Sexual harassment at workplace

“The most frightening part was that the heinous crime was committed to teach Bhanwari Devi a lesson for exposing a child marriage in the village. The five accused took it almost like a challenge to hurt Bhanwari Devi,” asserts Kavita Srivastava,now the Peoples’ Union for Civil Liberties general secretary in Rajasthan. She adds that Bhanwari Devi refused to give up,leading to more support from the public. According to Mamta Jaitley,who headed the Idhara state program and now heads Vividha,a women’s group,a testament to Bhanwari Devi’s courage was when she continually spoke about the crime itself. “It was for the first time that a woman was not ashamed of rape and in fact,spoke openly about it. She stoically tried to explain to people that the rape was not her fault,” Jaitley says. The two most important issues that the movement continually attempted to address was the denial of justice and a fair investigation. “It started with everybody insisting that Bhanwari Devi was lying about the crime,thus killing the investigation from the start. We picked up these issues and ran with them,” Srivastava said. She added that in 1992 the crime and Bhanwari Devi emboldened other victims to come out and complain.

But Bhanwari Devi has shown more patience than even her ardent supporters despite the fact that it was the movement surrounding her trauma that lead to the Supreme Court’s sweeping court mandate against sexual harassment. “Of course I want to win the case and finally get justice because 18 years is a long time and two of the accused have already died. But I have waited this long and will continue to wait. At least the issues of sexual harassment at workplaces emerged as a serious issue,” says Bhanwari Devi.