Wed 2 Jul 2008
The Newage front-page reports that among other things in Bangladesh, the state of gender-based violence at the work place is also deteriorating. Big surprise! The news comes as a result of a survey conducted by the Social Science Research Council of the Planning Commission, under Ministry of Finance and Planning. The news report by BSS states that ‘92.3 per cent working women of urban areas and 88.3 per cent of rural areas have been badly treated by various types of violence by their male counterparts’. Therefore, on an average, 90% of all women suffer from gender violence at their workplaces. I honestly can’t say that I am surprised.
The study reports that ‘huge number of adolescent girls and women were being sexually abused in their workplace but it was the most hidden and underreported from violence as there is a tendency to deny the incident.’ Almost all the women I know, including self and FnF and those I have worked with, have complained about facing gender-violence of some form or other at their workplace. It’s a malice we are all equally aware of, but powerless against. Even this report—for all it’s gravity and accuracy—is going to be well received, but after being discussed, debated and dissected, will be forgotten and our fates will remain the same. Perhaps, women who are violated every day have already lost faith in our institutions, laws and elders and their ability to protect us. Perhaps, it’s because most people still don’t even understand what constitutes gender-violence/sexual harassment, not even the victims themselves. Perhaps, it’s because we’ve all somehow contributed in making things worse for us by encouraging violence in our silences. Perhaps because we’ve become complacent about this and now choose to take it in our stride—after all, independent, successful women who’re trying to make it in a man’s world should just learn to ‘deal with it’ and not complain (because men tell us they don’t).
The Planning Commission study revealed that, ‘More than 22 per cent of the working women identified existence of few legal provisions as one of the main reasons for violence at the workplace in the urban area.’ Now, I don’t know if the sample included women working both white collar and blue collar jobs, but I do know that the problems in both cases,even in the public sectors/local government are, fundamentally, of the same nature. Thanks to the hue and cry about ‘compliance’, ‘ISO’ and ‘ILO standards’, garments factory owners, among others who promote themselves as emancipators of women, begrudgingly introduce ‘codes of conduct’ to try and protect the women whose hard work go into sustaining this 6 billion dollar industry. Sure they all have codes and ethics and rules and laws. But these efforts are cosmetic at best. They do however have activists and trade unions fighting for their cause, but what of the white collar female workers? A female colleague of mine was once slapped (and had her hair pulled and arm pinched, albeit playfully, but unsolicited) by a male superior at the office (a real liberal ad agency). Outraged, I had asked her if she had liked being ‘handsy’ with her male colleagues and why she hadn’t reported him, she had given me a sad smile and said, ‘Ki korbo Fariha? Na like kore ekhon ki korbo? Kothai giye complain korbo? Thanai?’ Asholei, what choice does she have? However, when the same happened to me, among other things at the same office, I did take it up to our female HR director, who said ‘Yes I know this happens, but what can we do? It’s very difficult to get candidates for this job [referring to the perpetrator]. I can’t fire him for this now can I? I guess I’ll just have to warn him again. [For the 25th time].’ I quit the agency ages ago, but that man still works there. A few days ago, I met another (male) colleague from the same agency. While discussing another ex-employer’s nefariousness, he remarked, ‘See, I had told you. These guys are everywhere. You should just learn to deal with it.’ Deal with it—so easily said and so arduously done! My banker cousin was routinely bugged by a persistent client who wanted to take her out for lunch/dinner. She was married; so was he and he was aware of the facts. After failing to get him to curb his untoward behavior, she reported him to her boss, who said ‘Bujhlei to, boro client. We have to keep them happy.’ The same boss would also routinely engage in extra-marital exploits of his own, in full hearing distance and view of his female colleagues. Outrageous, no? But that’s just how it is. In the absence of a working mechanism or at least a platform our work-place woes are actually dealt with, we have no choice but to deal with it.
