Casual conversations about consent, sexual harassment and more

Aviral Agarwal, a former volunteer at Safecity, continues to spread the message of safety and awareness wherever he goes. Now, working at Jindal Intelecom Ltd, he conducted an informal awareness session with 30 of his colleagues in Delhi.

During the break when all employees relax, eat and chat, he introduced the topics of sexual harassment in the workplace, consent, cyber crime and more. Out of a team of 30, 7 members were females. The girls shared experiences of stalking, receiving unwanted WhatsApp messages, inappropriate touching and more which went on to prove how prevalent sexual harassment really is in the workplace.

All the employees shared their views on how cybercrime has been on the rise. When Aviral shared about the different cyber laws, he came to find that 20 out of the 30 did not know about the current cyber laws. As the conversation went on to consent, most of them agreed that consent must be verbal and not dependent on gestures or body language. They then went on to discuss the present scenario in the country and the legal system which could be more stringent so as to make people accountable to acts of sexual harassment and violence.