Street vendors, factory workers, maids, etc., 95 percent of Indian women work in the informal sector and many are exploited regularly, despite a law ordering employers to set up committees to resolve harassment complaints, according to the Human Rights Watch (HRW). From lewd comments to demands for sex, women working in India’s vast informal sector rarely report sexual harassment for fear of losing their jobs. This is because often times families will blame the woman for being harassed and start beating them, and if you tell their employer, the woman will be fired. Police are also bad. They ask extremely inappropriate and intimate questions as an attempt to embarrass and belittle the woman. With no one to turn to, most women just bottle it all up inside and learn to ignore or normalise it which in return can have devastating effects to their well-being.
Sexual harassment is no new issue in India. After the global #MeToo movement erupted in October 2017, with millions of survivors posting to social media about their own experiences of gender-based violence, many women in India—mostly from the media and entertainment business, as well as others able to access social media in English—started using the hashtag to publicize their numerous accounts of sexual abuse and how common it was in India. One woman who posted to an online help forum for sexual assault survivors wrote, “There is no place safe for women in India. Not our workplaces, nor our homes, and not the road we take.”
In my opinion, no woman should ever have to fear being sexually abused, anywhere or any time. We must ask ourselves, since it is so common in India, why do we not hear about it more often and why do we not do anything to stop it? Well, it serves as a perfect example of the collective goods problem – does the reward outweigh the cost? To me, there is no price on a woman’s wellbeing and the ongoing harassment these Indian woman face needs to be recognized and stopped.