‘How is watching porn sexual harassment?’ a male colleague had once asked us, a group of his female colleagues. We asked him not to download porn or watch it live in the office. I can’t say I blame him for not realizing this simple fact, most women don’t. Watching porn, making derogatory comments about the opposite sex or engaging in any kind of conduct that is found ‘sexist’ is actually sexually harassment. The company I worked for then, finally disallowed downloading and viewing porn; not because it was sexual harassment, but because it ate up bandwidth and reduced productivity. I have been dubbed a ‘militant feminist’ and have been accused of seeing everything as ‘sexual’—starting from those friendly pats on the back, the seemingly harmless propositions, sentences like ‘I want to massage that idea out of your head’, discussions on people’s conjugal lives or just plain-old celebrity nudes. It’s the same, resounding, echo—‘It’s the same everywhere. Deal with it!’
Audre Lorde, the American feminist, had written, ‘Your silence will not protect you’. And it doesn’t. The study also implicates, ‘Most of the women do not talk about it in order to protect herself/himself from shame and stigma as well as to protect the perpetrator who is usually a colleague or supervisor, it said.’ Sure we talk about sexual harassment—on forums, at round tables, seminars, conferences, newspaper op-eds, blogs and on tv. But we don’t raise our voices in protest at the work-place, because that will stunt our professional growth, get us shunned by society, make us the gossip-of-the-week, or make us the ‘girl who claims she was sexually abused’. The man of course, will get rehired in no time or worse still, will get ‘warned’. Newage quotes, ‘Almost 38 per cent of the working women of the study areas opined that patriarchal mentality is the root cause for occurring violence at the workplace.’ Our male colleagues will forever bask in their oblivion—’we never HIT women or HURT them now, do we?’ At the end of the day, till we actually tell them what they’re doing wrong and these guys realize exactly what they’re doing wrong, they’ll have reasons to keep violating us; with their eyes, their words and their actions. For how much longer can we just ‘deal with it’?
July 2nd, 2008 at 4:25 pm
Feminism is an post-industrial movement. Given Bangladesh is still largely agrararian (women are expected to stay at home rather than work outside) chauvinistic attitudes toward women are the norm rather than the exception. Rather than legal remedy we need an evolution of cultural attitudes toward women. As women in the workplace stop becoming a novelty, attitudes should change.
July 2nd, 2008 at 6:55 pm
I fully agree with Sylhetifua. Feminism is not only a post-industrial movement but it is also a post-industrial movement that tends to recreate the traditional unit of family.
During the First and the Second World Wars (that were basically the wars of White Europe), women took the place of men in the factory when the men had to leave the factories to fight and die in the wars. The long length of war meant more amunition and the women came out of home to the factory to make this amunitions. At the end of these world wars, there was a shortage of men who died in these wars and the women took their places in the factories once again never to return back to home to raise children. Women have been coming to the factories ever since the onset of the industrial revolution in England that had a different social history from the one we had in Bangladesh.
While Bangladesh is having its own Garments and other industrial revolution requiring women to work outside home, this in no way means that we make these Bangladeshi women replicate the Western model. We never had to fight World Wars in bangladesh for our women to vacate their homes and children to work in factories. Therefore there is no reason why we should ignorantly accept the values of the West rammed down our throats by a few feminist inspired movements.
As far as the Bangladeshi women are concerned, there is the Begum Rokeya model or the extreme Taslima Nasrin model. It seems, given these choices most Bangladeshi women these days would prefer to become Taslima Nasrin than Begum Rokeya. Modernization does not mean Westernization. In order to be modern, Bangladeshi women need not replicate the worst that West has to offer in role models of women.
Amor Vincit Omnia.
July 2nd, 2008 at 8:23 pm
Thanks Fariha for bringing up such an important topic with some real data. We can’t afford to wait for the culture to change, unless there is strong workplace policies exits and it is enforeced appropriately.
It not just about harrassment, I think Professionalism in general is missing from our own culture.We hardly value opnions that is different from ours. We never have time to listen. Why so?
These days I don’t have first hand experience from BD. However I was talking to some high offical of a private bank and another one from another company, they mentioned to me that they don’t have any training for the managers. Without educating people about what is a good behavior vs what is unacceptable we can’t just assume that it will be fixed automatically.
