Global partnership would help tackle sexual and gender-based violence

In 2021, Al Jazeera released a podcast series titled Degrees of Abuse, calling out powerful perpetrators within UK higher education who took advantage of their positions of power to abuse women and silence survivors. Following its release, discussion around the urgent need for a #MeToo movement in academia began to gather pace.

However, academia had already had its #MeToo moment in India in 2017, which raised very similar questions around hierarchy, power dynamics, intersectionality, due process, and silencing. A law student, Raya Sarkar, posted a crowd-sourced list on Facebook of male Indian academics who had allegedly harassed women. This came to be known as the “list” and provoked widespread discussion, debate and activism about sexual harassment across India.

I do not intend to romanticise accountability and justice mechanisms that exist in India as being perfect. On the contrary, most participants I interviewed while conducting research on sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) in Indian universities spoke about the prevalence of victim blaming and a lack of support from peers and mental health services, among others. However, in India, some exemplary mechanisms have been developed collectively by members of the feminist community including students, academics, activists and lawyers, who came together to make institutions safer.

In 1997, following the brutal gang rape of a poor Dalit woman called Bhanwari Devi by five upper-caste men, the Supreme Court of India passed the first authoritative judgement on sexual harassment in the workplace. This led to the formation of the Vishakha Guidelines, which made it mandatory for all Indian institutions to put in place measures to prevent and redress sexual harassment in the workplace, including setting up independent committees to receive and investigate complaints.

An excellent example of one such committee in a university context is the Gender Sensitisation Committee against Sexual Harassment (GSCASH), at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in Delhi. This was an independent, elected committee with both student and academic representation. Anyone on campus – students, administrators, faculty or even external stakeholders – could file complaints to it about any form of SGBV.

Inquiries were overseen by an external expert and made recommendations to the university administration. If a student wished to pursue a criminal complaint, GSCASH provided advice and support, including accompanying survivors to police stations and courts, connecting them to suitable lawyers and helping with filing paperwork. The committee also carried out consciousness-raising activities throughout the year.

Unfortunately, pressure from the current right-wing government led to its replacement in 2017 by an Internal Complaints Committee (ICC) whose members are appointed by JNU’s vice-chancellor, leading to criticism that it protects people in power. Meanwhile, students and activists across India are still campaigning for the GSCASH model.

In 2013, the University Grants Commission released the groundbreaking Saksham Report, which examined ways to guarantee the freedom, autonomy and privacy of Indian students and faculty without resorting to “protectionism” and securitisation. In the name of protecting students against sexual harassment, universities in India often implement mechanisms that further curtail the freedom of female students, such as CCTV, extra security guards and stricter curfews at women’s halls of residence.

The Saksham report spoke out against these measures and advocated making the campus safe for all stakeholders. Its recommendations included mandatory sexual harassment committees, training for security staff in gender sensitisation, providing shuttle buses to and from campus, better lighting on campus and access to “well trained full-time counsellors” (rather than untrained teachers).

The Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition, and Redressal) Act was also passed in 2013. This required every university across India to have an ICC with student representatives. The consequences of non-compliance could include withdrawal of funding, grants or affiliation.

The pity is that there is little to no international sharing of anti-SGBV best practice because there is much that other countries could learn from these initiatives. For example, since universities in India are structured under the University of London model, knowledge exchange between UK and India could be particularly fruitful, saving time and costs that would otherwise be sunk into developing solutions from scratch.

Further, globalisation has led to a steady flow of international students and staff to the Global North in pursuit of education and work. Statistics show that the total number of international students in the UK is 679,970 as of 2021/2022, 559,825 of whom are from outside the European Union. These students come from different cultural backgrounds, with various patriarchal practices, social segregation and resultant violence.

However, it is routine for questions of race, class, caste, religion and nationality to be largely ignored and for the voices of staff and students from the Global South to remain unheard when considering institutional responses to SGBV in the Global North. This institutional blindness can lead to the normalisation of violence related, for example, to caste status or complex intersections between gender-based violence and Islamophobia.

Hence, learning from the Global South can make responses to SGBV in Global North universities more nuanced and inclusive.

Adrija Dey is senior research fellow at the University of Westminster and director of international knowledge exchange at the 1752 Group. She is the principal investigator on the UKRI-funded project “FemIDEAS: Decolonising Sexual and Gender Based Violence (SGBV) in Higher Education (HE)”. She was previously a British Academy postdoctoral research fellow at SOAS, University of London, where she conducted one of the first comprehensive studies of SGBV in Indian universities.