Singer Chinmayi took to Twitter recently to share instances of harassment and misconduct encountered by women teachers by students.

Flix Sexual harassment Tuesday, August 10, 2021 - 18:16
TNM Staff

Just a couple of months after a slew of allegations came to the light in the Chennai schools #MeToo row, many women professors have also revealed the sexual harassment and misconduct they have allegedly been subjected to by students and male colleagues. Singer Chinmayi took to Twitter recently to share screenshots of her conversations with women teachers and doctoral candidates, who have recounted instances of harassment and misconduct that they have faced.  

It began with a professor who put up Instagram stories to share how a student “prank called” her and asked for sexual favours. She noted that although she does not respond to prank calls, this one in particular, was disturbing. “The call made today asking me, their teacher, for sexual favours, is not just insulting to me as their teacher but also as a woman,” the user wrote on Instagram.  

In one of the screenshots posted by Chinmayi, the sender of the message, who is pursuing a course at Loyola College, Chennai, explains how was stalked by a male undergraduate student during one of her teaching assignments. The sender mentions that she confiscated the student’s identity card and threatened to take the issue to the college authorities. However, she also notes that she was confident that the management would not support her in the matter. 

“Since he was a first-year student, he wasn’t aware of the management’s negligence and he got scared. Got rid of him for a while and he was back again. Then my teaching assignment ended and I didn’t have to face him after that. It’s normalized and such a common thing, especially in colleges with majority of boys,” the message in the screenshot read.  She added that if her name or department were to be revealed, the management might not even approve her thesis. She also said that many men who are research guides allegedly ask for monetary and sexual favours when they have to sign a copy of the final thesis and approve other documents.

Another distressing instance of harassment by students as young as those in class 6 was revealed by a nutritionist. In the screenshot shared by Chinmayi, she wrote about unpleasant and inappropriate comments from class 5 to 8 students when she conducted sessions in schools. “I had to explain about calcium and milk. And there was a group of boys (class eight) telling me, ‘Actually we don’t have the habit of drinking milk but if you breastfeed us, we can consider.’ I was very angry, yet didn’t know how to react because that was my first job after graduation,” the sender had written. She also revealed incidents of sexual assault from 2015 where she was groped by a class 6 student, who also allegedly forcibly kissed her “thinking it was heroism”.

In yet another set of screenshots, a person shared the experience of their mother – a teacher in her 50s – who was sent explicit and inappropriate photos by students. The sender of the message explains how their mother received unsolicited explicit images from a student, who had sent it from his own number. “When she told her male colleagues, they asked her to ignore the matter because she’s a woman who has daughters, who have to get married in the future. You’re from a respectable family so you’ve gotta be silent,” the message read.  

The messages and social media posts also discuss how teachers have been conducting classes online and have been more active on messaging platforms such as WhatsApp post COVID-19; and how occurrence of calls wherein students harass, abuse and disrespect their teachers, have increased during this period.  

However, it is not just students who have sexually harassed their teachers. In one of the screenshots, a sender shares how their mother’s colleagues, who work at a government high school, had received messages from fathers of students studying in the primary classes after they had contacted the students’ parents to discuss their children’s academic performance and details pertaining to their assignments. “Female teachers are scared to open WhatsApp or pick calls. They rely on male teachers’ help to get through such phone calls,” the message states.  

Sharing the social media posts and messages sent by several female teachers, Chinmayi questioned why teachers should remain silent despite feeling unsafe in their respective workplaces. “Then these stories were shared. Our teachers cannot remain feeling unsafe in their own workplaces. Why should they go through this?” she tweeted. Chinmayi has been a fierce supporter of the #MeToo movement and has been using social media platforms to share allegations of sexual harassment made by victims. 

READ: #DickPics are no joke: cyber-flashing, misogyny and online dating

In May this year, a spate of allegations of sexual harassment against a teacher at a branch of Padma Sheshadri Bala Bhavan (PSBB) in Chennai, came up. It was followed by multiple allegations of sexual harassment, abuse and misconduct by teachers in several city schools as well as educational institutions across the state of Tamil Nadu.  

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