India: New Report Examines Four Types of Gender Violence
The Prajnya Trust’s Gender Violence Research and Information Taskforce recently published a report entitled “Gender Violence in
The report describes street sexual harassment as “a particularly persistent form of violence against women.” Street sexual harassment takes place in a variety of public places and includes a range of behaviors from staring and gesturing to stalking. There is no law in the Indian penal code addressing sexual harassment, but a few laws are tangentially related to street sexual harassment as they address insults or outrages to “a woman’s modesty.” Recent studies have found that young women (between the ages of 15 and 19) are most vulnerable and that poor infrastructure maintenance contributes to safety issues for women in public.
Workplace sexual harassment was addressed by the Indian Supreme Court in a 1997 decision in which the court found it to be a violation of a woman’s fundamental rights and set out 12 guidelines for dealing with reports of sexual harassment in the workplace. A proposed law, The Protection of Women against Sexual Harassment at Workplace Bill, is
Information and communication technology (ICT)-based harassment and violence is widely considered to be a growing global problem, but there are few studies addressing the issue. ICT-based harassment can sometimes spill over into the offline world leading to physical violence.
Finally, political gender violence is “violence undertaken by states, groups, or individuals" to make a political statement or achieve a political end. The report specifies four types of political gender violence: sexual violence as a conflict weapon, gender violence during riots, sexual violence by state agents, and sexual violence aimed at moral or cultural policing. Several United Nations Security Council resolutions in recent years have addressed and condemned sexual violence in war (for example, 2008 Resolution 1820), but it remains a pervasive problem throughout the world including in
Compiled from: Gender Violence in
For More Information
Please see the Sexual Harassment and Women and Armed Conflict pages of this website.
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