CONSTITUTIONAL AND LEGAL PROVISIONS FOR WOMEN EMPOWERMENT IN INDIA (ISBN : 978-93-49468-45-0)

From Compliance to Complicity: Examining HR Failures in Implementing the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013 in Indian Organizations

Author: Dr. Aarti Chopra & Ravi Kant Modi

The Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace Act (Prevention / Prohibition / Redressal), Act of 2013, was passed over ten years ago in order to provide a safe working environment for employees throughout India and is currently being implemented by numerous organisations; however, many reports of sexual harassment, both reported and unreported, still occur in workplaces across India and as a result, companies are questioning if they are in compliance with the Act. This chapter looks at the relationship between what was meant to be achieved through law versus what is occurring within company policies by examining how the HR function can assist in the implementation of this act to achieve these goals. By looking at a range of secondary data, including government reports, industry surveys, scholarly analysis, and documented narratives from case studies, this chapter has developed a pattern of systemic failures within human resource (HR) management that go beyond mere procedural mistakes. These HR failures include; compliance that is merely tokenistic in nature; limited capability of internal committee members; existence of conflicts of interest; training interventions that are weakly executed; the culture of silence’s becoming normalized based on subtle cultural biases. As a result, HR departments typically do not operate as independently and/or neutrally as they should when facilitating justice in an organization; rather they often exist within parameters of an organization that prioritize protecting its reputation over providing ethical resolutions to employees and/or former employees. This chapter suggests that these practices can create a transition for organizations from non-compliance to the next level as an implicit form of complicit behavior. Utilizing the framework of organizational justice and psychological safety, this chapter identifies that there is no trust, which results in organizations' lack of trust discouraging reporting of harassment. As a result, there continues to be a cycle of invisibility surrounding harassment. Therefore, this chapter calls for a movement away from compliance-based approaches to ethically informed, trauma-informed HR systems as a means to restore credibility and uphold the spirit of the law.

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