A Critical Study for Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplaces: From Legal and Preventive Perspective

In India today, sexual assault and harassment are the two most common types of violence against women. Sexual harassment, which was legalized in 1976, is acknowledged as a type of bias against women on the basis of sexual orientation. Additionally, this includes unwanted and sexually motivated behavior such as unwanted physical contact and advances, requests for or demands of sexual favors, remarks with sexual overtones, the display of pornography, and other unwanted physical, verbal, or non-verbal conduct of a sexual nature at all workplaces where women are employed in the public or unorganized (private) sectors of government. In the past, sexual harassment against working women was not reported as a crime because it typically does not involve a public presence. As a result, these crimes were classified as "Dark figures of crime" and "Noiseless crime." To stop these kinds of harmful actions against women, the government passed many laws and established a preventive system. The Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013, which was just put into effect, aims to safeguard women from all forms of sexual harassment at their places of employment in the public and unorganized (private) sectors. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to offer some recommendations to the government on the appointment of a monitoring team to visit both government offices and the unorganized (private) sector. Additionally, NGOs, the media, academics, and other non-profit groups should be raising awareness and carrying out monitoring tasks to stop harassment of women at the workplace. At this point, the descriptive research methodologies used in this study will be combined with secondary data gathered from books, journals, magazines, relevant statistics, laws, and online sources that are linked to women's harassment.