Sexual Harassment Against girls on Publictransportation: Understanding, Experience and Reaction

Abstract

This study is aiming to examine the understanding, experience and reaction of girls when they sufferred from sexual harassment inside a public vehicle. Sexual harassment against women on public transportation is the most heard problem of girls among their friend-circle. From bachelor level, i heard the experience of my friends regarding sexual harassment but when i started searching about the research conducted on this subject only one academic research is found. So, thinking this issueas a worst but neglected subject I decided to conduct the research in this subject matter. Narrating the statement of the problem and research questions the objectives of this research is to find out the understanding of women about sexual harassment basically focusing on symbolic and verbal abuses. How they react and what are the structures responsible for supporting sexual harassment inside a public vehicle. Taking an interview of 30 girls and doing case study of 5 girls research is concluding finding the result that 87% of girls using public vehicles daily suffered from sexual harassmentatleast once in their lifetime. Blaiming the crowd inside a public vehicles girls though take symbolic and verbal harassment as sexual harassment, but they share only physical harassment when asked about their experience on sexual harassment. And,that 87% is the percentage of girls who suffered from physical harassment inside a public transport. Only 5% of women raise their voice when they suffer from harassment for the first time. This study concludes that the transportation system (crowd inside it), men’s sexiest nature and capitalist patriarchy are responsible for sexual harassment. Thus, it is concluded that Nepalese Transportation is not women-friendly and the perceived help from by-standers is less than the actual help when girls suffers from sexual harassment.