Giving Compass' Take:

• Aruna Kashyap argues that clothing companies that have international factories need to do more to protect the workers in these factories from sexual abuse.

• How can brands/companies in the garment industry hold each other accountable for improvement and prevention? 

• Read about the short film titled, "That's Harassment" that shows how sexual assault can happen in a variety of places. 


In a recent survey of experts, countries were ranked according to how safe they are for women. India came out as the most dangerous, followed by Afghanistan and Syria.

One area in which women everywhere face discrimination, inequality, harassment or violence in their everyday lives is in their workplace. Governments and corporations must contend with how to keep women safe when they are working.

Globally, the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements have forced many companies to revisit their gender pay gap and anti-harassment policies. The momentum has spurred discussions for a new international labor standard that squarely addresses violence and harassment in the workplace.

As in the apparel industry, for example, where women make up much of the global workforce. Apparel companies should do more to create workspaces free of violence and harassment, including sexual harassment. Brands need to be held accountable for monitoring and remediating labor conditions in factories they source from, rather than being allowed to conveniently distance themselves from labor abuses.

Investing in the underlying infrastructure that translates paper codes of conduct into actual practice is key to any meaningful effort. Brands should take steps toward this goal. Many apparel companies have been leaders on transparency, but many others have yet to follow good industry practices for making details about their business easily available.

Second, brands should recognize the limits of social and labor compliance checks (known as “social audits” in industry parlance), in which it may not be possible to address issues like sexual harassment effectively. Third, merely having monitors check periodically whether or not a workplace has a complaint system is not good enough. The absence of well-trained, independent and gender-sensitive committees to look into complaints, coupled with a lack of strong anti-retaliation procedures, risk stripping these systems of any credibility.

Read the full article about sexual harassment in clothing factories by Aruna Kashyap at News Deeply.