Idiots lined up at every step, says IAS officer who filed sexual harassment case

A Facebook post by a young IAS officer exposing “how insensitive the criminal justice system is towards the sensitive matters of sexual crimes” has gone viral. “Idiots are lined up at every step,” says Riju Bafna, a trainee bureaucrat posted in Seoni in Madhya Pradesh, describing her experience of combating sexual harassment.
In her post, Bafna says that she had filed and FIR against an official of the MP Human Rights Commission for sending her “indecent messages”.The official was immediately relieved of his responsibilities, but the subsequent court proceedings left her disappointed.
On August 1, Bafna went to the judicial magistrate’s court to record her statement and says the “entire experience was horrible and traumatic”. “I realized why women do not want to come out in the open and report sexual harassment cases.”
Bafna says she requested for an in-camera recording of her statement. But “even before the court had decided on my request, an advocate who happened to be standing there started screaming at me as to how dare I make such a request. He said I might be an IAS officer in my office but this was his court and he was not leaving. I requested him to allow me some privacy, which I sought not as an IAS officer, but as a woman reliving the horrible experience of sexual harassment. But probably this advocate was more interested in demeaning me than facilitating justice against perpetrator of sexual harassment. He was not even a party to the case but just a bystander and he still did not allow me my privacy and kept arguing and using rude language. Finally after much argument, he left,” she writes.
During the entire incident, the magistrate maintained complete silence, Bafna claims, adding that he didn’t decide on whether she could be allowed an in-camera proceeding. “Worse, when I finally recorded my statement, he remarked that I was a young, new recruit on first posting, which was why I had these expectations of privacy and that I would get to know the system and courts with time and get done away with such demands.”

Read this in Hindi: जब यंग महिला IAS ने कहा, भारत में जन्म ना हो