Despite extensive investigation, source of wokeness remains a mystery

October 6, 2018 | Bengaluru | By: Mukta Joshi

India’s finest law university sure does boast of the wokest of Woke Bois, but where are they coming from? The Quirk team recently undertook an enquiry in an attempt to find some answers to the discrepancy between the number of men enrolled in feminist courses at the National Law School of India University, and the number of Woke Bois it churns out annually.

And these Bois sure are Woke – we need look no further than law school’s infamous email threads, SBA Noticeboard comment threads, and batch WhatsApp group conversations. It certainly isn’t the case that men who don’t bother to study feminist courses don’t have opinions on issues of gender, sexuality, and the pervasive nature of sexual violence, so we attempted to understand the cause of their absence in these courses, and spoke to a few Woke Bois on campus.

“I find academic feminism too pretentious, so my favourite organic source of feminism are my female friends. The best part is that their personal experiences and emotional labor are available to me for free, and I don’t even have to do as much as writing a Lizzie project!” said a fifth year student who’s so woke that he makes sure to never hold the door open for any woman, no matter how pregnant or how old.

“Why take a course on feminism when I can learn some every time a bhai gets attacked on the batch group?” said a fourth year student who, just last week, lectured his female friends on the importance of extending the benefit of the doubt to his bro accused of sexual harassment.

Since the Bois did, admittedly, seem to be making very valid points, we turned to the women on campus to gauge their opinion on whether the shocking lack of male participation in feminist courses was a problem.

When asked, a third year student said, “It’s true that my boyfriend would understand that his gaslighting behaviour is textbook if he’d read the damn textbook, but I think it’s okay because it isn’t too late now to say sorry, and he misses more than just my body.”

“Nothing quite compares to the adrenaline rush I get when I relive my own experiences of harassment while using them as examples to prove the importance of social sanction. I mean, I know that countless others have already spent their careers writing about them so I don’t have to, but I’m so grateful to my male friends for giving me a chance to do it anyway,” said a fifth year student.

“Even though the classroom is a space exclusively designed to facilitate the exchange of unsettling ideas and conflicting intellectual opinions, my favourite place to do it is at Chetta – after all, my favourite D’s are debate and discussion!” a fourth year student exclaimed.

Perhaps we were overzealous in identifying a feminist issue where there wasn’t one, but is this trend likely to change anytime soon?

“I don’t know – I’m just more inclined towards commercial law,” said a student as he walked past.

Exactly one year and two months ago, I had started writing this article. But at that time, the story was incomplete.

In what were the most difficult 6 months of my life so far, I had faced several things – the death of a grandmother, the death of a close friend, an abusive relationship. And rape. Yes, rape. No, I did not slap him immediately after the act. No, I did not go to the police. To all those who wonder why I didn’t, please consider that the Law School community has, time and again, discouraged survivors from even filing SHARIC complaints. In such a scenario, imagine being a 19 year old, yet to come to terms with the emotional trauma she was experiencing. Imagine standing in front of a group of men and narrating the ordeal in detail, over and over again. Difficult to imagine? Even more difficult to do.

Filing a complaint before the Sexual Harassment Inquiry Committee was an incredibly difficult task for me, considering that the perpetrator was once a friend. It did not help that I was feeling guilty for having been drunk at the party or for being unable to fight back during the incident. My guilt was added on to by those who messaged me asking me to let the matter be, to think of his career. My parents, who were more disappointed than angered, shook my confidence even more. Looking back, I would never have been able to file the complaint had a group of my friends not come to my room and given me the confidence to take the step forward.

I used to think that filing a complaint would mean that I would no longer have to interact with the perpetrator. I was wrong. That is when the mind games began. Emotional blackmail, constant messaging, fake threats of suicide, gaslighting and humiliation. While some ridiculous attempts did provide comic relief (going to each MHOR hostel room and faking a heart attack, seriously?), others tore at my self-worth (before this I did not know that only pretty girls can get assaulted). It became all the more difficult when his mother came to campus to meet me. I refused to meet her. But clearly, neither the college administration nor his mother understood consent well.

