Video series explores faultlines between friendship, intimacy, and harassment

Themes of consent and rejection, are the subject of a new video series that is trying to encourage critical, self-aware expressions of intimacy.

Created by Partners for Law in Development (PLD) in collaboration with city-based filmmaking collective Co:Motion, the series is based on stories re-constructed from true stories and "seeks to go beyond crime and punishment to explore and encourage transformatory approaches to popular attitudes and assumptions about sexuality".

Talking at the launch of the video series, Madhu Mehra, executive director, PLD, said that workplace confusion between peers is a difficult territory since there was a "very small percentage of what one would call a predatory harassment".

"A lot of issues had to do with social media, the use of WhatsApp and intimacies built on it that lead to certain kinds of assumptions about a relationship that might not exist but it does begin to exist in the minds of people," she said.

Mehra noted while creating the video series that beginning of such relationships and confusion often comes from the lack of "social capital" in lives of people going for higher education or getting a new job.

"We also realised that when people come to universities or get a new job in a city, it's a very fragile time for them where they are very eager to make friends. They don't have social capital and they need to build that and that means essentially pleasing everybody and trying to be very friendly," she said.

The series of 11 videos also explores cross-cultural confusions, peer pressure, and the social silence surrounding the issues of sexuality.

She said that policies against cases of sexual harassment and a lack of sex education also keeps people confused.

"You know sexual harassment is in parts an outcome of not knowing, it is also about just wanting to explore the sexuality but not knowing the rules of the game. Let's not forget under the Indian law now adolescent sexuality is completely criminalised, the idea of sex education in schools has been rejected.

"At the policy level we have set the stage for keeping people confused, and then you enter the workforce or the higher education and unless you are privileged and have empathetic parents who spoke to you about it, you just have pornography to understand sexuality," she said.