A Study on Prevention of Sexual  Harassment of  Women at Workplace 2013 Act - Social Work Intervention through Prevention, Prohibition and  Redressal with Special Cases Illustration

S Anitha

doi:10.34293/sijash.v7i3.1526

S Anitha Faculty, Department of Social Work, Ramanagara PG Centre, Bangalore University, Bangalore, Karnataka, India

DOI: https://doi.org/10.34293/sijash.v7i3.1526

Keywords: Women sexual harassment, Workplace, Incident Enquiry, Redressal, Interim Relief

Abstract

Sexual Harassment is a form of unwelcome sexual behaviors and taking sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature act that tends to create a hostile environment for women at the workplace. The author is an external committee member for various companies such as manufacturing industries, garment industries, software companies, and handled several sexual harassment incident inquiries. Based on these experiences and during the inquiries employees expressed their experiences such as uncomfortable touching, starring a women continuously, commenting or joking (Sexually colored remarks), sexually explicit pictures or posters, requests for sex, intrusive questions about persons private life or body, unnecessary familiarity, insults or taunts based on sex, sexually explicit physical contact, sexually explicit chats, mails, SMS, facebook, twitter any other social media. Apart from this, in this paper illustrated a case inquiry in detail through social work perspectives.

Objectives

Transmit the social workers to create a safe working environment for women employees through taking part in ICC external Committee member
Impart the sequence of incident inquiry under the POSH ACT 2013 and how to impart awareness sessions and documentation under the act.

Social workers can play the role of external member, drafting POSH Policy for the establishment or Social workers can play the role of external member, drafting POSH Policy for the establishment orcompany or any organized or unorganized organization, conducting orientation programs for ICCmembers, providing POSH act prevention, prohibition, and redressal issues. In addition to this,the Social worker plays a foremost role in prevention, prohibition through avoiding such instanceor circumstance occurrence in the organization. Moreover, they play a very crucial role duringthe incident that has already occurred in the redressal process. Since its inception of harassment,incident reporting, inquiry, and resettlement issues will be handled by the social worker of anNGO. In this regard, social worker intrusion is very important to handle the situations and give justification to the aggrieved women.