Sexual Harassment and Schooling

“Who you calling’ a b___?”

Queen Latifah

“U.N.I.T.Y” 1993

 

No matter where you live, no matter where you’re from, if you’re a woman you’re likely to encounter some instance of harassment at some point in your life. Whether it’s a young man in your classroom or a construction worker on the corner, a harmless pick up line, or something more averse, the phenomenon is something most women are familiar with. However, for young girls in some developing countries sexual harassment can be much more than a nuisance. For many, it is a tangible thing that is barring them from receiving their education.

I can’t presume to know what if it feels like to live in a place where I could be harassed senselessly and brutally while walking to school.  As a child, I walked to school every day from age 9 until 14 and I took for granted my relatively uneventful morning walks. Sadly, in the Indian district of Bijnor this is not the case. Digital news outlet The Quint chronicled the “street stalking” that was preventing young girls in the district from atten009-india-eve-teasing-chappalmaarungicampaignding school.

The news outlet decided to investigate how safe women and girls felt in the Bijnor
community following a violent incident stemming
from an instance of eve-teasing, the public molestation and harassment that is becoming more common throughout the region. What they found was that women did not feel comfortable at all and because of victim blaming, police inaction , and the denial of administrators many families are making the decision to went to keep their daughters home rather than leave them vulnerable to their male neighbors and classmates.

Bijnor is not a unique community. There are many places, including those in the “developed” world where women face sexual harassment and violence daily.  A particularly concerning instance of this may be in Australia where there have been several troubling incidents of sexual harassment in the last year including an instance at the University of NSW where a group of male students were filmed singing a sexist chant which referred to women as “buns in the oven” they’d like to “cream by the dozen.”

Although actions have been taken to combat these instances of sexual harassment at Universities throughout the country,  there have been critiques about the surveys being done by one of the universities implicated in the harassment. Still, I’d argue that this is a step up from places, like Bijnor, where the issue is being largly ignored by police and administrators.  The fact that nothing is done about this behavior is not only a disservice to these girls education, but to their safety as well.

evtiging

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