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Showing posts from September, 2017

The Case for Sexual Harassment Workshops and Why Consent is not a Dirty Word

This is the first year of the YIF programme where sexual harassment training and workshops are mandatory. Considering myself to be as woke a feminist as they come, I thought that I was well aware of the sexual harassment and consent terminology and didn’t think that there was anything else I could learn. So what is the point of having these sessions? Led by Dr Madhavi Menon, all students were briefed on the Ashoka sexual harassment policy; what constitutes as sexual harassment, how to make a complaint to the Committee on Sexual Harassment (or 'CASH' for short), what the procedure would be and what the penalties are if a student is found guilty. She kick-started the session with a short video from AIB which challenged some of the pre-conceived ideas of courting/stalking and other themes that are propagated in Bollywood films. The batch was then divided in to groups and each watched a series of short films, produced by Ashoka students which mimicked real-life scenarios of incid