In the long months before any proceedings commenced, the perpetrator continued to attend classes, seek attendance condonations and project extensions for having been “traumatised”. These months were the starting point of the conversation revolving around condonation of the acts of sexual harassers on campus. Many batchmates took the stance that they could not take any decision about my reality until the SHIC had decided on the same. They  chose to place their trust in an unknown body rather than a batchmate they had known for 3 years. We, in Law School, often forget that we are not bound by judicial principles when we do not possess judicial authority. Neutrality is not a virtue when you know the reality of oppression. Regardless, it was saddening to see these people change their stance when their own friends were harassed (consistency is also a judicial principle, if we really want to go there).

It took almost one year, one bold professor, and one committee change to finally commence the proceedings. I will not lie – the proceedings drained me completely. However, for once, in the entire journey, I felt closer to justice than I ever did before. It was also the time where I found support in seniors and friends who selflessly devoted their time to the cause. Help is indeed always given in Law School to those who seek it.

A few months later, the decision of the SHIC came out. Ecstasy was my first emotion, grief was my second. Over the year, I had pinned my entire mental health on that one decision and expected it to solve all my problems. The grief struck when I realised that I was not magically cured. The day of the decision was the first time I felt suicidal. It’s surprising how little is said about mental health issues in Law School considering how many people suffer from them, day in and day out. I realised after a long time (and constant pushing from my roommates) that seeking help would not make me “weak” and I did deserve to be happy.

On the 15th of September, 2018, my struggle was vindicated. Securing justice gives you the closure that “what if” never does. Yes, the struggle was long and there is still a long way to go. But now I know I have the strength for it, since it is no longer my fight alone. It is the fight of the senior who guided me when I was filing a complaint, of those witnesses who poured many hours into the proceedings, of those alumni who came out in support, of those friends who consoled me when I lost hope, of those parents who would have died to get their old daughter back, of all those women who told me they went through similar experiences, of that bold professor who took on the college administration to ensure the proceedings continued, of those SHIC members who worked tirelessly to complete the proceedings, of the partner who taught me how to recognise my worth – and lastly, it is the fight of all those who came out and stood in solidarity on that momentous Saturday afternoon in the pouring rain.

I could fight because it was not a lone woman’s fight. It was a community’s fight.

This past week has been a confusing time for many of us – shocking and disheartening for some, reassuring and empowering for others. I’ve heard the phrase “law school is having its #metoo moment” more than once, and many of us (myself included) have felt like we’ve been caught in quicksand, at times – struggling with questions that we’re unable to escape or ignore. This is natural, of course; everyone takes their own time on the learning curve. But the problem with taking too long when it comes to something like practicing feminism is that the collateral damage caused by missteps taken by those who are still on this learning curve can be devastating to those who are already been left vulnerable.

Why should we dissociate ourselves from men who we know have sexually harassed? This question was thrown open during the run up to the SBA elections this year, and naturally turned into a shitfest of gargantuan proportions. Is this not a form of mob justice? Do we not believe in the ability of a perpetrator to reform? Is it not inconsistent with mainstream law school opinion on the death penalty? In a nutshell, the need for social sanction, or dissociation, is precisely this: when men commit sexual harassment, which is an abuse of power and privilege, it is their social capital which allows them to not only commit the act in the first place, but to silence the victim after the act has taken place. While this silencing may not be active or even intentional, it functions in latent ways – by instilling fear and self-doubt (not to mention a constant feeling of dread) in the mind of the victim, which intensifies when she eventually comes to the realization that the perpetrator will never be held accountable.

In law school, in addition to the social power structures that naturally exist, additional forms of privilege act as shields – studliness, mooting achievements, sporting stardom, and committee convenership, to name a few. The higher up you are on the law school ladder, the more quickly you are likely to be forgiven for your abuse of this status. Does a class bias not exist in how we’ve seen social sanction pan out over the past couple of years? Of course it does, and it shouldn’t. But the logical extension of this ought to be that we take all victims of sexual harassment seriously, and sanction their perpetrators equally, regardless of their law school status – and not that nobody should receive any sanction at all.

