Mumbai: ‘Boys at college stopped locker room talk’

Aili Seghetti with a member of her team at a practice ‘mock date’ session. She conducts these with her clients to prepare them for romantic dates so that they can communicate and process their feelings better, and make the engagement a fulfilling experience minus insecurities

On June 19, Panchasheela Jamadar, a 30-year-old mother of two, was murdered in a moving autorickshaw by her boyfriend, Deepak Borse. Jamadar and Borse had been in a relationship for two years and had known each other before that. And yet, when Borse asked her to marry him, she turned him down, due to which he allegedly slit her throat with a chopper. According to Mumbai Police's monthly statistics, the city witnessed 591 cases of crimes against women in January, 536 in February, 601 in March and 604 in April.

Mental health and relationship experts concur that rejection of a romantic overture is among the top reasons behind violence by men against women. While Borse's case is among the extreme ones, authorities record scores of instances of online or in-person harassment of women who have rejected men. "The two classic extreme coping mechanisms after being rejected are resentful aggression towards the person or self harm. Both of these are two sides of the same coin," says Aili Seghetti, founder of The Intimacy Curator, who conducts mock date sessions to prepare men for actual dates.

Dr Natasha Kate and Vaibhavi Rani

"Men who face rejection," Seghetti says, "should know why they are being rejected and how to engage with the woman's human experience, how to perceive their rejection and to build the capacity to communicate with them, so that the process of dating is a fulfilling one instead of an insecure one. Rejection hurts and is even felt in the body. This is how people react when their self-proclaimed position of authority is questioned."

Her initiative aims to prepare men to converse with women and respect boundaries. The first step in the programme is a mind mapping session, where, with questions and prompts, she identifies their interest, goals, strengths and perceptions. The Red Dot Foundation, an NGO that works towards preventing crimes against women, runs an app that maps hotspots of crimes based on real life data, so that women can avoid certain lanes, blind spots or buildings. Apart from this, Red Dot also holds sessions with men to counsel them about the consequences of predatory behaviour.

"When we make young men aware of the deep implications their inappropriate comments or ‘locker room talk' have on the girls, empathy develops and they stop committing such acts. For instance, when we received a complaint against male students of a college, we called them in for a lecture without telling them that their female classmates would also be in attendance. We explained to the boys the implications of such behaviour, like paranoia or even girls dropping out of college. The boys experienced a shift in conscience and stopped doing it," says Vaibhavi Rani, lawyer and programme coordinator at Red Dot.

Dr Natasha Kate, head psychiatrist at Masina Hospital, Byculla says that the way a man perceives rejection is also an important factor. "When turned down, a man doesn't consider that it is the situation and not him. Maybe she's had a bad day or has something urgent to do. She does not want to go out is not the same thing as she does not want to go out with you," she says.

In the online space, too, crimes against women are on the rise. Cyberstalking alone has increased by 13 per cent in 2022, as per the National Crime Records Bureau's statistics. Other than posting objectionable comments on social media, other cybercrimes include morphing visuals, creating fake profiles and blackmail.

Seghetti says, "The right realisations by men can reduce the chances of them committing such crimes. If such sexual wellness counselling is done on a larger scale, we might see a fall in harassment of women." Perhaps the biggest testament to approaching men's mental health comes from a testimonial from one of Seghetti's clients.

"My dates used to ghost me, which led to low self-confidence and inability to approach women. But after seven to eight weeks of sessions with Seghetti, my sense of humour and articulation were back, and my overall wellbeing had improved," says the male client, who prefers to remain anonymous.