Sexual Harassment

COVID-19 is a means of isolating them from their friends and family. Perpetrators are threatening to throw their victims on the streets.

by Victor Cherubim

What have we seen in the months since the outbreak of the Coronavirus which no one speaks about is harassment, of one kind or another? Besides, the restrictions placed on free movement by our governmentsand health authorities, we have also created boundaries ourselves that enabled us to make some separation between work and non-work life. We have been forced to stay at home, trying hard to meetends meet, with other pressures on us. Children have been house bound, pets have been not cared for as much as we liked, ourlife and our environment has been claustrophobic.

All this impediment has gone against the grain of mankind being a social animal, of wanting to interact with others, for familiarity, for sustainability. After months of so called “isolation”, social distancing, quarantine fatigue has set in. People need to live their lives and are making safer choices, even if those choices are not as safe as staying at home. We see people starting to take risks on the one end of the spectrum and at the other end, parents are not at all convinced against all the advice of health professionals and Boris Johnson, that it is safe to send their children to school in September 2020.

Fear as a tool of silence

“A woman whose babies are going hungry will do anything to put food on the table”. We have these and many other stories about women desperate to go back to work after the pandemic. It is a slant mainly on women in poorer countries which themedia in the West tries so hard to expose, whilst hiding the fact that clothing conglomerates in these same countries of the West exploit cheap labour to provide cheap clothing for their outlets, as this is today’s niche. It is no “Victoria’s Secret” that exploitation of women in poor countries after the Coronavirus, is rampant.

I have noticed over the years, that women in our parts of the world being treated as a different species than women in the West. It is a stigma that has a deeper meaning.

We hear of garment workers, say machinists in clothing factories, in countries like India, Mexico, Turkey, Bangladesh, Vietnam and even Sri Lanka, the so called chain of countries which have the largest poor populations of women workers who rely on their sewing skillset, to make a bare living, rather than being qualified asprofessionals orin technical know how. They are the stigmatised as the ones being easily assaulted for “sex, stalked, groped, harassed and raped” in the sweatshop clothing factories which produce cheap clothing for international brands. Bangladesh garment workers have been highlighted having faced serious sexual violence in the workplace in recent days.

Sexual harassment in the fashion industry in the poorest of the poor nations, during this pandemic, is the newest exposure in the media in the West, “to produce more for less,”as people are not buying clothing as they used to.

Inhumane treatment of women in their homes in the so called West?

What is not in the news is that women in the West are suffering inhumane treatment in their homes after the pandemic, with money very tight and tempers frayed to put food on the table.Everybody talks about male masochism, but nothing seems to have been done either in Parliament or in the home. It is a taboo subject of keeping women safe in their homes. It seems that the home which is the “isolation unit” is not infected with Coronavirus but with “sexual, more like domestic violence.” Not one perpetrator has been fined. No criminal charges for sexual assaults have been brought by the victims.as far as I know in the UK.

“For people, women who are experiencing domestic violence, the lockdown which was and is mandatory to curb the spread of the virus, have literally trapped them in their homes with their abusers, isolated from people and the resources that could help them” Time magazine.

COVID-19 is a means of isolating them from their friends and family. Perpetrators are threatening to throw their victims on the streets.

Domestic violence is rooted in power and control, as we all feel a lack of control over our lives, it is impacting the lives of women with health systems becoming overstretched, medical care on video conferencing. Parental homes is no longer a choice due to the virus, even many social services for victims of domestic violence have suffered from budget cuts with the looming recession.