Alliance against Sexual Harassment at the Workplace AASHA is an alliance of 9 non-governmental organizations in Pakistan, established in 2001, and committed to end sexual harassment at the workplace. To achieve its ends, AASHA launched a multi-faceted campaign focusing on all sectors of society, in particular civil society organizations, corporate sector entities, government officials, elected Parliament and Senate members. AASHA invested in mobilizing women through awareness raising campaigns, publications and humorous identification of types of harassers in Urdu and English. In additions, AASHA recorded individual testimonies of women, which led to the collection of thousands of statements from working women that favored the passing of a law for protection of rights of women against sexual harassment. AASHA campaign also focused on networking and legislative reform, as a result of which, the law against sexual harassment was endorsed by the President in March 2010, following its unanimous acceptance by the Parliament and Senate in January and February 2010 respectively.[1]
AASHA’s achievement was in fact the achievement of NGOs in Pakistan since AASHA was itself an alliance of NGOs. This made the task of owning the movement easier for most civil society organizations. Every CSO ensured that it not only adopted but also implemented the Code of Conduct for Gender Justice at the Workplace, and promoted its adoption and implementation with their local partner organizations. A series of NGOs led provisional consultations were held in all four provinces and their recommendations were collected to enrich the code and broaden its ownership. Action Aid Pakistan with access to greater financial resources played a major role in this process and supported local NGOs widely.
Though the bill has become a law, the society in Pakistan is yet to develop zero tolerance for sexual harassment. AASHA has achieved a great deal, yet it has a long way to go. AASHA still lacks popular support from general public because despite attempts at broadening the ownership of AASHA messages, it remains to be led and supported by intellectual and upper middle class women’s rights activists. The legislative achievement have rendered urban based NGOs too optimistic, so much that they have started showing signs of impatience for the time that a majority of population in Pakistan is taking in accepting these norms in practice.[2] It is of significance importance that the women’s rights movement in Pakistan to invest in building their popularity with the rural population and lower classes of society and realize that it took American women 52 years of constant struggle and a total of 909 different campaigns to remove the word “male” from the Constitution. [3]
Besides, now that the bill has become a law, the threat of withdrawal of financial resources from this movement is looming large. In such circumstances, it is critical for AASHA to deploy cheaper methods towards the promotion of their ideals of anti-sexual harassment. One such cheaper method is the deployment of naming and shaming the culprits, an area which has not been used by AASHA so far.[4]
[1] http://www.aasha.org.pk, accessed on April 30, 2011
[2] Nazira Ali, personal interview with a women’s rights in Pakistan, April 28, 2011
[3] Alex Keyssar, The Right to Vote, (New York: Basic Books, Inc. 2000), 139.
[4] Lesley Wexler, “International Development of Shame, Second-Best Responses, and Norm Entrepreneurship: The Campaign to Ban Landmines and the Landmine Ban Treaty” The Arizona Journal of International and Comparative Law, Vol. 20, No. 3, 2003, p.564, http://www.ajicl.org/AJICL2003/vol203/wexlerarticle.pdf