Some argued against it because the list named people without any context or explanation about their alleged offences, and because it took away the distinction between those who have been found guilty of sexual harassment and those against whom no formal complaint has been lodged.



Those in favour of the list asserted that the list performed a cautionary function, helping female academics become aware and protect themselves. It was also a protest, they insisted, against those due processes that protected the harasser and not the survivor. “The list does not aspire to be a legal category. Rather it is a backlash against what has happened in the name of sexual liberation,” said Swati, a PhD student from JNU. “It is a desperate cry for help.”

The list unleashed waves of pent-up anger and trauma from those who have suffered sexual harassment as well as everyday incidents of sexism in academia. To understand its origin and its impact, we interviewed students representing a wide spectrum of social and regional diversity across India. The interviewees were mostly women, with the exception of one queer man, and they are all students or recent graduates in social sciences and humanities from some of the biggest, most recognisable universities in India.

The list as social media event

Within a day of its publication, the number of names on the list climbed from 2 to 58, indicating the widespread nature of the problem. “The institutes listed there are the ones who should take responsibility. They have been protecting these abusers for long, at the expense of women,” said Kriti, a student of SRFTI. “The list is a slap on the face of the system, people, and due processes, and everything else that failed victims of sexual harassment.”

The purpose of the list was to make visible what the anthropologist Michael Taussig called ‘a public secret’ – a powerful form of social knowledge that is generally known but cannot be spoken. This emergence of these secrets began with the New York Times expose of Harvey Weinstein, a powerful Hollywood producer who has been thanked more times than God at the Oscars. Weinstein emerged as a serial sexual predator who used his power to prevent women from lodging complaints against him.

Weinstein's fall from grace had a ripple effect and secrets started spilling out in other industries as well. American media women compiled Shitty Media Men, a document which crowdsourced names of male colleagues who were allegedly known to be sexual predators. In the Indian context, the public secret was the knowledge that young researchers and PhD students shared about men they should be beware of in academia.

Shitty Media Men and Raya Sarkar's list are both symptomatic of a wider trend in online culture that caters to consumers shortened attention spans by using numbered lists.