With regard to reformative justice and forgiveness, I believe that nobody has the right to forgive a perpetrator for violating someone else. But obviously, expecting someone to remain a friendless outcast is not viable forever. Focusing on the consequences of ostracization (but what about his job? what about his mental health?) could not be further from the point, though. When trying to devise a practical solution to deal with a practical problem, we cannot ignore the fact that we still very much live in a world, and in a law school where, as much as we’d like to believe otherwise, sexual violence is not taken seriously. A perpetrator is never going to be rendered an absolute pariah, unless maybe the victim manages somehow to go through a gruelling SHARIC trial and secure a conviction (and maybe not even then). What we must keep in mind though, is that the best (and only genuine) apology is changed behaviour. Until we are unequivocally certain of that, ensuring that we do not continue to reward perpetrators with the same social capital they have abused is one small but necessary step we can take to see to it that we are, in fact, taking sexual violence as seriously as we think we are.

As a fifth year student, I’ve spent four years now living with a deep sense of regret for not having spoken up (and other times, not having spoken up forcefully enough) about the sexual violence I’ve experienced during my time in law school. And I know I’m not the only one. Perhaps if the community had reassured me, as a first year, that each experience amounted to something more than just minor infractions that I should get over and let go, I wouldn’t have struggled for so long with feelings of distrust and hopelessness. I think we’re further along the learning curve now. And I think we owe it to those still struggling with these feelings (and those who haven’t had to, yet) to let them know we’ve got their back.

(Hereinafter, I will be using male pronouns for assaults and female pronouns for victims, for ease of expression, although both victims and assaulters can be from either gender.)

Dear Author,

This is a public request to take down your article. I will not use your name although most people already know who you are. I do not want to direct more people to your article nor do I want to direct my anger solely towards you. (Ideally, it would be directed at all of the people who thought fit to share and like your article, without thinking of the message this sends to victims and sexual assaulters, it’s also directed to everyone who shares the same beliefs expressed in your article).

Sexual Assaulters are fortunate enough to be able to forget about their ‘victims’, are able to compartmentalize an act as just that, a singular act that has no bearing on the rest of their life. You are fortunate enough to be able to distinguish the part of your friend that assaulted someone and the rest of his personality.

As a survivor, I am not that fortunate.

The first time I was assaulted, the manager told my family that their request to fire the employee was impractical, see they didn’t have enough proof and a legal battle over wrongful termination was too much effort, too complicated. As an employee, he was very good at his job, and they had no valid reason to fire him (except for the whole molestation of a ten-year-old-girl thing).

Its been 12 years, and I still scream when someone touches my neck. I still can’t sleep with the lights turned off. I still burn myself with cigarettes when I’m walking on streets alone, so the fear won’t paralyze me.

He didn’t even have to switch jobs.

The second time I was assaulted, his friends laughed when he said goodbye to me at the bar, it didn’t matter that I was fifteen and he was twenty-six, and it didn’t matter that he had gotten me so incredibly drunk that I wouldn’t have been able to spell cat let alone consent to sex.

It didn’t matter because my version didn’t count, for his friends. His did.

The third time I was assaulted, our friends told me I wanted it. That they were here for me but they were pretty sure I misunderstood. They were sure he didn’t “mean to do it.” My feminist friends assured me that if I spoke to him, he’d be able to clear up everything. I’m not sure there is a way to clear up things like why he slipped drugs into my drinks without my consent or knowledge, why he thought not using protection was absolutely fine, why he kept going when I begged him to stop.

He was my best friend; they had no idea how much I wanted to be wrong about him. They absolved him of guilt and went back to being friends with him within the month. It’s been three years and I still can’t talk about what he did to me. I told my friends it was the drugs that made me lose nine kilos because I couldn’t tell them that putting food in my mouth felt like reliving the assault all over again.

My oldest friend has been dating him for the last two years. After all, “everyone makes mistakes”.

You do not have the right to talk about how hard your month of reconciliation, of the man you thought he was and the error he made, was when I still can’t sleep with the lights off even though it’s been years. You may be unwilling to live in a world where forgiving perpetrators of sexual assault is not acceptable, but I am not willing to live in a world where sexual assault, is so rampant, and society and all its members refuse to recognize the extent of trauma that is inflicted on us. You do not have the right to forgive him for what he did to me.

