When the Nirbhaya episode happened, it came as no surprise that many NGOs were at the forefront of the protests. Activists are known to spearhead movements like these. So when international NGO, Greenpeace came up with a campaign for lighting up the streets of Delhi stressing on women’s safety, people just nodded in approval. Activism and public welfare was after all, one of the primary things that NGOs took up.
After all this, when Greenpeace gets hauled into the news for charges of rape and sexual harassment, it comes as a big, big shock! What’s worse is the manner in which the organisation tried to dismiss the charges and brush it under the carpet!
In an article published on a web forum a week ago, an ex-staffer went public with allegations of rape and sexual harassment by her colleagues, adding that she had to leave her job as a result of that.
Narrating her ordeal, she said that it started a year after she had joined the NGO at their Bengaluru office. The first incident happened during an official trip in October 2012. “I got a call from a senior colleague at 11 PM, asking me to vacate my room and insisting that I sleep in his suite. In another incident, he approached me physically despite my discomfort, insisted on force-feeding me birthday cake,” she told IANS.
Although she registered a written complaint with the HR manager, she did not receive any verbal or written communication from the Internal Complaints Committee (ICC) of the organisation, which looks into sexual harassment cases. To her shock, she learnt that the person was a serial offender and no action had been taken against him despite his misbehaviour with two other female employees.
Not only was no action taken in this case too, the victim was blamed for the episode and her character assassinated. Matters grew worse for her a year later during a party when a male colleague whom she knew quite well found her unconscious and raped her!
“You cannot imagine the pain and fear I went through. I was terrified to speak and I knew even if I had, no one in this organisation would come to my aid. I did not have the strength to report my rape, neither to the police, nor to my employers. How could I, when the processes had failed me once already?” she asked. Traumatised, she left the NGO after a few months.
It took a long time for her to get over the incident. Finally, in February this year she decided to make it public by putting up a Facebook post about her ordeal. Greenpeace issued an apology to her and promised to investigate it. But that was pretty much it.
“The ICC, which convened in March, recommended the termination of the offender, but the executive director overrode the decision on some pretext and the only thing I received was a written apology from the molester,”” she said.
The victim’s public tale of woe has opened a can of worms, as other former staffers too came forward alleging sexual harassment. Another ex-staffer (name withheld) also said that she was harassed by the same person implicated in the first incident. She said she resigned in March 2015 after inaction by the NGO.
Usha Saxena, a former employee, alleged that she was forced to quit Greenpeace because she took a stand against the rampant cases of harassment in the NGO. She had filed a misconduct complaint against a senior HR director for making ‘discriminatory and threatening remarks about her gender’. No action was taken and she was bullied out of the company in 2013.
It is shocking that an NGO with global credentials like Greenpeace, which has often made claims of standing up for people’s rights, apart from environmental issues, should be a party to a cover-up like this. Moreover, it’s the NGOs, which in many cases help victims by insisting that such cases of sexual harassment and molestation must be escalated within the company, and by insisting that we get what is due to us as per our rights.
That they would do this posturing in public while dismissing internal claims of rape goes to show the level of hypocrisy. It also goes to show what is rapidly being confirmed these days, that non-governmental organisations are organisations first, with their own levels of hierarchy and agenda. Activism comes a poor second. The worst outcome of this affair is that the next time a woman is sexually violated, an all too common occurrence in India, and an NGO takes up cudgels on her behalf, nobody will take them seriously.
Image Courtesy: BCCL
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