[Eve-teasing] Sexual Harassment

Eve-teasing SEXUAL HARASSMENT

Eve-teasing is a euphemism in India for sexual harassment. The phrase infuriates me, and I only use it here to demonstrate how offensive it is (and I can't put strikethrough in the title). If you follow the news about India at all, you have certainly heard about the 23 year old girl who was brutally gangraped on Dec 16 and died of her injuries on Dec 29. Everyone has been talking about it here and there have been noisy protests as well as candlelit vigils almost every night.

On the 19^th I went to the protests with about a dozen co-workers. I was tasked with writing “Shame” on a posterboard, and while I didn’t make it on the front page, my two supervisors, fellow intern, and the sign did. A lot of different things are yelled at the protests:

we want justice!
chemical castration!
kill the rapists!
shame on Delhi Police!
shame on Delhi minister Sheila Dikshit!

HRLN has a strict policy against the death penalty, so I watched my Indian colleagues to make sure that the chants I was repeating in Hindi weren’t something we actually disagree with. It was interesting to actually participate in a protest after seeing Occupy and living in DC for years, but it did not sway my opinion about protests in general.

Current India law provides for seven years to life imprisonment for rape (not sure about applicable punishments for the one minor accused (EDIT: he can receive a maximum of three years imprisonment, but cannot be held past his 18^th birthday, in about six months)). There’s a huge uproar about this single gangrape, but the worry among activists is that the broader conversation on how women are treated will get forgotten once this passes.

Women are treated differently here. It’s as simple as that. I sit around with my three white, female, in their 20s colleagues and we discuss how the streets are 90% full of men. Where are the women? And why do the men stare? Within a few days, I’d perfected a 100-yard stare of not making eye contact with strange men, and I use a combination of gently saying “Na Na” (nay nay) and loudly saying “Nahi!” (na hee) when someone is too persistent in trying to get me to take a rickshaw ride, or look at their items in a market, or just won’t leave me alone. It’s an aggressive, louder, pushier environment than I’m used to, but it’s also just different than the U.S.

I’ve been drafting this post on sexual harassment and the gangrape for two weeks, and it’s hard to express it in a blog. For example, I’m having trouble coming up with a description of how men act, so I’ll refer you to this short article from Times of India and a longer one from Slate. They help explain how men in India think it’s okay to ask, assume, judge, and even touch.

I’ve mostly been fine, except for a few inappropriate comments by a waiter and a trail guide, both on Dec 26 in Nepal. I must have been looking exceptionally good that day <--- that, right there, is half the problem! The idea that women have done anything to deserve being treated with less than full respect. The idea that we must dress in a certain way so as not to attract attention. I’ve been dressing very conservatively and was actually quite bundled up on my hike and even at dinner, so I guess I was just unlucky that day. I’ve varied between trying to dissect why my trek guide thought I wanted a “Nepali boyfriend” and why my waiter emailed me after dinner, and wanting to forget about those creepy moments and move on.

At the time I took the steps I could – telling the guide to stop talking about it, and firing him from the next day’s trek. And I reported the email to the restaurant owner, who responded promptly and reprimanded the waiter. (If you want more details on either story, just email me.)

It all serves as a reminder of how uphill the battle is for every aspect of women’s rights – not just reproductive rights – in India. I’m glad I’m here and for now I’m choosing to brush off those incidents, because there is so much work to be done.