A lot of us who regularly use social media might be aware of the Facebook list of people in academia who have allegedly sexually harassed a student. It allows the said student to anonymously add the name of the academician to the list, and anyone can see the list. Here’s a link to an article on The Quint, talking about this – Facebook List Naming Profs as Sexual Harassers Sparks Fiery Debate.

 

While I appreciate how the list tries to encourage perpetrator shaming instead of victim blaming, I cannot agree with the concept of creating such a list.

It is no secret, that academia is full of people who have abused their power to force sexual favours from students. And most of the times, these incidents go unreported for the obvious reason that in an academic environment, the teachers have a disproportionately large amount of power in their hands. They have the ability to destroy a student’s career with one pen stroke. In such cases, it understandable why someone would want to go anonymous while naming the perpetrator. But I still cannot agree with naming these people in a public list, that does not follow due process.

Why you say? Simply because it takes the disproportionate amount of power from one set of hands to another. I could very easily drum up some false story about how I was harassed by a certain person, and name that person on the list. The accountability is completely gone.

I understand there is a terrible flaw in our social system that mostly puts all the onus of defence and providing proof on the victim’s shoulder. I also know that we trust the teacher more often than not in most cases. But again, that is not enough reason to bypass the justice system and mete out justice ourselves. Believe me, it pains me to say so here in this case, but a person is innocent unless charged. It is entirely possible, (even though it is extremely rare) that someone may have misunderstood a situation. Again, it is difficult to see sexual harassment as anything else, but it isn’t impossible. Women and men routinely misread social signals in everyday life. Is it that beyond our imagination that the same might be possible in the academic environment too?

Also, the list doesn’t differentiate between degrees of harassment. To say that a few moronic words are the same as taking sexual advantage of the student, would be the same as saying gills are the same as lungs. The list’s nature makes it optional to describe the incident where the student was harassed. So you never know whether the person on the list is a real failure in life with using respectable words or should he/she deserve to be put behind bars, pronto. For all that matters, all the people on this list have committed equally horrendous crimes and therefore should receive an equal amount of public shaming or humiliation.

This brings me to another point. We are completely delegitimising the judiciary of our country and putting the power in people’s hands. And we all know where that could lead to. I agree that the justice system hasn’t always been the most timely in its help. There have been instances where justice was never achieved. Sometimes, the Hindi idiom “Der aye lekin durust aye” just doesn’t cut it. But in any case, we have fought too many centuries to develop a credible justice system that has some power. To willingly undermine the fights we have undergone in the past for creating an authoritative justice system, would clearly come to bite us in the ass later on. We are creating a precedent for future cases, where people would cite this example as the justification for taking matters into their own hands.

Some have also raised the issue of caste. A teacher belonging to the upper castes would have an even lesser chance of being blamed for any case of harassment since people are reluctant to associate upper caste people with crimes. Most of you people reading this article would probably belong to the urban system, where we see lesser number of such cases. But for the majority of India, the unfortunate truth is that caste-based discrimination is prevalent in social and economic strata. Yet we fail to recognise the fact that just as how upper caste teachers may get an undue advantage, some upper caste students might also exploit the system to push their agenda forward. And let us not forget the rising number of cases where caste-based discrimination has been unfairly used by the lower caste people for their own benefits as well.

My objective is not to belittle our struggle to fight against an academic system that often favours perverts instead of the survivors. I only hope that in our fight, we don’t forget to weigh the consequences and end up creating a solution that solves nothing and instead gives power to another set of wrong hands.