In the era of #MeToo

Bill Cosby was finally convicted last week of sexual assault. The beloved star of family-friendly television’s fall from grace marked another significant milestone for the #MeToo campaign. Cosby’s conviction is a lesson for those in Pakistan critical of the movement against sexual harassment. It shows that a sexual predator doesn’t have a stock image that makes them easily identifiable. Claims of being a family man should not serve as rebuttals for allegations of sexual harassment, since being a father or a husband has never magically transformed men into showing respect for women. Ali Zafar should take note and stop using that as a defence. While this is an important fact that needs to be ingrained into our society’s conscience, Meesha Shafi’s claim, and the reaction surrounding it, show that there are many others that need to be learned by our society.



First, our society needs to understand that our court system is not providing an environment for women conducive to bring claims of sexual harassment. A brief interaction with any woman who has been unfortunate enough to go through our legal process will reveal that they are harassed each time they go to court by male staff, lawyers, and judges. Depraved stares, crude remarks, prurient gazes and salacious gestures are all things that women will be forced to confront in our courts. Given this, can we really blame victims of sexual harassment for not going to court and highlighting their issues on a safer forum like social media? Would a woman like Meesha Shafi be given a fair hearing when a judiciary dominated by men assumes that women in the entertainment industry are characterless?

Things like whistling at a woman can legally be construed as sexual harassment, yet, I cannot fathom a judge in our lower judiciary ever taking such a claim seriously. By going to our courts, a woman will be harassed in her attempt to prove harassment, therefore social media will continue to be the best possible option for victims to highlight their issue. That is, until we fix our courts and the social acceptance of harassment that is breeding in our society.

All this is assuming that a woman’s case actually reaches court. Both the Pakistan Penal Code and the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act make sexual harassment a criminal offence. This requires a woman to go to the police and ask them to register an FIR. While the law says that even a sound or a gesture can constitute harassment, the police often note that such instances are commonplace and not worth the ink that goes into writing up an FIR. With no FIR, there will be no trial, and there goes any attempt to bring the matter to a court.



Another fact that our society must understand is that demands for evidence miss the point of how sexual harassment of a physical nature occurs in the majority of cases. There are often no witnesses, and unlike rape there is no forensic evidence. The victim’s statement alone is the evidence and there is no reason to doubt it unless it is adequately rebutted. Our law gives this benefit to victims of rape, might it also lend the same to sexual harassment?

It is inevitable that people will ask why women wait so long before coming forward with claims of sexual harassment? This line of questioning shows the lack of understanding of a woman’s perspective in our society. It takes a tremendous amount of courage to come forward, courage that must often be built over a period of time. Trauma, anxiety and fear of victim blaming are just some of the factors that force women to stay silent for long periods of time. Just look at the amount of vitriol being piled on Meesha Shafi on social media. That by itself is one of the biggest reasons why women will stay silent. We can’t hold that against them. Yet the law does, with precedent upon precedent stating that delay in lodging an FIR is detrimental to a criminal case.

There does exist a law that allows for women to bypass the court system and its myriad problems: The Protection against Harassment of Women at the Workplace Act of 2010. While under this law women can approach an Ombudsperson with a complaint, even this law, by itself, is not enough to make things easier for women. The law only deals with harassment at the workplace as opposed to the plethora of instances of harassment that women face outside the workplace. Plus, the government is lax in appointing an ombudsperson, making the law a dead letter. While this law is an admirable attempt, it can only truly work as an effective avenue of redressal when the mindset in our society changes. The mindset that claims that the amount of clothing a woman wears is proportionate to her level of consent; that harassment in the form of whistling or cat-calling is ‘all in good fun’; that ‘no’ sometimes means ‘yes’. No amount of law can rewire the brains of our patriarchal society — for that we must look to broader social and cultural change.

These are only some of the facts we need to come to terms with if we wish to understand the hurdles victims of sexual harassment face in Pakistan. The law by itself cannot cure this malady, we need broad social change, we need education at an early level. Most of all we need more female representation in every area of government so that the female experience is felt when making every law and policy. Until then, we should stop being part of the problem by attempting to shame women into silence whenever they claim to have been subjected to sexual harassment.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 1^st, 2018.

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