More importantly you don’t have the right to call yourself a supporter. It discredits actual supporters and allies. To say you are akin to my friends who have left their visiting boyfriends to sit with me on the roof till 4 am because I didn’t have the strength to stop myself from jumping of(f) the roof, or my roommates who try to make peace with the fact that I sleep with all the lights in my room switched on and don’t complain when I wake them up if I have a nightmare, or the people who were unafraid to take on the consequences of hurting my assaulter so he’d stop contacting me, and basically everyone who actually supports people like me is down right insulting.

You cannot cheer for him in a match and expect me to believe you don’t support him. Saying you support me from the convenience of a public article, only makes you feel better about yourself. It does nothing for survivors, The assault affects everything; we do not have the ability to just disconnect it from the rest of our lives. So what gives you the right to disconnect my assault from the rest of the perpetrator’s life and how on earth do you think that is what ‘being supportive’ looks like?

Not forgiving my rapist doesn’t make you an “angry feminist stereotype”, it just makes you a decent human being. Sexual assault is not forgivable and certainly not by you. The worst part is knowing that I wasn’t the first person they assaulted and I highly doubt I’ll be the last. People don’t reform themselves, unless they absolutely have to and reformation is not a quick, overnight process. People like you are the reason, people like him think what he did to me is not that big of a deal.

If you bothered to understand what we go through, you would have the decency to not laud your selective support and compartmentalization, as feminism.

So please take down your article. If not for me, do it for all the other potential rapists and victims who will eventually stumble across your article.

P.S. Putting disclaimers before your pro-rape culture statements don’t make them more acceptable.

Thank you,

Anonymous

(I genuinely don’t want my assault history to go viral. I wish I felt like law school was a place where I could sign my name, a place where my assault wouldn’t become nest week’s gossip column, unfortunately it clearly isn’t. Here’s to hoping that it soon will be.)

“When in Rome, do as the Romans do,” they say, but for those studying at NLSIU, Nagarbhavi (“Nags”), there are perhaps two Romes: One within the protected walls of our ivory tower: where we preach free love and advocate safe sex, and where more skin doesn’t (usually) mean less morals. Step out of the gates that house these red walls, though, and everything that is a norm within becomes an aberration.

Outside rests a world where ‘Indian Culture’ still runs wild, and wearing shorts and smoking is looked down upon. As Vijay, who has been working in Nags for the past 12 years puts it, “this is not M.G. Road after all”. Where the people who ought to be selling you contraceptives think it’s okay to refuse them to you saying, “Do you come to college to study or to do all this?” (Well, at least you know you weren’t imagining the judgment.) Dinesh, who has been running a pharmacy store for the past 5 years, attributes the difference in thinking to a generation gap. The other people we spoke to explain our behavior as coming from “modern places like Delhi” or “imitating foreigners” and claim to be able to easily tell the difference between NLS students and BU students, “It’s the way you all speak English and your clothes”, they told us when asked.

For many of us, like those of us who come from sheltered backgrounds in metropolitan cities, and those of us who pride ourselves in having the freedom to do what we want, the environment in Nags can become extremely stifling and frustrating. Nivedita Mukhija (Class of 2016) calls it the ‘Nagarbhavi Paradox’,[1] where one moment you are “reading a treatise on women’s empowerment, and the next … changing into full sleeved clothes” (because you need to go out and buy groceries). This is far from being a new development. Alumni of NLS have recounted that the area around campus always made them feel unsafe and rather uncomfortable. “We go out only as a group. There have been several times when eve teasers have harassed girls. In fact, most of us have begun to carry safety weapons for self-defense,”[2] said an NLSIU student way back in 2006.