Its not only on the males, women have to come forward to establish their rights. I sometimes read the women pages in our popular dailies I find that we focus very much on the idea that “society has to change”. I would rather ask each one of us, what did you do to make that change?
One simple example: I read this book, “The power of positive confrontation”-This was a life changer for me, unfortunaly most ppl I talked about it didn’t think it will work. I found that we (men, women alike)are very close minded in many cases. When we talk about openness it is mostly how open we are in wearing non-coservative clothes or adopting anything that is foreign :(.
Sharmin
July 2nd, 2008 at 10:58 pm
i think its really cool that in desh ranking female engineers and scientists wear their own clothes and are respected for their acumen. need more of that. forget the banking sector, thats not proper work.
July 3rd, 2008 at 1:25 am
Fariha, great post on a very important issue. Some things to ponder about - all questions that I have little answers to, and would appreciate discussion.
1. I wonder how true is the perception that ‘women were traditinally expected to stay at home than work outside’? How deep is that tradition? What was the gender relations in rural Bangladesh before the great political upheavals of the past few generations?
2. Everytime I go back (on average once every 10 months or so in the past decade), I see two things. I see lot more women in public places. And I see lot more women in hijab-burqa as well as ‘western’ clothes. Last year, I decided to ask a few of my friends and relatives about the hijab-burqa. The sample size is too small and there is an obvious selection bias to make any generalisations, still it’s worth noting that for most of them, donning a hijab was a defence mechanism against harrassment. While I’m well aware of the political ramifications of using hijab as a defence mechanism (more: http://jrahman.wordpress.com/2007/05/05/on-hijab/), from a narrow, individual perspective, I do wonder what I would do in a situation like that.
3. On the patriarchal mentality, think about how a ‘liberal husband’ in our society described. ‘Such and such is a very liberal guy, he allows his wife so much freedom’ - have you ever heard such a statement? ‘Ami to amar bou ke shob shadhinota dei’ - how about something like this? In our society, shadhinota/rights is for the husband to give to the wife. Our typical ‘liberal husbands’ seldom realise the irony in this.
4. On the point about extramarital affairs point, I recall another post from Dhaka few weeks ago that noted that marriage brakdown is on the rise. Are there any data on that?
July 3rd, 2008 at 5:30 am
Jyoti bhai,
As always, thanks!
1. I don’t agree with blanket statements such as “‘women were traditinally expected to stay at home than work outside”. Where is this tradition rooted? Only in mainstream moddo-bitto Bangali Muslim culture, which Begum Rokeya was able to challenge. Traditionally, even in rural areas, women had worked as house-maids, they had gone out for fishing and hunting game and aiding in farming. Their husbands/fathers had no qualms about it because someone had to do the job! Women, even in rural Bangladesh, stepped out of the house and into ‘work’ out of need– not for some glorified feminist push. The garments workers started work in the 80’s and the female construction workers started work perhaps even earlier. No NGO brought them about, not feminist fought for them. They were there and they were working because they needed to. And society did not frown because at the end of the day, it’s the ‘need’ factor. The causal factor was the as the same as the West- the growing demand for workers in certain sectors– the circumstances were different. This trend is universal and not spurred by feminism. Problem starts when women start working in non-traditional sectors — heavy manufacturing, service etc..
2. I think this trend is the fall-out/effect of the growing polarisation of Dhaka society (don’t know how it is outside of Dhaka). People feel forced to choose a side– liberal and conservative. And every year, it seems to me (though my sample size is small too)that more and more people opt for a pole as opposed to middle of the ground. It’s either uber urban pant-shart or the hijab/ niqab . But I honestly don’t know anyone who wears Hijab for protection. It’s usually meant to symbolize their rather beliefs. Especially if they are young people, you might see that they are the first generation of hijabis in their family. (Disclaimer: Have some wonderful Hijabi friends)
3.‘Biyer por to tomar guardian tomar husband’ ‘tomar husband k to khub smart mone hoi, nishchoi tomake freedom dibe’ ‘western kapor porte dibe to? porashuna korte dibe? – i hear that far too often. You’re so right about this. It’s like my guardianship/ownership get’s transfered from the hands of my father to my husbands. You’re right about the irony too —most men I know find all this flattering dekhecho amake liberal bhabe. jane ami koto bhalo
4. No data. Just anecdotal. Too many extra-maritals and too many divorces. Very scary prospect. Won’t be surprised if we start re-inventing the marriage contract with a pre-nup.
