Teasing or Torture?

I remember being a young girl and scanning the columns of Dawn, coming across headlines that said things like “Five booked for Eve-Teasing” or “Girl Students Report Eve-Teasing Outside College Premises”. I didn’t really understand what eve-teasing was until I grew older and realized that it was when groups of boys or men banded together to leer at, say provocative or obscene things, or even touch and grope girls and women in public places.

It sounds so innocent, doesn’t it? Eve-Teasing. You get the mental image of boys in the playground, pulling girls’ braids, or throwing frogs at them in an attempt to make them scream with fright. You don’t realize, from this phrase, that the teasing doesn’t come from fun, but from frustration, and that the women are doing the screaming all on the inside. Because our society, with its convenient “blame the victim” stance, does not encourage women or girls to report this kind of behavior; instead it makes them swallow it all up, keep silent, not tell their parents. If they make a noise about the humiliation that they undergo as they go to school, university, their jobs, they will face restrictions and be told that this is what happens when women go outside of their houses.

Akhtar Saeed, in his excellent column in this week’s Review (“A Silent Terror”, October 17-23, 2002) says that “teachers of psychology and social scientists, believe ‘eve-teasing’ to be a result of the frustrations suffered by a majority of youth. Disappointed by the unbecoming attitude of uninterested teachers and indifferent parents, they yearn for an outlet to vent their aggression and depression. Besides, many who do not inherit good values tend to indulge in acts of harassment”.

First of all, let’s do what Mr. Saeed has done and call a spade a spade. The media is guilty of promoting this sort of “boys will be boys” attitude by continuing to call it “eve teasing”, a phrase which I find revoltingly backward in its deliberate naivete. This kind of behavior really falls under the classification of sexual harassment, and, well, if the newspapers don’t like using the word “sexual” in their columns, too bad. They don’t show a similar kind of squeamishness when it comes to reporting rape or sodomy or child molestation.

Second, let’s not shy around what exactly constitutes “eve teasing”. The papers always write in euphemisms, saying that the culprits said “obscene things” or “acted improperly” or “vulgarly”. Perhaps if the papers clearly outlined what the men said or what they did, it would wake us up to the ugly reality of harassment. Some people may regard this as titillation or even sensationalism, but others will probably be shocked out of their complacency when they realize that the “teasing” is not just the singing of a few songs or a wolf-whistle or two, but the actual use of sexually intimidating language, calling innocent women whores and sluts, or physically intimidating behavior, like grabbing women’s breasts or buttocks.

Third, the media should emphasize the fact that this sort of harassment happens no matter how a woman is dressed, where she is going, or who she is with. My household domestic servants – massis and ayahs – have told tales of being in buses, covered properly from head to toe, going to work, to hospitals, being with children, and still being harassed. Girls in the offices I used to work at told me, with tears in their eyes, how they would be draped in chadars and veils and their brothers would stand on street corners waiting at bus stops to escort them home because it simply “wasn’t safe” for them to walk home in their own neighborhoods.

Imagine the stress and trauma for these girls and women, simply going about their business, and being subjected to this kind of torture. Long-term exposure to sexual harassment can lead to anxiety, depression, and a whole host of psychological problems for its victims. The mental state of the perpetrators, too, should be called into question. There is something deeply wrong with a man if he needs to get his amusement from harassing and intimidating strangers on the street. It speaks of his utter castration, symbolically, mentally, emotionally, of his being made to feel completely powerless in all other areas of life, in order for him to find some power in this form of behavior.

A doctor I spoke with told me of the fact that molestation cases are on the rise in Karachi. “Why?” I asked him.

“You know, the simple fact is that ever since the poor have gotten access to cable and the dish, and porn on the Internet, they’re seeing a lot of television programs that are, to put it simply, turning them on. They’ve got no way to let out their emotions, let off their steam, and that’s why we’re seeing more and more children, girls and boys, being molested.”

This doctor is no moral conservative; he was merely stating an observation he had made based on his work with patients of all social strata. A country which bases its pride upon values such as sharam and haya and urges the repression of normal biological needs of human beings is going to find itself in exactly this kind of situation. Islamic leaders urge early marriage to escape these problems, and that is one simple (and simplistic) solution, but let’s face it, teenagers and young unemployed men can’t afford to get married. And these young men are being bombarded by ten times the amount of sexual stimulation that their forefathers were, being beamed in through satellite, cable, piped in through the Internet and accessible at cheap Internet cafes across the nation.

After fantasizing and daydreaming about Madhuri, Angelina, Karishma, Jennifer, who else are they going to take it out on but poor Sana, Khalida, Naila, and countless others walking down the streets, riding in buses, shopping in the malls? The honest truth is that the other side of “Eve teasing” is “Adam sinning”, and both men and women are equal losers when it comes to sexual harassment in our country.