The nexus between the structural & cultural characteristics of universities and gender-based violence: Voices of female college students from India

• In Event: Highlighted session: Gender-based violence within educational spaces: Policy, practice and lived experiences of students

Proposal

Gender-based violence (GBV) within higher education institutions (HEIs) in India is a complex, persistent, and unspoken phenomenon that is largely underreported, under-researched, and under-estimated (Strid, 2021; Naezer et al., 2019). While it manifests in diverse forms such as bullying, sexual harassment, academic sabotage, verbal denigration, and interpersonal violence, the only nationally representative data that exists on GBV within Indian universities are the sexual harassment cases reported by female college students (Gender Sensitization Data, nd). These reported cases of sexual harassment, which stood at 65 across a total of 485 nationally recognized universities in India in the AY 2020-21(Gender Sensitization Data, nd), do not provide a credible picture of the nature and scope of the phenomenon since a) majority of the cases of sexual harassment go unreported (Dasgupta & Mukherjee, 2020) and b) GBV also manifests in non-sexual and non-heterosexual forms.

GBV in HEIs in India can thus be seen as the “giant elephant” in the room that neither the universities nor the national/state government in India wish to talk about. When viewed within the context of the neoliberal model of universities as a business that competes for ranking and for attracting more students, the silences on GBV should not be seen as an indicator of the failings of the system. Instead, it should be viewed as the system working exactly as it intends to work, i.e, to manage negative publicity, dissuade potential victims from coming forward, hide evidence of a pervasive culture of harm against sexual minorities and the disabled, and to protect the reputation of abusers and academic institutions (Anitha & Lewis, 2018). It is precisely these “workings” of the system of a large public university in Delhi (henceforth called “Indian University”) that my dissertation study seeks to unravel.

The chief aim of the dissertation study is a critical investigation of female college students’ perceptions of the structural and cultural characteristics at their university that sustain or hinder GBV. For the larger work that this presentation comes from, I make use of two chief data sources 1) online participatory focus group discussions with a diverse sample of female students at the “Indian University” and 2) in-person interviews with self-identified victim-survivors of GBV at the university. In the presentation, I will present findings from focus group discussions (FGDs) (n=10) conducted with a purposively recruited sample of forty-five female college students enrolled at the university. Participants in the sample differ along the axes of socioeconomic status, caste, and sexual orientation, and are enrolled in the undergraduate and Master’s programs at the university. Emphasis is placed on exploring the nexus between the direct acts of GBV that can be traced to an identifiable agent and the indirect forms of violence inflicted by invisible structural and cultural features within higher education institutions. Preliminary findings reveal discriminatory sexual harassment policies, the othering of homosexuality, lack of gender sensitivity among the administrative staff, and ageism as few structural/cultural aspects of the “Indian University” that indirectly sustain GBV against female college students in India.

Author

• Ruchi Saini, University of Maryland College Park