Safety is a feeling of comfort, a feeling that allows us to be mentally peaceful and go on about living our lives without alarming echoes of fear. It is only when this feeling of safety is threatened that we realize its importance. The act of threatening one's feeling of safety through intimidation or aggressive pressure is known as ‘harassment’.
As unfortunate as it is, a large number of people from all over our nation are victims of some form of harassment, most of whom either don't speak up due to fear or go unheard when they do speak up. It is us who must speak up for those that can't. Here’s how.
The first step is to understand the depth of the situation. In a survey of over 15000 respondents in India, it was discovered that over 32% of the respondents or their family members had experienced sexual harassment at their workplace alone! Globally, 35% of women have experienced physical or sexual intimate or non-partner sexual violence. That’s nearly one in three! And this is just in our country, in many others the situation is even worse. This just goes to show how unsafe of an environment the world can be. WE NEED to do something about it!
We must be aware that anyone can be affected by harassment, regardless of age, gender identity, religion, or attitude. Although women form the largest percentage of people to be victims of harassment, they’re far from being the only ones. The trauma caused by such incidents are just as painful to everyone that has suffered it.
Men are often neglected with the presumption that men simply don't get harassed. The attention on harassment towards men is not as much attention shown towards women. Surveys conducted by Save Family Foundation and My Nation Foundation, between April 2005 and April 2015 surveyed almost 1,00,000 men during that one year over the internet. Among them over 20.4% of the men were affected by sexual violence.
This is true for non-binary genders too, who are commonly faced with harassment According to the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey: Nearly half (46%) of respondents were verbally harassed in the past year because of being transgender. Nearly one in ten (9%) respondents were physically attacked in the past year because of being transgender. Nearly half (47%) of respondents were sexually assaulted at some point in their lifetime
So what can we do about all of this? We need to take a stand - spread word about the concern and make them explode on social media. We can take the movements like #meetoo and #timesup as great examples, where men gathered up the courage to come and speak out against the unfair things that happened to them. It's moments like these that inspired courage in a lot of other people to speak up, and be heard by the masses.
We must urge governments to be more inclusive with laws against harassment, better enforce existing laws, and formulate new ones to regulate our safety standards. The voters of today's generation are increasing consumers of social media content.
The single most important thing you can do to fight against harassment is to speak up! And enable anyone you know has been through such incidents to speak up too. So share this with people you know and spread the word through social media and stand for our loved ones, our families, our friends, and everybody around. Together we can make our world a safer place for all of them to live in. We hope to bring a change, and we hope you will join us.
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