SASH: Students Against Sexual Harassment

By Chien Wee Yoon

PETALING JAYA- A team of five female students from different colleges has set up a blog named S.A.S.H. It stands for Students Against Sexual Harassment to encourage students to speak out against sexual harassment.    
  
One of The Founder of the SASH blog, Dahlia Martin spoke to The Break during their blog launch at Monash University on 8th of March.
 
Due to the many cases of sexual harassment happening around school areas, Dahlia said the initial idea of the SASH blog is to show students how directly sexual harassment relates to their life.
  
"Sexual harassment affects people of all ages and what can we do to educate people more? We need people to be more aware about gender inequality." she said.
  
As there are many people experiencing sexual harassment and gender discrimination, SASH blog was established for people to discuss about women and gender issues.
  
Dahlia told The Break there are a lot of support services in the community to help victims against sexual harassment, but the options are limited.
  
Though there are codes of conduct in some companies that enable employees to take action for security purposes, there is a lack of laws pertaining to sexual harassment in Malaysia.
  
The SASH blog team believes society can act collectively to end sexual harassment by the most obvious thing: to end gender discrimination.
  
"We won’t have such thing as grouping gender roles anymore, if people generally respect each other regardless of gender", said Dahlia.
  
The administrator of SASH blog, Rachel Ng Koon Ling said the SASH blog function is to create a catalyst for students to help each in stopping sexual harassment.
  
They believe that most of the time it occurs in the workplace.
  
Rachel added that sexually harassed victims will feel psychological and physical trauma, and this will handicap them from doing anything including being friendly with other people.
  
The SASH blog team advises females that sexual harassment is not the victim’s fault.
  
They should feel free to ask for advice from support centers or click in to their site to obtain more information about the issue.
  
"If everyone put one step forward to bring up this unspoken topic and bring the issue into the open, people would tend to be more aware and cautious about sexual harassment", said Rachel.
  
The SASH blog team welcome readers to speak out against sexual harassment and their posts in the blog will be free from censorship.
  
For people who are interested to write to the SASH blog, their email is at my.sash@gmail.com and their website can be accessed at: http://sash.blogsome.com.

-Published in The Break, 27 March 2006, (Taylor’s College Petaling Jaya, students monthly laboratory newspaper)