Gender Violence at Work-place? Deal with it!

The Newage front-page reports that among other things in Bangladesh, the state of gender-based violence at the work place is also deteriorating. Big surprise! The news comes as a result of a survey conducted by the Social Science Research Council of the Planning Commission, under Ministry of Finance and Planning. The news report by BSS states that ‘92.3 per cent working women of urban areas and 88.3 per cent of rural areas have been badly treated by various types of violence by their male counterparts’. Therefore, on an average, 90% of all women suffer from gender violence at their workplaces. I honestly can’t say that I am surprised.

The study reports that ‘huge number of adolescent girls and women were being sexually abused in their workplace but it was the most hidden and underreported from violence as there is a tendency to deny the incident.’ Almost all the women I know, including self and FnF and those I have worked with, have complained about facing gender-violence of some form or other at their workplace. It’s a malice we are all equally aware of, but powerless against. Even this report—for all it’s gravity and accuracy—is going to be well received, but after being discussed, debated and dissected, will be forgotten and our fates will remain the same. Perhaps, women who are violated every day have already lost faith in our institutions, laws and elders and their ability to protect us. Perhaps, it’s because most people still don’t even understand what constitutes gender-violence/sexual harassment, not even the victims themselves. Perhaps, it’s because we’ve all somehow contributed in making things worse for us by encouraging violence in our silences. Perhaps because we’ve become complacent about this and now choose to take in our stride—after all, independent, successful women who’re trying to make it in a man’s world should just learn to ‘deal with it’ and not complain (because men tell us they don’t).

The Planning Commission study revealed that, ‘More than 22 per cent of the working women identified existence of few legal provisions as one of the main reasons for violence at the workplace in the urban area.’ Now, I don’t know if the sample included women working both white collar and blue collar jobs, but I do know that the problems in both cases,even in the public sectors/local government are, fundamentally, of the same nature. Thanks to the hue and cry about ‘compliance’, ‘ISO’ and ‘ILO standards’, garments factory owners, among others who promote themselves as emancipators of women, begrudgingly introduce ‘codes of conduct’ to try and protect the women whose hard work go into sustaining this 6 billion dollar industry. Sure they all have codes and ethics and rules and laws. But these efforts are cosmetic at best. They do however have activists and trade unions fighting for their cause, but what of the white collar female workers? A female colleague of mine was once slapped (and had her hair pulled and arm pinched, albeit playfully, but unsolicited) by a male superior at the office (a real liberal ad agency). Outraged, I had asked her if she had liked being ‘handsy’ with her male colleagues and why she hadn’t reported him, she had given me a sad smile and said, ‘Ki korbo Fariha? Na like kore ekhon ki korbo? Kothai giye complain korbo? Thanai?’ Asholei, what choice does she have? However, when the same happened to me, among other things at the same office, I did take it up to our female HR director, who said ‘Yes I know this happens, but what can we do? It’s very difficult to get candidates for this job [referring to the perpetrator]. I can’t fire him for this now can I? I guess I’ll just have to warn him again. [For the 25th time].’ I quit the agency ages ago, but that man still works there. A few days ago, I met another (male) colleague from the same agency. While discussing another ex-employer’s nefariousness, he remarked, ‘See, I had told you. These guys are everywhere. You should just learn to deal with it.’ Deal with it—so easily said and so arduously done! My banker cousin was routinely bugged by a persistent client who wanted to take her out for lunch/dinner. She was married; so was he and he was aware of the facts. After failing to get him to curb his untoward behavior, she reported him to her boss, who said ‘Bujhlei to, boro client. We have to keep them happy.’ The same boss would also routinely engage in extra-marital exploits of his own, in full hearing distance and view of his female colleagues. Outrageous, no? But that’s just how it is. In the absence of a working mechanism or at least a platform where our work-place woes are actually dealt with, we have no choice but to deal with it.

‘How is watching porn sexual harassment?’ a male colleague had once asked us, a group of his female colleagues. We asked him not to download porn or watch it live in the office. I can’t say I blame him for not realizing this simple fact, most women don’t. Watching porn, making derogatory comments about the opposite sex or engaging in any kind of conduct that is found ‘sexist’ is actually sexually harassment. The company I worked for then, finally disallowed downloading and viewing porn; not because it was sexual harassment, but because it ate up bandwidth and reduced productivity. I have been dubbed a ‘militant feminist’ and have been accused of seeing everything as ‘sexual’—starting from those friendly pats on the back, the seemingly harmless propositions, sentences like ‘I want to massage that idea out of your head’, discussions on people’s conjugal lives or just plain-old celebrity nudes. It’s the same, resounding, echo—‘It’s the same everywhere. Deal with it!’

Audre Lorde, the American feminist, had written, ‘Your silence will not protect you’. And it doesn’t. The study also implicates, ‘Most of the women do not talk about it in order to protect herself/himself from shame and stigma as well as to protect the perpetrator who is usually a colleague or supervisor, it said.’ Sure we talk about sexual harassment—on forums, at roundtables, seminars, conferences, newspaper op-eds, blogs and on tv. But we don’t raise our voices in protest, because that will stunt our professional growth, get us shunned by society, make us the gossip-of-the-week, or make us the ‘girl who claims she was sexually abused’. The man of course, will get rehired in no time or worse still, will get ‘warned’. Newage quotes, ‘Almost 38 per cent of the working women of the study areas opined that patriarchal mentality is the root cause for occurring violence at the workplace.’ Our male colleagues will forever bask in their oblivion—we never HIT women or HURT them now, do we? At the end of the day, till we actually tell them what they’re doing wrong and these guys realize exactly what they’re doing wrong,they will have reasons to just keep doing it. For how much longer can we just 'deal with it'?