Anatomy of sexual harassment

I have now been working for 14 years. I am not sure if I have been sexually harassed so far. Sure, there have been some crude jokes, plenty of double entendres and a couple of incidents of misbehaviour over a post-work drink. It did not once occur to me that these were worthy of an official intervention. Like most urban women, I was raised to be a “trouper” and so I trouped through it.

Now, in the post- Tehelka world we live in, a lot of women employees are harking back to past misdemeanours against them and wondering whether they should have spoken out against their bosses and colleagues. In this age of open offices and flat structures, one of the more baffling questions we face now is what exactly constitutes sexual harassment.

The Vishaka guidelines are straightforward in three out of the five instances it quotes. Unwelcome sexual behaviour such as physical contact and advances, demand or request for sexual favours, showing pornography, making sexually coloured remarks and any other unwelcome physical, verbal or non-verbal conduct of a sexual nature. But it is usually with respect to the last two that women employees are unsure whether they should be victims or troupers.

The confusion lies in the details and not in the definition. What exactly is verbal conduct of a sexual nature?

More puzzlingly, what is non-verbal conduct of a sexual nature?

If organisations do not detail these definitions, accusations of sexual harassment will wobble on subjective interpretations of these clauses. Unsure of whether they have been violated against and advised that they are over-reacting, victims will continue to merely stew in silence.

In most cases, even in companies that are compliant with the Vishaka guidelines, the complainant eventually finds herself out of a job.

A former colleague who filed a sexual harassment case against a co-worker in the news TV channel she worked for, calls it differentiating the dehumanisation from the dehumanised. “Everyone used four-lettered words in all conversations in the office. But at some point the way in which those words are used become abusive,” she says.

Unfairly targeted

When it got progressively worse, R — who was a news anchor on the channel — complained to her seniormost female colleague, who she thought might be able to empathise better. After promising a quick redressal, the colleague did nothing.

So she took the complaint to the editor. “His reaction totally stumped me. He wouldn’t even hear me out fully. He just said we’ll take care of it and hustled me out of his room. It was clear he didn’t even want to acknowledge my complaint, much less act on it,” she says.

When nothing came of this escalation, she took it up to the HR department.

The department called the editor in and appraised him of the situation. His reaction was to call a staff meeting and inform everybody about what a valued resource the perpetrator was.

“Next, my editor rescheduled my slots and assigned me to the 4 a.m. shift. Every day from then on, the editor and the person against whom I complained, criticised every single aspect of my work. In a few months, I felt so hounded and so picked on, I had no choice but to quit,” she says. Last week, this same editor was on his channel stridently denouncing Tarun Tejpal and his misconduct.

Sexual harassment, in most cases, is acknowledged as one only when it happens to someone else.

Rule, not exception

R’s story is not an aberration. If the power equations are lopsided and the complainants subordinates, in most cases they are harassed until they quit.

In the odd case where the evidence of harassment and/or assault is too strong to be ignored, the perpetrator is sacked.

In the case of another news channel, a proven perpetrator was re-hired two years after he was fired for sexually harassing a colleague. This is not a malaise restricted to media houses. Such stories abound in corporate India.

Phaneesh Murthy was fired by Infosys only after the victim took the matter to the court. Within a year, he was hired by iGate as CEO on a massive salary and enormous stock options. In 2013, he was forced out of that job too under similar circumstances.

Shripad Nadkarni, marketing head of Coca-Cola who was sued by actress Sushmita Sen for sexual harassment, stayed on in the company for more than a year before he resigned.

News reports from the time quoted Nadkarni as saying he was leaving on “a positive note”, seemingly suggesting that the accusations against him had been dismissed even though the actress was paid a sum of money in settlement.

At the time, sexual harassment induced too much squeamishness and invoked too few questions.

It is heartening that gender issues are now at least a part of the public discourse in India. Sadly though, inside companies, harassment continues to be a grey area — far more easily hushed up than acted upon.

Corporate heads and business owners who have long criticised governmental inefficiencies would do well to take the lead in this matter.

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