When the sun sets
The Hindu : Jyoti Chowdhary paid with her life for a systems failure. But look what everyone’s bleating. “Why do women chose BPOs? They should know it’s not safe.” Girls from little known towns break layers of social cocoon to emerge educated. They feel it is their right to grab opportunities to earn a comfortable future. What do they hear? Migrate and make honest money “at your own peril.” Some empowerment, this.
Tell-us-what-you-thinks are flying thick on TV and web channels. Why didn’t she call? (She’s a call-centre employee, right?) Why did she go alone?
Didn’t she learn self-defence drills? The discussion is shrilly reaching its predictable conclusion, “It’s all her fault”, stopping just short of “she must have asked for it.” Bristled a BPO employee, “Why isn’t there a campaign asking men to behave? We should be able to work wherever we want, what about our choices?” The pertinent question in all this hasn’t found even a feeble voice: Why isn’t our society safe for women?
Late-night shifts
BPO is not the only sector with post-sunset shifts. Women have been sorting fish at night since men went out to catch them. Women nurses have been doing night rounds for ages. Airlines, hotels and service industries have large contingents of 24/7 workers of both genders. The media have late night shifts, don’t they? Even as I write this, the Orissa episode is screaming off the TV screens. A couple of goons stopped a tourist bus, pulled a woman out in front of a frozen group, gang-raped and abandoned her. In daylight. She boarded that Konarak bus “at her own peril”? Onto sexual harassment in the workplace. The head of the political science department at Delhi University was found guilty of sexual harassment. What action has been taken against him? Just think. If this happens in “intellectual” corridors, is there hope for women in “lesser” environments? It…More
