A lack of morals leads to sexual harassment
By Xiong Lei (China Daily)
Updated: 2006-03-08 06:04

The fight against sexual harassment has been stepped up with new legislative penalties.

Following nine bills put up by 283 deputies to the National People's Congress, China's top legislature, at its last session in March 2005, the prohibition on sexual harassment against women was written into the revised Law on the Protection of Women's Rights and Interests, which came into force last December.

This is indeed remarkable considering the term "sexual harassment" was alien to most Chinese, men or women, only 14 years ago. Women's rights activists, law experts, social scientists and media have good reason to hail the act as a milestone in China's legislation.

Although I was among the first Chinese journalists to cover the issue in the early 1990s, I am not excited at the incorporation of the clause into the law on the protection of our rights and interests. This is because I am not sure if this indicates social progress or regression.

An online survey jointly conducted by Sina.com, a leading portal website, and Fortnightly Chat, a popular news magazine, of 2,910 women last year revealed that some 60 per cent of the respondents experienced sexual harassment occasionally, and 17 per cent of them felt they were frequently harassed sexually.

This is a striking contrast to the situation three decades ago. I remember filing a story in 1992 about Tang Can, a researcher with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences who pioneered study of the issue of sexual harassment in China. In that story I reported that Tang talked with some 30 women over 40, and found that few of them could recall even a single instance of sexual harassment 20 years before.

In other words, we Chinese, men in particular, behave much less decently now than we used to.

The rare occurrence back in the 1970s would take place mostly on buses or in cinemas, committed anonymously, and in the form of sexual molestation or lascivious passing remarks to strangers.

But nowadays, sexual harassment in the workplace has stood out, and the offender is more often than not the victim's superior, with the offence involving more nasty characteristics, according to the All-China Women's Federation.

Probably the necessity to make sexual harassment illegal has come out of such new "developments" and the prevalence of the offence.

However, given the widespread occurrence of sexual harassment, I doubt that legislation alone is an effective solution to this violation of human rights, especially as the law lacks the bite to define and punish the offender.

I am not questioning the necessity of the law. But the law is only the bottom line of human behaviour, the boundary of what we can do, the lowest common denominator of social life. The law is a means to protect us, but there must be values that weigh more than the law.

In their fight to enact the law against sexual harassment in the past decade, activists, lawmakers and experts tended to neglect those values and forgot to ask the simple question: Why was there infrequent occurrence of the offence in an era when we had far fewer laws?

The reason is simple. That was a time when people truly believed men and women were equal and should respect each other. Society was not free from residues of feudal ideas and discrimination against women, but the overwhelming ideology held those ideas to be wrong, and people would be ashamed to be identified as chauvinist.

Then came the so-called sexual liberation, and some of those values faded. Although equality between men and women is acknowledged in our Constitution as a basic State policy, women are more and more presented as commodities, for their sexual appeal in ubiquitous commercials and posters.

The sex industry has sneaked back, and women are more often than not depicted as fragile and vulnerable in the media. This has shaken the foundation of gender equality and honest mutual respect for one another between men and women.

Hence the frequency of sexual harassment.

Now we have a law protecting women against it. Even if the law is effective enough to provide us with protection, can it automatically rekindle the honest respect for women and endow us with the dignity we should have? Can it eliminate the evils of sexual harassment by itself?

I do not think so.

What is missing in our society are some ideals we used to treasure. To eliminate discrimination against women in all forms, sexual harassment included, the power of the law is but limited. Greater efforts should be made to cultivate a culture and environment in which every member of society treats others equally and with respect, "without regard to their sex, race, sexual orientation, age, marital or family status, pregnancy, parenthood, disability or size."

That is just as important as the legislation, if not more so.

The author is a council member of China Society for Human Rights Studies.

(China Daily 03/08/2006 page4)

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