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.
In her book Making News: Women in Journalism (2000), based on interviews with over 200 women across the country on a range of issues, Ammu Joseph records what she learnt from them about sexual harassment in media workplaces over the decades. In her introduction to an excerpt from the book, published in Scroll.in, she writes:
The #MeToo movement has finally reached India a year after the hashtag unleashed a global, public outpouring of women’s experiences with sexual harassment and related abuse. 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 the workplace, with the spotlight here (as elsewhere) trained, for now, on the media and entertainment industries.
The existence of the problem has been known for a long time, as is evident from the book excerpt below, based on interviews with women journalists across the country conducted 20 years ago. So have some of the names that are now tumbling out of the closet. But never before has there been such a public conversation about it, and one that is so loud and clear that even boardrooms evidently cannot ignore it any more.
Read the excerpt at: #MeToo in the 1980s: Sexual harassment in India’s media workplaces is not new, as this book shows
