Breaking down the question
This twenty-mark question has three tasks. First, define the POSH Act. Second, examine the quoted statement — that women do not easily identify or name the tormentor at the workplace even today. Third, and crucially, substantiate with examples from India. The word examine asks for critical analysis, not mere description, and the word substantive signals that unsupported assertion will not do.
The heart of the question is sociological: why, despite a law, does naming a harasser remain difficult? The answer lies in power, patriarchy, stigma and the structure of workplace relations. The examiner is testing whether you can move from a legal description to a social explanation of why law alone does not dissolve the barriers to identification.
How to approach it
Begin with a concise account of the POSH Act — its full name, its origin in the Vishaka guidelines, its definition of workplace sexual harassment, and its key mechanism of the internal committee. Keep this crisp; the marks lie in the analysis.
Then examine the statement. Explain the barriers to identifying the tormentor: unequal power, fear of retaliation and job loss, stigma and victim-blaming, the informality of much women's work, and the culture of silence. Draw on feminist theory of patriarchy and law. Substantiate throughout with Indian realities — the informal sector, domestic and unorganised work, high-profile disclosures and the wider reckoning around workplace harassment. Conclude by balancing the law's promise against its limits.
Model answer
The POSH Act — the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace, Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal Act of 2013 — is the principal legislation addressing sexual harassment at work in India. It grew out of the Vishaka guidelines laid down by the Supreme Court in 1997, themselves prompted by the gang-rape of a social worker in Rajasthan. The Act defines sexual harassment broadly to include unwelcome physical, verbal and non-verbal conduct, quid pro quo demands and the creation of a hostile working environment. Its central mechanism is the internal committee that every eligible workplace must constitute to receive and address complaints, with local committees for smaller and informal establishments. The Act thus recognises harassment as a violation of women's rights to equality, dignity and a safe working life.
The quoted statement — that identification of the tormentor does not come easily even today — captures the gap between a progressive law and lived reality. Sylvia Walby's theory of patriarchy as a system operating through paid work, the state and interpersonal relations helps explain why. Harassment is rarely an isolated act; it is embedded in unequal relations of power. The harasser is often a superior, an employer or a gatekeeper to promotion and livelihood, so naming him carries the risk of retaliation, dismissal or the quiet ending of a career. Where a woman's employment and income depend on the goodwill of the very person who harasses her, silence can appear the rational, protective choice.
Stigma and victim-blaming compound the difficulty. In a society that polices women's honour and mobility, a woman who complains may find her own conduct scrutinised, her motives questioned and her reputation damaged. Nivedita Menon's writing on gender and law argues that legal recognition does not by itself dismantle the social structures that produce women's subordination, and workplace harassment illustrates this: the law provides a channel, but the fear of not being believed, of being shamed, and of being blamed keeps many complaints unspoken.
Indian examples substantiate the point powerfully. The overwhelming majority of Indian women work in the informal and unorganised sectors — domestic work, agriculture, construction, home-based production — where no internal committee exists, where employment is precarious and undocumented, and where the machinery of the Act barely reaches. For these women, identifying a tormentor is almost impossible without risking their livelihood entirely. Even in the organised sector, the wave of public disclosures around workplace harassment in India, in which many women came forward together years after the events, showed both the depth of the problem and the difficulty of naming perpetrators in isolation and in real time. That women often spoke only when others did reveals how collective courage was needed to overcome individual fear.
The structural informality of women's work reinforces this. As with the wider informalization of labour, the absence of contracts, unions and grievance mechanisms leaves women without the institutional support that makes complaint feasible. The connection between women's exposure at work and the broader spectrum of gender-based harm is developed in the notes on violence against women.
The considered conclusion is that the POSH Act marks a genuine advance in recognising and providing redress for workplace sexual harassment, but the statement in the question remains largely true: identifying the tormentor does not come easily, because law cannot by itself dissolve the power, dependence, stigma and silence that surround the offence. Effective change requires not only the Act but a transformation of workplace cultures, secure employment and the wider social attitudes that place the burden of shame upon the victim rather than the perpetrator.
Examiner's perspective
Examiners want the definition delivered accurately but briefly, with the analytical weight placed on the statement. The strongest scripts explain why naming a harasser remains hard — power, dependence, retaliation, stigma and informality — rather than merely restating that it is hard. Substantiation is explicitly demanded, so grounding the argument in the informal sector, the reach of the internal committee and the public reckoning around workplace harassment is essential. Feminist theory from scholars such as Walby and Menon adds depth, and a conclusion that weighs the law's achievement against its social limits secures the top band.