Women taking to social media to report sexual harassment is good news

Why is Jasleen Kaur’s account seen as an alleged lie, while the accused and eyewitnesses’ as alleged truth?

WrittenBy:Makepeace Sitlhou
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Men are screwed. This is the rhetoric widely heard (since men have felt under siege) on social media in India ever since Jasleen Kaur’s viral Facebook post, where she claimed to have been threatened with obscene remarks, were contradicted by eyewitnesses of the incident.

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The mob dismissed Jasleen’s claims as quickly as they had shared her testimony and in a domino effect, it got picked up by news agencies and propelled Delhi police to take action on the same day. While the Internet got to hear both sides of the story, the online verdict is polarised between the “pervert to innocent” Sarvjeet Singh (whose mother has unsurprisingly defended her Monu) and the “brave heart to liar” Jasleen Kaur.

Moreover, this debate has once again given legitimacy to men’s rights activists or MRAs (as they like to be called), who have long been trying to draw attention to cases of false complaints by women. In a backlash to women reporting sexual harassment online, MRAs now claim that many women are misusing their “victim voices” to name and shame men for personal settlement or fame.

Jasleen’s case was quickly connected to the alleged false case of the Rohtak sisters, who were also initially called brave hearts after a video went viral of them physically assaulting their alleged sexual harassers in a Haryana state line bus. Both cases have similar twists in their stories – the eyewitnesses of the incident contradicted the perceived narrative of heroism or feminism. The Rohtak sisters were even put through a lie detector test, based on which the public has already dismissed their claims. It’s another matter that these eyewitness accounts carry a degree of patriarchal attitudes as well, much like the Jat community villagers of Baghpat who claim no rape diktat was given by a Khap Panchayat that allegedly doesn’t even exist.

Two realities in India comorbid to keep women from raising their voice or reporting sexual violence to the police — the existing rape culture that instills huge shame on women’s bodies and the hopeless Indian justice system.

As far as 10 years back, only 5.8 per cent of the incidence of sexual violence (other than the husband) was reported to the police, according to this RICE Institute study that compared data for incidence and rate of reporting from National Family Health Survey and National Crime Records Bureau. This was the same year social media was beginning to catch on in India, although its potential to mobilise people on social issues was still not explored. There were Nirbhayas at the time too, namely the Dhaula Kuan rape case in New Delhi, who had but fewer places to turn to for support, with a choice between the devil that wears khaadi and the deep blue sea of invasive mainstream media channels.

Many journalists in India have reported on police attitude to sexual assault survivors by going undercover in police stations. Invariably, the responses to seemingly innocuous questions like what time of the day or where did it happen eventually were traps to blame the victim, not to mention the obvious, what were you wearing.

Historically, women’s accounts of surviving sexual violence have typically been met with blame, moral judgment, trivialisation or dismissal. The horror of being subjected to unwarranted and unnecessary questions while filing an FIR or registering your complaint has inhibited so many women from pursuing the case legally for their personal peace of mind. While cumulatively more cases of sexual offences might be reported from 2013 to ‘14, numbers on sexual harassment in public transport or at the workplace hasn’t seen any enthusiastic jump, with only 57 cases of sexual harassment at work reported from across the country last year. Clearly, our hearts only go out when guts are spilled or objects inserted.

NCRB data also reveals a significant spike in the number of reported sexual offences only in immediate aftermath of the Nirbhaya case in December 2012. The percentage change in the rate of crime from 2003 jumped from 73.7 per cent in 2012 to 120.2 per cent in 2013. Ever since that, the percentage change from 2013 to 2014 (with an addition of “attempt to commit rape” as a crime under IPC) has been miniscule at 1.15 per cent in sexual offences.

Instead, many women have found a refuge for their stories on social media. Initially, the trend was limited to anonymous blogs. But now women are sharing these experiences from their personal accounts on Facebook and Twitter. The name and shame campaign took off in India as early as 2011 by a Facebook group called Shoot At Sight, which encouraged its members to post pictures of men engaging in street sexual harassment in order to publically shame them by capturing them in the act. While our Khap Panchayat leaders might disagree, mobile phones actually empowered women (at least a section), this being one of the ways to fight back.

The increasing agency that social media enabled for women to be able to speak up and own their experiences is a huge step in going against the tide of rape culture, which otherwise enforces silence and shame. While one can easily blame women for the ongoing social media trials, where do we expect them to turn when neither the police (not even lady cops) nor their families encourage them to pursue justice? This Ladies Finger series of survivors’ first person accounts of filing complaints to the police illustrates how the system is still not conducive to women. Legal activist and lawyer Indira Jaising once said in a speech delivered at the staging of Vagina Monologues in Delhi, “People say women are abusing the law. I say women are hardly using the law.”

Unfortunately, she stands largely undisputed, even today.

Men’s rights activists will have you believe a huge number of women’s complaints are out of revenge, extortion or more recently, Twitter followers if you were to listen to this guy. No doubt that there are fake complaints, many of which are lodged (and women are pressured into) by parents in cases of eloping or sexual relations with a minor girl, despite mutual consent.

It’s important that the system from the police station to the judiciary should be equipped to discernibly and sensitively handle cases of alleged sexual offences. If there’s anything that the lynch mob in Nagaland or the ongoing media trials tells us is that it’s high time (in fact, much overdue) for police to step up its game in responding quickly, efficiently and without prejudice to women reporting sexual violence. Maybe then this naming and shaming will become redundant.

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