Durlabh Agrawal, Week 8

Sexcapade: Law and the Workplace

Law plays a salient feature in the structurizing the society from home to workplace, law has been a crucial tool seeks to create a transparent and safe environment, but when the it comes to the liberty and safety of women, lawmakers burdened with the task creates an ambiguous, liberal and discriminatory policies without taking into account the golden triangle of the constitution.

Ratna Kapur in her article Sexcapades and the Law discusses about sexual harassment, a gordian knot for women at workplace. According to Kapur, legal development in patronizing women at workplace started in the US with sex discrimination and intersectionality at play. Gradually, with awareness and legal development women of colour and race made their entrance and became a part of the workforce.     

In India, Vishaka v. State of Rajasthan is a symbolic step towards the validation of the problem of sexual harassment at workplace. The judgment lays down guidelines to be followed for sexual misconduct and harassment at workplace, according to which, the criterion for guidelines to be enforceable are unwelcoming sexual conduct against a female employee and it must disadvantage a woman. The ingredient prima facie sounds fair but is limited to employer-employee relationship. 

Capitalistic definition of labour can be termed as a social relation of voluntary and paid labour. A quid pro quo situation where services are provided in exchange for monetary support. Now this definition, when clubbed with a male egoistic, dominated and closed mentality, it would bolster the patriarchal sexual norms and preserving the orthodox sense of sexual morality in workplace, which has been a major a reason for cases of harassment at workplaces as they see women not a worker but a sexual commodity for their benefit. 

Conducts at workplace affirms Kapur's central argument of elaborating the legal definition  of sexual harassment and reform the law and policy. It would be necessary to take a radical and affirmative action towards the holistic environment sprouted in the workplace.