through social ostracization, boycotts etc.
This piece is a part of a two-part series.