I did not learn about workplace sexual harassment from a textbook or a statute. I learned about it much earlier, in a tuition centre, long before I had the language to name what I was seeing.
I was a child then, attending English tuition. The centre was run by a male teacher in his late fifties—experienced, respected, and firmly in control of the space. He was someone parents trusted and students obeyed without question. There was also a young female teacher in her early thirties who taught alongside him. She was his employee, and that difference shaped everything that unfolded in that room.
What I remember is not one isolated incident, but a pattern of behaviour that felt deeply uncomfortable even to a child. The male teacher would touch her unnecessarily and intentionally. It was visible. It was repeated. And it never stopped. There was no attempt to hide it, perhaps because he did not feel the need to.
Alongside this, there were other moments that stayed with me. While teaching English, he would sometimes explain the Hindi meanings of body-related words in a way that felt inappropriate for a classroom full of children. These explanations were not required for learning the language, yet they were offered casually, without sensitivity or boundaries. At that age, I did not fully understand why it felt wrong—I only knew that it made the room feel uneasy.
The discomfort was not just mine. It hung in the air. The young female teacher would go quiet. Her posture would change, her eyes would lower, and the energy in the room would briefly shift. And then, just as quickly, the class would continue as if nothing had happened. No one corrected him. No one asked him to stop. Silence became routine.
Even as a child, I could sense that something was off—not just in what he did, but in how everyone responded. Or rather, how no one did. That silence felt deliberate, learned, and strangely normal.
The power imbalance was impossible to miss. He was older, authoritative, and the employer. He controlled the space, the timetable, and the pay. She was younger, dependent on the job, and easily replaceable. Whatever response she might have chosen—speaking up or staying silent—carried consequences that she alone would have had to bear. Watching this taught me, quietly but clearly, who was expected to absorb discomfort and who was allowed to cause it.
This is where data often fails us.
Statistics can count reported cases of workplace sexual harassment. They can show how many complaints are filed and how many inquiries are conducted. What they do not capture are these everyday moments—where inappropriate behaviour is witnessed, recognised, and still tolerated. They do not show how often silence is mistaken for consent, or how authority turns misconduct into something ordinary.
They also do not show how early such lessons are learned.
As a child watching all this unfold, I learned—without anyone explicitly teaching me—that power protects itself. I learned that discomfort is often dismissed when the person causing it holds authority. I learned that women are expected to endure quietly, especially when the man involved is senior, respected, or “in charge.” These lessons were not spoken aloud, but they were absorbed all the same.
No dataset records the impact of witnessing this on a child’s understanding of safety, dignity, and gender. No report measures how such experiences quietly shape one’s sense of justice, long before one knows what justice is supposed to look like.
Years later, as a law student and an aspiring lawyer, I finally have the language to name what I witnessed. I can now call it sexual harassment. I can recognise it as an abuse of power. I can place it within the legal framework of workplace rights and protections. But having words today does not undo the failure of that moment—when a woman was made uncomfortable, children were exposed to blurred boundaries, and silence was chosen over accountability.
What troubles me most is how ordinary it was allowed to be.
There was no disruption, no questioning, no intervention. Life went on. Classes continued. And perhaps that is why such behaviour persists—not because it is hidden, but because it is visible and still excused.
When we speak of gender justice, we often rely on numbers to tell the story. But numbers cannot show the hesitation in a woman’s posture, the calculation behind her silence, or the way a child internalises unequal power dynamics long before understanding them intellectually.
This is what the data doesn’t show:
how normalised harassment looks when no one stops it,
how boundaries are crossed in everyday spaces,
and how early inequality is learned by those who are simply watching.
That childhood memory did not fade for me. It followed me into my studies, into my interest in women’s rights, and into my understanding of why law matters—but also why law alone is not enough without social courage.
Because sometimes, the harm lies not only in what is done, but in what everyone allows to continue.