July 3rd, 2008 at 7:48 am
Great post, Fariha. It’s sad how these things never change, and actually grow as more women enter the workforce, and, perhaps, learn to talk a bit more about it too.
I remember writing a piece on sexual harassment in the workplace and everywhere else, in fact, over five years ago for the DS magazine (among other pieces on the same topic). It was just a two-page story and one of my first since joining DS, but to date, it’s possibly the one I got most responses to, in the form of letters, etc. People have such inhibitions about these things that any avenue to vent their frustrations, to talk about it, to encourage the person talking about it and even, though more rarely, contribute to the conversation, is welcomed by most people.
Yet there are others who are just so disturbed by it all. I remember people in my own family having a problem with my using the word “breast” in print (in reference to a man on the bus just putting his hand on that of the woman sitting next to him) and rape and everything. The idea was, why did I need to write about it, and it wasn’t something they could tell their friends that a member of their family had written it and what-not. My take was, obviously, that if it can happen, why can’t I write about it?
Seminars and roundtables don’t help until and unless we really get and talk about what’s going on, until we clearly define sexual harassment for what it is, until we have a legal (and social) framework to counter it and encourage and give people the courage to speak out and have something done about it - not only when it’s drastic or has gone on for long enough, but each and every time something like this happens.
July 3rd, 2008 at 8:56 am
Thanks Kajalie. And I’ve read and liked all your articles on the same issue. Sadly, even in my family, if I had been any more graphic in describing harassment at the workplace, my father who actually reads this, would no doubt frown. (Sorry baba!)
Secondly, you’re right –the fact that most people, even women, don’t realize how even seemingly trivial things such as those ‘near-inappropiate’ sentences are also sexual harassment. It’s not just soliciting or outright groping!
We should be able to protest these ‘menial’ things, legally and socially, and we deserve a framework which gives us protection from such harassment and helps us take our violators to task. Unless our violators fear retribution, harassment would only perpetuate.
Like Sharmin apa said, we can’t expect society to change by itself without contributing to the change ourselves. Arguing in fallacies- society is still not acceptable of working women– only points at our own shupto basona to preserve this system of discrimination.
July 3rd, 2008 at 11:36 am
Cholishnu, what is “extreme” about Taslima model? Please explain.
Her earliest pieces were about eve teasing by men in public spaces. In 1980s that was the nascent version of male fear of female presence and power, played out as invasive groping, which now has spread to the urban workplace.
If you are referring to her views on religion, you are playing out the tired script of using Taslima-on-religion to negate Taslima-on-gender-rights.
July 3rd, 2008 at 12:00 pm
[...] Unheard Voices on the issue of gender-violence that women face in the workplace in Bangladesh. Posted by Neha Viswanathan Share This [...]
July 3rd, 2008 at 3:24 pm
Ref: #9, Naeem, Thanks for your invitation to address this issue of comparative feminism of gender-rights from the perspective of Begum Rokeya and Taslima Nasrin, two contendors of role models for the modern Bangladeshi women. Following is my analysis.
For Taslima Nasrin, marriage is an oppressive and exploitative economic arrangement, which reinforces sexual inequality, and binds women to domesticity. For Taslima, marriage perpetuates the belief that if the female is protected and provided for by her male partner, she is happy � she is thought to be content that her needs are provided for.
Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hussain refuted this belief. In her �Sultanar Shaapno � A feminist Utopia�, she, like her Victorian feminist counterpart, Virginia Woolf (see her Moments of Being, 1941) introduces the ideas of transcendence and immanence. Begum Rokeya argued that the fulfillment of human potential must be judged, not in terms of happiness, but in terms of liberty. Liberty is something more than maintaining one�s existence peacefully and comfortably. Liberty is about the environment. Whereas freedom is about the person. To be free, a person must transcend the animal part of his or her life �the temporary and unthinking happiness that comes from being in one�s infantile and youthful Chelebela or Meyebela of being warm and well fed. This is what Taslima Nasrin failed to do. Taslima failed to transcend the animal part of her life, her youthful Meyebela with Syed Shamsul Haque and Sunil Gangapadhay whom she blames for their sexual misconduct and for violations of her gender-rights (see, Meyebela, 2006).
