In the wake of the spread of the #MeToo movement, where a number of survivors of sexual harassment have come forward to publicly name perpetrators, the Mumbai chapter of the Network of Women in Media, India (NWMI) and Mumbai Press Club convened a discussion at the Mumbai Press Club on October 24. Urvashi Sarkar reports
The Network of Women in Media, India, condemns the decision of The Wire to allow Vinod Dua, against whom sexual harassment accusations have been levelled, to use his show ‘Jan Gan Man Ki Baat: Rafale Deal and Rising Fuel Prices’ to malign the #METoo movement and mock the allegations of sexual harassment levelled against him as ‘muck’.
In the first video that was uploaded on Tuesday, October 16, Vinod Dua said the media was not asking the government questions on ‘real issues’, and was instead preoccupied with stories of “who sexually harassed whom how many years ago”.
The Network of Women in Media, India (NWMI) vehemently denounces the attacks on journalists, including several women journalists, at Nilackal/Sabarimala. Saritha S Balan of The Newsminute, Pooja Prasanna of Republic, Radhika Ramaswamy of CNN-News 18 and Maushumi Singh of India Today were attacked today while attempting to cover the situation at the entry point to the Sabarimala hill temple, scheduled to open for monthly rituals this evening. Yesterday several journalism students were stopped by protesters, mainly female, who were stopping and screening all vehicles bound for Pampa. It is up to the government to see that more names are not added to the list and that mob frenzy is not allowed to interfere with freedom of expression, the public’s right to information and the media’s responsibility to report on events and issues of public concern.
NWMI (Network of Women in Media, India) extends its unstinting support to the Women in Cinema Collective (WCC) of the Malayalam film industry in its relentless crusade to seek justice for a Malayalam actor who was sexually assaulted in February 2017. WCC has been fighting against the apathy of the Association of Malayalam Movie Artistes (AMMA) in Kerala, that has reinstated actor Dileep who is accused of masterminding the assault on the survivor (Dileep was suspended from AMMA following his arrest last year but was arbitrarily reinstated when he got out on bail this year).
Disclosure after disclosure by Indian women over the past week have brought to public attention for the first time the pervasiveness of sexual harassment in Indian media workplaces. The experiences shared by women journalists across the country 20 years ago and recorded in Ammu Joseph’s book, Making News: Women in Journalism, first published in 2000, establish that the existence of the problem has been known for a long time, as have some of the names now tumbling out of the closet.