Double standards of society

Oct 25
08:52

2011

Mike Greaves

Mike Greaves

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Sexual harassment is, above all, result of male chauvinism in Asia. Where men of countries like Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Nepal manifest dark side of their masculinity on women, who they think are challenging their roles as head of the society.

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In developing countries sexual harassment are outcome of sheer insecurity at men's part.Women are much more likely to be victims of sexual harassment at workplace precisely because they are more often seen as a threat to male dominance. They are robbed off their dignity because men think that's the way to make women feel powerless,Double standards of society Articles vulnerable and insecure hence a misfit for male dominated workplace. Sadly in spite of several laws and bills it is still happening all over Asia like a phenomenon.In Nepal a research on Sexual Harassment at the Workplace revealed that the problem of sexual harassment is highly prevalent in workplaces, women workers reported that they have faced the problem of sexual harassment in their workplaces, 23.08 percent women workers were of the view that they were aware of sexual harassment at the workplace.Whereas in Bangladesh, large scale of women's entry into paid labor force has increased incidences of sexual harassment. The 1996 figure shows that women's participation in labor force is 51 percent; women engaged in agriculture are 63 percent, women in service sector are 27 percent and women industrial activities are 10 percent. Sexual harassment, work and mobility appear to be closely intertwined in Bangladesh.Cases of sexual harassments have been happening all over the world but more in developing countries. The reason behind this is the existing double standard in civil society about gender. While people of Asia boast off their liberalism, the reality of Asian women's lives remains invisible to rest of the world. This is why majority of sexual harassment victims are women. Despite of the fact that over the years women have made great strides in many areas with notable progress in reducing some gender gaps, yet, ‘the afflicted world in which they live is characterized by deeply unequal sharing of the burden of adversities between women and men'.Although awareness about the adverse impacts of sexual harassment efforts have been increasing efforts around Asia not only to break the silence on sexual harassment but also to take pro-active steps in addressing it but even today, ‘the mainstream remains very much a male stream'. The dominant tendency has always been to confine women and women's issues in the private domain. The traditional systems of control with its notion of ‘what is right and proper for women' still reigns supreme in Asian civil society and reinforces the use of violence as a means to punish its defiant ‘offenders' and their supporters.