THE incident of a guard at a Nadra office slapping a needlessly aggressive female reporter has divided opinion once again. On the one hand, there are those who have strongly criticised the assault on her person; on the other, several voices have approved of the guard’s reaction. This has exposed an embedded acceptance of violence against women as a means of restraining and controlling their behaviour.

Certainly, a microphone-wielding journalist crossing the limits in personal interaction deserves censure, but at the same time, the guard’s violent response to the woman’s high-handedness should not be lauded as a befitting reaction, despite the rule books and manuals that caution against touching the uniform; society must still secure all fronts to prevent such a scene from recurring.

This debate on the professionalism of the reporter and the action of the guard needs to include the ethical dimension too. Any discussion on ethics must refocus one’s attention on the basic human values of respect and kindness. Incredibly, these simple values appear to have been missing from the discourse on women in professional fields.

Media ethics must be based on values upholding dignity.

The first responsibility lies with the media houses, with evidence pointing to the inefficacy of teaching ethics — in whatever form these are taught — to media professionals. It points to the need for integrating practical ethics into journalists’ professional training, instead of having them listen to an isolated lecture or enrolling them in the odd course on ethics.

This integration of media ethics must be based on principles and values that uphold everyone’s dignity, everyone from a guard at a government office to the head of a corporation sitting in a plush room. Any code of ethics will fail to achieve results if it has not been founded on the basic human values of fairness, kindness and respect. Perhaps the media has discarded these values in favour of profiteering amid intense competition, while the critics of the media have forgotten these in their impatience to castigate a prominent section of society, increasingly perceived as being errant.

The ethical responsibility of society and its institutions in dealing with aggressive reporters is founded on the same values. However, a vital dimension here is the difference in gender-based perceptions of respect. We would do well as a society to acknowledge and find a way around these differences to be able to call ourselves a decent society, especially in an era of increasing female participation in the workforce.

A woman in Pakistan steps out of her sanctuary with more than a ticking clock on her mind. She is carrying the load of her physical vulnerability, decades’ worth of negative endorsements from society, concerns for her own safety and security, and awareness of the consequences of a mistake or accident. She keeps a keen eye on the environment around her, is wary of attracting the wrong kind of attention, and constantly watches out for her personal space. This thought process is in addition to the universal concern for safety against street crimes that men and women share when they leave their homes.

Women restrain themselves but not out of some inborn tendency. They have accepted the prescribed norms of (traditional) behaviour in order to keep safe from those men who insist on disrespecting them. Consequently, when out on the streets, where they are most likely to encounter insolent behaviour, women do not act and react from a position of strength. They are constantly fighting the spectre of contempt that overshadows their existence.

When I see the video clip of the incident, I see a woman resisting, yet overreacting against the shackles her gender has placed on her. In protesting against the guard’s perceived derision, she seems unable to decide how much force to apply and when to stop pushing at all. In such situations, critics need to consider that these are new frontiers for women. As she struggles, the world around her also struggles to handle someone breaking the traditions that half the population of the country has almost quietly internalised.

Orientations and trainings at all institutions including media houses and male-dominated fields need to take these nuanced perceptions of respect into account before their staff members are ready to serve in the field. Similarly, members of society also need to step back and consider their own attitudes towards women working in an environment that is far from enabling.

Finally, we need to drop the distracting images of the microphone, the uniform, the pull, the push, and the slap for a second, and examine whether we need to revive the traditions of respect in our social and professional interactions. The other choice is to let society descend further into chaos.

The writer is a journalist with special interest in bioethics.

Twitter: @AsfiyaAziz

Published in Dawn, October 31st, 2016