Sexual harassment in workplace causes and remedies.

Sexual harassment is a two-way crime – first assault against a person's life, second, a biased approach towards female gender. Sexual harassment may sound a new terminology making its way to the news channels recently, but it has been since a long time as a part of our society. It is one of the major social evils rooting back to unimaginable times.

Ever since women stepped into the corporate world, men envied them and tried putting them down. "It's the way our colleagues dress up which 'excites' us and we tend to humiliate them." This is one of the reasons mostly given by an employee convicted for sexual crime in a work place.

Cases are seen wherein men try touching female colleagues at work place. Some higher officials try to pressurize their subordinates to do unwanted things with promise to help them in their career. The most prone work sector for sexual harassment seems to be fashion industry (film industry too) and corporate sector as well.

What appears that nowhere women are safe? It takes a lot more than knowledge and a lot more than a man, for a woman to become independent and to stand on her own and have her individual identity.

The main cause of sexual harassment at workplace is superiority given as an inherent trait to men in some social conditions and environment. The act of letting down female colleagues, calling them dud is cheap act of satisfying themselves. Such men do not have any humanity and think that by harassing girls, they can take advantage of them.

Many a times, it is the need of the girl to earn a living, drives her to work but they fall prey to such unwanted elements of our society. In such cases it becomes really difficult for her to protest the acts of sexual harassment.

Many a times, there are senior officials involved in such kind of heinous crimes; a strong action must be taken against such people. However, many of the cases are not even reported because the sufferer fears losing her job. Thus, it is also necessary to make women aware that they should speak up for themselves.

They may lose their job by complaining against these people but they are saving their society and their own dignity at the same time. They will get a new job but working under such conditions should not be acceptable at all.

This problem can be minimized by organizing seminars on issues relating to human rights, the rights of a woman and women safety: inculcating it as a part of the job and also including this as an integral part of the recruitment procedure in all the companies. By doing this, it will become mandatory for all the workers to attend the workshop and this exercise will surely end up making an impact on them.

Every time the government or the society cannot protect women, so they should be made independent to handle acts of sexual harassment. A safety kit for women should be made available which should include basic safety tools including pepper spray, knife, etc, so that they can take a swift action to protect themselves. Basic self-defense training should be provided to women for free. The laws should be made more rigid regarding sexual harassment crimes.

Sexual harassment is a crime and a strong approach should be followed to make workplaces safe for women.

-Aishwarya Jain