Chennai: The recent sexual harassment allegations made by students and alumni of several institutions against their teachers have shocked the entire State. It all began after charges made on a teacher of PSBB school came to light through social media.
Following this several students from various institutions also came forward and made allegations on social media about inappropriate behaviour, sexual abuse and harassment by their teachers.
As soon as the issue came to light several people including politicians wanted to take action the PSBB school.
While there is no doubt that action needs to be taken against Rajagopalan, the PSBB teacher, a few requested to close the school.
However, that is not the case when similar incidents take place in other institutions, says A Ravichandran, an activist.
“Those who had openly spoke about the PSBB school have kept numb when similar issues came to the light in other institutions, especially those run by minority communities. For instance, after the PSBB incident, the Chennai city police registered similar cases against another school teacher Anand and an athletic coach P Nagarajan. However the name of the institutions and the coaching centre were not blown up as it was during the PSBB issue,” he said.
Maathangi, another activist recollected a few similar incidents which took place in city colleges in the recent years.
In 2019, students from the Zoology department of Madras Christian College had complained about a professor behaving inappropriately with them while they were on an excursion to Karnataka. The issue was downplayed and was dealt only with the Internal Complaints Committee of the college with no further development on the issue in the media.
“Similarly much focus was not put when a woman from Loyola College filed a complaint of abuse and harassment against the Director of Alumni Association Xavier Alphonse. The survivor had to approach the Court and alleged that not even an investigation was conducted,” she added.
The experts said that while all the above mentioned incidents are related to sexual harassment not all of them are given the equal exposure.