…

Ten years later, the situation has barely improved. We conducted a small survey within the law school community regarding instances of sexual harassment around campus. Out of the 53 people who responded, 33 said that they have had to deal with instances of harassment, while 19 said that they have witnessed it happen to someone else. Instances of verbal harassment and lewd gestures were the most common; there were also attempts to take pictures and unwelcome physical advances. Instances of stalking were also disturbingly frequent, with nine women claiming that it had happened to them. The culprits could be shopkeepers who we interact with on a regular basis: last year, a first year student got her phone recharged at a local store and had to deal with unwanted messages on WhatsApp from the man who worked there. The could also be the faceless bikers we see zooming past us as breakneck speed, who often sneer at, stare at, and sometimes even physically hit women pedestrians. People working in the numerous juice shops just outside our campus also told us that the number of outsiders hanging around with their bikes and smoking, significantly decreases when Law School is shut, all the while implying that they come only to ogle us Law School women.

Our survey also asked what the women were doing when they were harassed – a question similar to the oh-so-common “but what were you wearing?”– in order to gauge whether it was our ‘abhorrent behavior’ that was inviting hostility towards us. However, while quite a few women did say that they were wearing short or skimpy clothes/smoking/wandering around campus at night when they were harassed, an equal number of women weren’t doing any of the above.

Unsurprisingly, most of the victims ignored these incidents. A few of them shouted back and a couple of them even chose to complain at the nearby police station. The complaints were not taken seriously. In the face of the language constraints, the fact that sexual harassment is still not taken seriously, and that very often women have no idea who their harasser was, women are often simply helpless, often accepting it as a normal part of going to Nags. This apathy, which perhaps exists due to the frequency of this harassment, is evident in the 50% of the responders who say that these incidents have not changed their behavior. Other respondents say that they no longer smoke as freely, go running to Bangalore University, or leave campus unless accompanied by a male. More importantly, everyone can relate to the sense of paranoia that crops up, especially after sun down.

…

It was with this information that we went around Nagarbhavi, asking its many inhabitants why they think incidents of sexual harassment occur. Notably, with the exception of a few small shops immediately outside campus, most shop owners claim to have never witnessed instances of sexual harassment or what is usually trivialized as “eve teasing”. Unsurprisingly, while everyone we spoke to agreed that sexual harassment is wrong and bad, many thought it happens because girls wear short clothes and stand around smoking. While this is certainly a form of victim blaming, most of the times it came across less as judgment and more as concern– the same concern our parents show us when they don’t let us go alone to “unsafe” places at night. For instance, the ammas working on campus assured us that wearing shorts is fine but warned us against wearing them outside because they don’t want anything bad to happen to us. For all our fight to be able to wear shorts on campus, (in re Shortsgate) we ourselves, on countless occasions, have gone back to our rooms to change into something that would cover us up before venturing out of campus.

While it is easy to justify these opinions as well intentioned, it becomes a problem when women are punished for not following these prescribed safeguards­­– such as when the guards at Gate 0 don’t let us enter at night even when they can clearly see that there are drunk men right outside Roti Park because as they see it, we shouldn’t be out so late anyway. These instances might seem completely different. You may think that there is a difference when your mom tells you not to wear shorts and when the latest BJP MLA does the same, and you’d be right. But at the end of the day both attribute sexual harassment, not to the men who do it, but to the actions of the women who are harassed. The problem arises the moment you associate wearing shorts or drinking or smoking or going out alone as the cause of sexual harassment. That’s the base of the pyramid that is rape culture. A society which thinks rape happens because girls were alone at night, will necessarily produce people who think they can rape someone because she was alone at night. These two strains of thought are interdependent where each sustains the other.

To be clear rapists constitute only the ugliest manifestation of this rape culture. The bulk of it is filled with real estate agents who don’t allow men in women’s apartments, because the neighbors will think ‘otherwise’, or the law school students who dismiss sexual harassment as trivial, crack jokes like ‘all attention is good attention,’ think women are prone to overreactions and paranoia because lets face it, it could have been worse. At least nothing ‘really bad’ happened.

…

Except it did. This October will mark the fourth year of one of our students being gang raped by eight men in the forests of BU. It made national news: ‘Gang Rape in India’s Premier Law School.’ It was a horrific incident, with the rapists handing her ten rupees after the heinous act was over.[3]

Bangalore University’s response was equally horrific, where they threatened our college with the ultimatum of withdrawing their land grant unless we changed our behavior. “We are fed up with the way the students of NLSIU are behaving and also with the bad name our campus is getting because of them.”[4] It was us, therefore, who were the cause of the bad name – we were “too liberal”. If media reports are to be trusted, the locals blamed us for being too “bold and courageous.” Our own administration bought this narrative and instituted a curfew for all students. The student dropped out of NLS soon after this incident.

