Harassment at the Workplace

Workplace harassment is of two kinds:
1. Harassment at the workplace related to employment
2. Sexual harassment at the workplace

Since most of the cases that come up involve sexual harassment, let me clarify both types of harassment. What is harassment? Harassment is when your senior, without cause, forces you to do something you are not legally required to do, or you are prevented from doing something you are legally bound to do. This can be said to you verbally, said directly, said through voice messages or SMS. These are the actions through which a senior officer harasses you, whether you are male or female, forcing you to refrain from lawful work and bind you to unlawful work.

The second kind is sexual harassment. Sexual harassment can be verbal, direct, through voice or SMS messages, in writing, and in writing this can include forms, SMS, emails, written papers, screen savers, posters, CDs, anything at all. It can also be physical, and physical can include intentional attempts, intentional overt attempts. It can also be an unintentional but deliberate attempt, and it can also include making requests in favour of sexual activity. Requesting sexual favours, whether directly or indirectly inviting sexual relations, asking for a date, this too falls under it. Sexual teasing can also occur, from a man's side or from a woman's side. These are all the categories that fall under workplace harassment, under sexual harassment.

First let me tell you this: in an office, a firm, a company, a workplace, wherever you work, when such a situation of harassment or sexual harassment occurs, there are two kinds of damage. First, the person facing that harassment or sexual harassment suffers harm, their career is ruined, they leave the job, or they are fired, whatever the situation may be. That's one kind of damage, to the person facing the harassment or sexual harassment. The second kind of damage is to the company, the firm, the institution, the office in which all this is happening and which is not handling it properly, it suffers from this poison. When the office environment becomes unnatural, it is certain that performance will suffer, and when performance suffers, it is inevitable that operations decline. This is a very broad subject, I will try to cover it across a few programs. Let me give some background first, which perhaps many of my brothers and sisters may not know, and some may already know.

When I talk about the opposite sex, I mean both men and women. There is a natural attraction toward the opposite sex, and human instinct includes adventurousness, and it is within this adventurousness that all these matters proceed.

Now, let me point out to you that the first thing a woman needs is freedom. By freedom I don't mean waywardness, I don't mean recklessness. By freedom I mean recognizing her basic rights. Islam was the first to give women freedom, fourteen hundred years ago, and you'll be surprised that our so-called developed nations, the developed countries including America, the UK, France, these developed countries only gave women freedom in the twentieth century. Islam gave women freedom fourteen centuries ago, and it hasn't even been a hundred years since these developed countries gave women freedom.

The exploitation of women was greatest among non-Muslim communities, this is history, an undeniable history, no one can deny it. You are already aware of all this, you know it all. In America, women were given the right to vote in 1964, and even in 1964 they weren't given full rights, they still can't digest it. This year's poll in America, and the statistics that came out, ABC News, Washington Post did a poll, the Washington Post is a very major newspaper, according to it, in the United States alone, 3.3 million women have been victims of sexual harassment in the workplace. As you're already aware, there's a movement going on called Me Too, in which people find the courage to speak up against this. Let me condense this a bit, so this program doesn't become too long, because I want to cover different aspects of this harassment and sexual harassment topic across different programs.

First, let me tell you what laws exist in Pakistan that protect you against this kind of harassment and sexual harassment. Our primary law here is the Pakistan Penal Code, which has various sections that protect you. After that, the forums of the Federal Ombudsman and Provincial Ombudsman are available to you, which you call the Provincial Ombudsman and Federal Ombudsman. Then, in certain cases, if matters reach an extreme point, the new cybercrime laws also protect you. After that there's what we call in short PoWH, the Protection Against Harassment of Women at the Workplace Act 2010, then internationally there's the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which I mentioned, the first right given to women only sixty, seventy years ago. Then there's the Defamation Ordinance, if you can prove it, that too is available to you. All these laws currently exist in this country. Whichever forum you want to pursue, you can pursue it.

In the next lecture, God willing, I will tell you about the procedure you can follow, along with the relevant laws and judgments.