Locating the Injustice in Sexual Harassment: Perspectives from Public Universities in India

Abstract

This paper, as part of my thesis titled “Rethinking Feminist Engagement with Institutional Anti-Sexual Harassment Mechanisms in India: A Study of University Spaces”, delves deeper into how stakeholders define the injustice of sexual harassment in the university. In this paper, I intend to trace the conceptual unities and differences in recognising the injustice of sexual harassment, across different generations of academics, students and lawyers. To do this, I rely upon the in-depth open-ended semi-structured interviews I conducted in the past year with academics, lawyers, and students across public universities in Delhi, India. I locate, through these narratives, how far has the legal-institutional consciousness seeped in the conceptual categories employed by stakeholders to identify some act/behaviour as sexual harassment, and how far the feminist resistances against sexual harassment have been able to impact the stakeholders’ thinking process. I observe that the legal, rather institutional consciousness that stakeholders manifest when talking about the injustice of sexual harassment is not just legal consciousness in its traditional sense. Despite the increasing mistrust of stakeholders on due processes, protests and alternative mechanisms by university students and faculty, focus of stakeholders have remained on making institutions work rather than not. Feminist resistances against sexual harassment in universities are aimed towards demanding better functioning of either existing mechanisms or creation of newer, more equitable ones. The culturally productive power of the law is such that despite being let down by the law, one still challenges the law or its implementation to make a statement of protest. Most importantly, I find that people remain hopeful about institutions, despite everything, in a democracy, thereby making it imperative for us to revisit the possibility of procedural justice.