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Sexual Harassment at the workplace - In Real Life, and in Reel

. Dr Saptorshi Das, &, Dr Isa Mishra, Prof Mohar Banerjee Biswas, Dr Anil Bajpai, KIIT School of Management, KIIT Deemed to be University Prestige Education Foundation


Abstract

Some scars heal. Some never do. Harassment is one of the latter. No matter what you do, no matter  where you go, the memories will haunt you forever. And so will the pain. Call it gender bias, or simply over sightedness, the word ‘harassment’ has always been associated with an image of a woman undergoing torture at the hands of almost any section of society , family , in-laws , husband , boyfriend, colleagues and seniors at work, and the public at large . Not for a moment does it appear to us that there could also be a man at the receiving end of harassment. In this paper an attempt is made to bring to light the dark side of society, dark because no one expects it, no one speaks about it, no one writes about it. But it exists. And pretty rampantly at that. And this paper endeavours to bring to the forefront, the issue of harassment of men, specifically at work, with special focus on sexual harassment, and how realistic its depiction is on screen.

However, not many films have been made on this sensitive issue. Yet, there are still a few notable ones that are remarkably well made, and poignantly depict how the ‘superior’ sex too faces harassment, and the trauma it entails. Amongst them, one can immediately recall Fatal Attraction, where a married man gets harassed by a woman who is obsessed with him and tries to sabotage his marriage. But that’s against a western setting. Back home in India, a similar issue has been highlighted pretty deftly in  Inkaar and  Aitraaz,  and both were pretty successful.

This paper looks at the various aspects that lead to conditions wherein male employees are subject to harassment at work, and the portrayal of this predominant but barely highlighted social issue on reel.

 

Index Terms- Accuse, Harassment, Men, Pain, Workplace.

 

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