| For women out and about in public spaces, being groped by creepy men is a near universal experience. Why don’t we talk about it enough? Read on. The Big Story We are in the middle of a groping epidemic, and we aren’t talking enough about it It was just another working day for Isa Balado, reporting on a robbery in Madrid, live on TV. That’s when a man approached her from behind. You can see him touch her bottom. Back in the studio, programme host Nacho Abad noticed. “Forgive me for interrupting you,” he said. “But did he just touch your bottom?” Indeed he had, confirmed Isa. Abad then asked the cameraperson to put the “idiot on the camera”. The “idiot” was laughing. “I’m doing a live show and I’m working,” Isa informed him. The man denied touching her and walked off. Isa apologised for the interruption. “No, you have nothing to feel sorry for,” Abad told her. And the show went on. There’s a happy postscript to this story. Later that day, Spanish police announced the man had been arrested for sexual assault. A groping epidemic From Madrid to Mumbai, you’d be hard pressed to find a woman who hasn’t been groped in public by a stranger. I have lost track of the number of times I have been groped by creepy men. On the bus, in markets, walking alone on a deserted road in daytime and even once, years ago, on a train, chair car from Delhi to Mumbai, where the passenger next to me thought it was all right to begin masturbating late at night. I went off in search of the ticket checker and he was good enough to not ask me too many questions and find me an empty seat elsewhere. No other action, as far as I know, was ever taken. On Sunday, a concert by composer A.R. Rahman in Chennai, Marakumma Nenjam turned out to be India’s highest selling show with 45,000 people in attendance with reportedly mismanaged crowds and near stampede-like conditions. Several women were assaulted, reported The Quint. A day later, an independent film-maker said she was molested even as she was having a panic attack in the crowd. As she sought help from a man she called anna, or brother, “He looked me in the eye, and the next thing I knew, his hand was on my breasts and I was groped.” Rahman has promised to look into allegations of mismanagement.  A picture shared by AR Rahman on Instagram (Source: X/@water_menon) In the air, there is the growing legion of badly behaved male passengers. Every week it seems there is a new story. On Monday, a man was arrested for sexually harassing his female co-passenger on a Mumbai-Guwahati Indigo flight. After the cabin lights were dimmed, the man allegedly lifted the armrest and touched the woman. She reported the incident to the airline crew, and the man was arrested on landing at Guwahati. So pervasive is this menace, that in 2017, Air India announced it was setting aside two rows of seats for women. [I wrote about badly behaved male passengers in an earlier newsletter here] Making light of it Even now, the sexual assault of women in public view is euphemistically referred to as “eve-teasing”. The Supreme Court’s recently issued handbook on avoiding gendered terms correctly calls it street sexual harassment. In fact, touching a woman’s body without her consent is assault that can leave lasting trauma. On Monday, a railway transport worker in UK testified before a court in Sheffield about being touched between her legs and on her bottom by a drunk passenger in September 2021. As someone who loved her job, she said, she was left unable to work on the same route for months after the assault, leaving her traumatised with a loss of confidence. Even judges can trivialise it. In July, a judge in Italy let off the 66-year-old caretaker of a school for groping a 17-year-old schoolgirl on the ground that it was a “joke” and hadn’t lasted more than a few seconds. Why do men do it? “It’s a very perverse form of bullying,” says Ajanta De, a Bengaluru-based counselling psychologist. “It’s about power and needing to assert themselves in the knowledge that they will likely get away with it.” In male-dominated public spaces and in patriarchal societies, there’s a subtext too about showing women their “place”. If women step out to work, study, go out for a walk or enjoy a concert, they must be prepared to face violence and even assault. Charulata Rangarajan, the film-maker who posted a video of her hands shaking a day after being assaulted at the A.R. Rahman concert has been trolled. What had she had expected at a crowded event? After all, everyone knows that women are "fair game" in crowded public spaces. Talking about it  New Year’s eve celebrations in Bengaluru in 2016/17 became a free pass to grope (Source: AP) In a world grappling with heinous violence against women—one in three face domestic violence, rape and gang-rape data is ghastly—public groping is seen as a lesser evil and (understandably) gets vastly less attention. But, says De, “Nobody has the right to touch you without your consent.” The first thing to do after being groped is making sure you are safe. “You need to first protect yourself.” But if the conditions are ok, then you need to make it clear that being touched is not acceptable. “You definitely have the right to speak up,” says De. That is exactly what the journalist in Spain did. And it’s high time that we too said, enough. I want to hear from you. Have you been groped? How did you deal with it? How can we begin a national conversation making such behaviour unacceptable? Write to me at: namita.bhandare@gmail.com | 