The student response was vastly different, where the shocked and angered community staged a protest at the Town Hall, and the security was ramped up, the police were more vigilant. But, as is often the case, 4 years later, when the anger is gone, the curfew is gone and the police are gone, the sexual harassment still remains.

…

Most locals will tell you that things are changing slowly for the better. Vijay tells us how he always asks girls to smoke inside his restaurant so they don’t attract unwelcome attention outside. On a few occasions when men follow them inside, he tells them that he personally knows the girl and asks them not to pass comments.

We also realized that people’s changing notions of ‘Indian Culture’ come at the heels of economic benefit. Mohini, who sells cigarettes nearby, thinks there is nothing wrong with women smoking, all the while vehemently opposing them wearing shorts. And Praveen, who sells bhaang in his shop around Holi, sheepishly tells us that bhaang in small quantities is okay because it is a part of Indian festivals and culture.

There were even locals around campus who thought that there was absolutely nothing wrong with anybody wearing what they wanted and smoking as and when they pleased. Their opinions certainly seemed a thousand times more progressive than that of the educated registrar of Bangalore University. But seeing that places like Roti Park still exist, which function as a no entry zone for most law school students, things clearly aren’t changing fast enough. Nagarbhavi has been, and still is, a rural area still in the process of urbanization, and the students of National Law School have always largely been the crème de le crème of the middle and upper middle classes. It’s easy to attribute sexual harassment to the mindset of rural India and class resentment but there are enough instances of sexual harassment in modern settings of offices and schools and colleges to know that the urge to harass is not an uneducated backward man’s affliction.

…

Given that the problem of sexual harassment isn’t unique to Nagarbhavi, and that even in Nagarbhavi it has been a persistent disease, it is all too easy to brush it aside as something that nothing can be done about. What we do notice, though, is that the problem in Nagarbhavi co-exists with a gigantic cultural rift, and it is, perhaps, by means of stepping into this rift, that it can be dealt with as well.[5] But the larger problem that needs to be solved is the relative silence that exists around these incidents that has continued to affect women in all of Law School’s glorious twenty-five years.

While most of us have been experiencing first hand the fear of violence and the restrictions imposed on us by the recent protests in Karnataka, let’s not forget that this dread and inconvenience is an “option” that far too many women have to choose, every day.

…

(We would like to thank Aditya Patel (Batch of 2016)  and Sharvari Kothawade (Batch of 2019) for helping us conduct the interviews).

[1] https://thefeministmarshmallow.wordpress.com/?s=nagarbhavi+paradox

[2]http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/bengaluru/For-residents-Nagarbhavi-is-an-urban-slum/articleshow/1398668.cms

[3]http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/National-Law-School-student-raped-on-Bangalore-University-campus/articleshow/16814554.cms

[4]http://www.dnaindia.com/bangalore/report-bu-mulls-over-evicting-law-school-1752944

[5] This was also the principle with which the group ‘Blank Noise’ combated a similar problem in Yelahanka, where volunteers lined the streets with tables and chairs and invited passers-by to have a conversation with them, in a bid to understand each other.

]]> http://www.nlsquirks.in/when-in-nags/feed/ 8 http://www.nlsquirks.in/to-name-or-not-to-name-navigating-the-harassment-quagmire/ http://www.nlsquirks.in/to-name-or-not-to-name-navigating-the-harassment-quagmire/#respond Sat, 18 Jun 2016 09:32:02 +0000 http://www.nlsquirks.in/?p=1318 Continue readingTo Name or Not to Name- Navigating the Harassment Quagmire]]> This piece was written by Padmini Baruah (Batch of 2016).