Begum Rokeya Sakhaway, a daughter of the Zamindar of Payrabandh and a niece of the Zamindar of Baliadi, led us to believe that she is a feminine transcendentalist, who transcended her mortal desires to elevate her self to a intellectual state of being where her work and philosophy of the emancipation of women will shape the world for future generations of Bangladeshi women, thereby affording her a form of immortality.
Taslima Nasrin, however, is immanent � i.e. through her distorted image of motherhood and her inability to transcend her mortal desires, she represents herself and her philosophy in a purely animal way, and does not otherwise affect the future of thoughtful Bangladeshi women. Taslima Nasrin�s liberty is limited and narrowly defined. It is granted to her by the same misogynists that she writes about in lurid details of her Meyebela, and, as such, it is no liberty at all.
For Begum Rokeya, the key to female emancipation lay in woman�s release from her bodily identification, something that Taslima Nasrin fetishizes in her Meyebela to attract her Babus. This belief of releasing one�s female body from identification rests on the idea that there is a schism in human experience � that we are both immanent and transcendental being, that is, we are determined by both our body and mind. Although we are tied to our animal, bodily selves by hunger or lust, as transcendental beings, we can overcome these base desires and pursue our full intellectual and emotional potential. This is the rationalist mind-over-matter objective that Begum Rokeya was able to achieve that Taslima Nasrin failed to achieve. It is for this reason alone, in my personal opinion, our beloved Bangladeshi women-kind, the better part of ourselves, should follow the role model of Begum Rokeya Sakhwat Hussain as opposed to Taslima Nasrin.
July 4th, 2008 at 9:40 am
The comparison between Taslima Nasreen and Begum Rokeya has no relevance to the the origninal post. We are not comparing feminist discourse here.
However, if any one really wants to read up about Begum Rokeya’s opinions on Gender Violence and what women should do to tackle it, as well as her opinion on women’s positions in the ‘work place’, please read Poddorag. It actually is based on the first-wave feminists of Bengal.
And men who write sexist remarks in the the blogs of female bloggers have no business comparing ‘feminists’ and their flaws. You’re fetishes are no less disgusting than the TN you seem to despise.
July 4th, 2008 at 11:11 am
begum royaka (ra) would probably have thought the monicker ‘femenism’ a little naff and westoxified no?
begum shaista ikramulla, i consider her to be ours also (I understand why you might not), she’s a bit more recent.
July 13th, 2008 at 9:28 am
Re: post no. 5
Hijab/burka might be a political ramification, but not always.
Hijab is a reminder : what should be the attitude towards these hijaabi women. These women are explicitly declaring their choice by maintaining a dress-code, their is no scope for any confusion. In a society that respects the ideology directing this dress-code needs no further training of so-called Managers.
So you see, its cost-effective at the same time eliminating the need for training budget.
And, still, if the wome face any more problem despite maintaining the dress-code, where they are going to complain?( I know it for sure)
I think this is the point against which many ppl will raise their voice, blaming it Fundamentalism. (My dear Fariha was saying : where to make complain..?)
July 13th, 2008 at 1:06 pm
#13,
She would, yeah? You’re right.
#14
Shewly apa,
If only it were that simple, no?
I think blaming everything on ‘fundamentalism’ or ‘islamization’ is just naive. I’ve seen women in Burkha’s get pushed around on the street-side ( I won’t even go into that ’short-skirt’ issue). There are some who may think that wearing a burkha will make us less susceptible to harassment, but I don’t agree.
In a different post, I think Kajalie mentions how we actually need a special sexual harassement policy for women for all spheres of public/private life. It may not change things overnight, but at least it’s a start!