Growing concern over women's safety in public places in India

The abuse of women in public places is rooted in India’s changing socio-cultural and political environment.

Since August 9, the entire medical community in the Indian state of West Bengal has been angry with Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee for not resigning over the gruesome rape and murder of a young doctor (now known by the pseudonym Abhaya) at the government-run RGKar Medical College and Hospital in Kolkata.

As the state government dragged its feet on the issue despite growing public anger, the Calcutta High Court ordered transfer of the case from the Calcutta Police to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).

Besides tying the hands of the Kolkata police, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee transferred the principal, Dr Sandip Ghosh, to the prestigious National Medical College in Kolkata, instead of punishing him. Her actions have raised suspicions that some influential members of her party, the Trinamool Congress (TMC), were involved in the clandestine trade of dead bodies and hospital waste in collusion with the principal, Dr Ghosh.

“Namata Banerjee must resign as she is not only the Chief Minister but also the Minister of Health and Law and Order,” said an agitator.

The chief minister, however, attributed the surge to the machinations of the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Communist Party of Marx (CPM), its rivals in West Bengal’s political arena. Both parties had bitten the dust in the parliamentary elections held earlier this year in West Bengal.

The Prime Minister has accused the state Governor Dr Ananda Bose of being behind the agitation. Bose is angry with the Prime Minister for exploiting a sexual harassment complaint filed against him recently by a female employee of his household. The clash between Mamata and Bose is part of an ongoing conflict between the Centre and the state.

As of now, there seems to be no common ground between the Chief Minister and the angry doctors. But like all agitations, this one too will end. However, the issue of women’s safety in public spaces will remain unaddressed as it is a thorny issue deeply rooted in the cultural, social and political conditions of India.

Dimensions of the problem

In their World Bank blog dated December 22, 2023, Dina Umali-Deininger and Patricia Fernandes said that sexual harassment limits women’s career and educational opportunities.

“In India, women attending the University of Delhi were willing to go to an institution in the bottom 50% for quality, rather than to one in the top 20%, simply to take a safer path to university,” the authors said.

“This reality coexists with another grim statistic: South Asia has the second lowest female labor force participation rate, at just 25 percent, even though it is well established that when more women are in the workforce, economies tend to grow,” they added.

In Bangladesh, the ready-made garment industry has enabled women to join the workforce. Yet, according to a UNDP report, sexual harassment remains a problem. Most factories do not have anti-harassment committees or grievance redress mechanisms to address harassment cases. Affected women are likely to have higher absenteeism rates, leading to loss of wages.

A report by the United Nations Population Fund found that 90% of women surveyed in Sri Lanka’s nine provinces had experienced sexual harassment on public transport and 37% said their work performance had been affected by the harassment.

A study conducted by the International Finance Corporation (IFC) in Sri Lanka found that three in five respondents have experienced some form of violence or harassment at work, costing businesses at least $1.7 million a year.

In his book,Law and labor relations: a human resources management approachDr Arosha S. Adikaram of the Faculty of Management, University of Colombo said that in Sri Lanka, affected companies would have to pay dearly for sexual harassment in their institutions like companies do in the West.

In Sri Lanka, the maximum penalty for sexual harassment is only LKR 10,000, Dr Adikaram pointed out.

The Justice K. Hema Commission, which looked into complaints about directors and other senior officials in the Kerala film industry seeking sexual favours from female artistes, found that going through the ‘casting couch’ was the norm.

Status of Women in India

Women are celebrated in Indian mythology and the Hindu pantheon has goddesses and gods. Women have ruled India at the central level and the states as elected leaders. And yet, the safety of the average woman is not guaranteed in public places.

Due to the lack of security for women in the public sphere, Indian families tend to be overprotective, a major flaw in their acculturation seen from the perspective of a modernizing country.

Families lack confidence in their women’s safety outside the home, which partly explains why women make up only about 25% of India’s workforce.

Sociologist Patricia Uberoi wrote in a journal article in the 1970s that within the home, family, kinship and caste group (which she calls the “private sector”), the behavior of men and women is controlled by traditional norms and reinforced by sanctions.

But in the public sphere, which she calls the “public sector,” men’s behavior is unchecked, while women’s is. It’s free-for-all, meaning that men with guts can do pretty much whatever they want, including misbehaving with women. Women are expected to stay away from these wolves rather than confront them.

Harassment of women in public spaces is the result of patriarchal norms, according to sociologists. In this system, men are supposed to be macho, bold and even aggressive, but women are supposed to be conciliatory and accommodating. The best a woman can do in the event of sexual harassment in this culture is to move away from the problematic place or avoid such problematic situations in the future. There is no will to change the conditions.

Places of harassment

A 2013 survey in Delhi by the International Center for Research on Women and UN Women found that 73% of women and girls experienced sexual violence “in their own neighbourhood”.

Streets are considered the least safe places (80%), followed by markets (50%), parks (47%) and bus stops (37%). In addition, 63% of respondents said they were afraid when going out alone after dark and 21% never went out alone.

Thus, in the eyes of women, leaving the house to go to work was problematic, especially for those who depended on public transport. In the absence of any effective control over men’s behaviour in public spaces, families tended to keep their women tied to the house or send them to places considered relatively safe. This contributed to the low participation of women in India’s formal labour market.

Notable cases of harassment

In 2012, a 23-year-old physiotherapy intern known as “Nirbhaya” was gang-raped on an empty night bus in Delhi and left to die on the road. The incident sent shockwaves across India, with people taking to the streets to demand an end to the horrors.

But even years after the tragedy, nothing seems to have changed in Delhi, Swati Mahiwal, chairperson of the Delhi Commission on Women, recently lamented.

In May 2023, female wrestling champions staged a lengthy sit-in in central New Delhi to pressure the government to take action against Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, president of the National Wrestling Federation, for sexual misconduct. But given Singh’s ties to the ruling BJP (he was an MP), he got off lightly. He lost the federation presidency, but his term in office still stands.

In highly politicized countries like India, almost every controversy is politicized and the responses of one and the other take on a political color. Partisan thinking clouds reasoning. External issues come into play, preventing any decisive and quick action on the issue in question. The original problem remains unresolved.

And when the political dust settles, the issue of harassment of women in public places is swept under the carpet, only to resurface again and again.