Will the UP Women’s Commission's proposed set of recommendations actually ensure women’s safety or provide more employment opportunities for women?
The Uttar Pradesh Women’s Commission has proposed a set of recommendations for “women’s safety”, including banning male tailors from taking women’s measurements, male trainers from instructing female clients at the gym, and male workers from attending to female customers at beauty parlours.
While speaking to ANI, the UP Women’s Commission chairperson Babita Chauhan said the recommendations were based on complaints she had received from women, who had felt uncomfortable or experienced harassment at gyms, parlours and boutiques, and that implementing the proposed recommendations would ensure women's safety but also promote employment for women.
“When women go to the gym, some of them are blackmailed, after their photos are taken. Or they experience 'bad touch' but are not able to tell anyone because they have no options. My only request is that there should be female trainers along with male trainers at every gym,” Chauhan said. She pointed out that 90 per cent of the tailors at boutiques are men and they are the ones who take the measurements of female customers. “Keep (employ) male tailors if you want but for measurement keep females. This isn’t our culture or tradition,” she said in a video interview with ANI.
Chauhan thinks a beauty parlour is another setting where women can face harassment if the workers are male. “Earlier, 90 per cent of the workers used to be female, but in this new era we see more boys than girls. Nowadays bridal makeup is also being done by men..." She suggests that if women want to avail services from a male worker either at a beauty parlour or a gym, they should give it in writing so the “government or administration cannot be held responsible” in case of a mishap.
Citing the recommendations as “patriarchal” and “atrocious”, women’s rights activist Brinda Adige said the proposed guidelines were akin to those enforced by the Taliban. “This is not going to enhance women’s safety, this is going to segregate women and continuously send the message that women have no agency,” she says. “The recommendations blatantly avoid all the guarantees given to women by our Constitution that we have the right to choose and decide what we want to do.” She also pointed out that it is unacceptable to generalise that all men are “leching after women”.
Adige says the recommendations are not the best way to enhance women's employment as claimed. She says that women’s employment shouldn’t be at the cost of skills and delivery of effective efficient services. "If there’s a woman tailor who’s going to make a shoddy blouse, am I going to give my blouse to her just because she is a woman? If a woman gym trainer is not good at her job or is not up to the market standards, will I go to her?”
Adige believes such rules will neither be fair to male workers, who would lose their female clientele or to female customers, who would be forced to go to women simply because of their gender.
Shonee Kapoor, Co-founder of Sahodar, a men’s rights group, thinks the UP Women’s Commission’s recommendations are "regressive”. The legal consultant who counsels people suffering from misuse of rape and matrimonial laws, says the recommendations are like the “cracker ban”, impossible to implement on the ground level. “These are not implementable; these will be provisions that the police and NGOs use to extort money from men in these trades because I think the gap is too big to be filled. There aren't enough trained women barbers or tailors," he said.
Shonee Kapoor believes the move will create “chaos” with a huge number of tailors becoming unemployed . “If we are considering these recommendations then we should pass a law that males and females should not interact ever, wouldn’t that be ultimate women’s safety? No marriages, no kids!” he says.
According to the 2022 National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) report, UP saw the highest number of cases filed under crime against women which includes rape, cruelty by husbands, domestic violence, kidnapping and sexual harassment. Between 2020 and 2022, the cases went up from 49, 385 to 65, 743. Of the total cases recorded in India, UP accounted for 13.29 per cent in 2020 and 14.76 per cent in 2022.
Adige rightly points out that the “police, prosecution, and courts” need to take far more substantial steps than what the proposed recommendations suggest.