Over the past two months, many incidents have brought to our notice the debate over the question of whether it is right to publicly name and shame the perpetrator of an instance of harassment, whether or not the victim has chosen to file a complaint. Let me disclose my own bias before I proceed further. My own personal encounter with this question, as some of the readers might be aware, stemmed from an instance of verbal sexual harassment I faced as a participant at the 55th Triannual public meeting of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. In the absence of proper mechanisms for dealing with this kind of incident – to the extent that a global body of the stature of ICANN did not have a definition of what amounted to sexual harassment – I ultimately felt like my complaint was not being heard, and therefore in a final bid to ensure that the issue did not die down, I issued a public statement where I named the perpetrator at the outset. I was the complainant, and I had chosen to waive my confidentiality. To my bewilderment, this pushed me to the centre of a controversy that took a direction I had not been anticipating at all. I found myself the target of harsh criticism for breaching the confidentiality of the perpetrator. Men and women who had hitherto been on my side turned against me, and told me in no uncertain terms that the damage I had caused was not fixable. The focus of the issue shifted entirely from the pressing problem that I, as a female student from India, faced sexual harassment from Mr. Khaled Fattal (woops, named him again), the global chairman of the Multilingual Internet Group. Instead, I became the target of much flak because I had breached some abstract duty of confidentiality I apparently owed. I had to make it clear that because of the failure of the process to give me a satisfactory outcome, or indeed even a satisfactory hearing, I was constrained to call him out, as otherwise my case would have been shut without further analysis. The ICANN ombudsman had the dubious authority of investigating this case, and his final report shut down my case on grounds that confidentiality had been breached, and that somehow mysteriously tampers with the fairness of procedure. I appealed this decision, and that is where the matter stands.

After almost a month, I find myself witnessing a controversy of a similar nature with respect to the case of a certain faculty member who had allegedly directed sexist comments towards a student of the NLSIU community. In the media storm that erupted, he has been named in each and every report, kicking up the question of whether this is fair, whether this violates natural justice and the dignity of the professor in question, and whether he is entitled to his privacy pending investigation.

These two instances I have cited above depict two different scenarios. In the first, there was an acute lack of procedure, due to which the victim felt as though all channels of justice had been exhausted, and naming the perpetrator was the only route available to ensure that at least something would be done. In the second, the naming was not by the victim, but by some outraged member of the student community who perhaps believed that naming would be an effective way to ensure an adequate response from the authorities as well as have the effect of censuring the professor in question. In this light, I appreciate that it is difficult to achieve the balance between the rights of the accused and the freedom of expression of those who feel targeted by his alleged actions. There is no sole gold standard that can be achieved. Is it justified to expect someone who is a victim to stay silent if he or she feels that his or her case will fade away into oblivion in the event that it is not brought to public light? On the other hand, is it fair to expose the alleged perpetrator to a trial by public opinion, especially if that call has not been taken by the victim?

Confidentiality, as per our campus sexual harassment rules, is mandatory for all proceedings of harassment, and is a duty vested upon all parties to the proceeding. However, in the absence of initiation of proceedings – which is solely the victim’s call to take – or in the event that the procedures prove inadequate or unjust, what recourse does the victim have?

There can be divided opinion on the effectiveness of naming and shaming. On one hand, it does prove as an awareness raising mechanism, and in the event that all other remedies have failed, can often be the only tool that the victim has. It is certainly not an easy task to speak out about this, and the person who does name and shame often faces the backlash for it. On the other hand, however, it might seem like there is an unjust association now being made in the mind of the public about the alleged perpetrator, and there may not always be a forum for him or her to present his or her side of the story, especially if proceedings have not been initiated.

At the end of the day, this is a choice that has to be exercised with caution. If there is an investigation underway, it is wiser to respect the process – but only until the victim does not feel as if the process is failing him or her. In the event that there is no investigation, again, naming and shaming can be used as a deterrence tool, but those who do name and shame must be prepared to justify their need for doing so, with sound reason and logic, and also be prepared to respond to possible counter statements on the part of the alleged perpetrator. At the end of the day, the real question is one of how best to attain justice in the least painful and most effective way possible. In my personal opinion, only if there is truly no other recourse that appears meaningful to those who have been affected, should this be resorted to, lest we get caught up in a campaign of demonizing, which can often detract from the focus of the problem.

All agreements and disagreements with this piece are welcome. Write back at [email protected].

The featured image has been taken from Hatecopy.