Kazakhstan needs sexual harassment law

Yevgeniya Kozyreva, President of the Feminist League of Kazakhstan commented on the issue: "It is necessary to analyze this problem and prove its existence to our law enforcement, and prove it to the Parliament that there is absolute necessity to provide the laws which will protect women both in the workplace and in general. Kozyreva referred to the social research which was conducted by the organization among 750 men and women of Shymkent, Almaty and Aktau aged from 18 up to 56 years. "70% of both men and women faced some form of sexual harassments in their lives on the workplace. (...) Sexual harassment is a closed subject and there is no such statistics in our law enforcement and judicial authorities because there have not been any complaints registered. The reason why nobody makes a claim is because there is no such a law to address the claim".

To the question of the journalist whether a man's courtship is harassment, Kozyreva explained that "if a woman does not want the courtship and she said so, any following step shall be considered to be harassment. Even if you give her flowers, perfume, kneel down, or hang out posters -everything will be considered to be sexual harassment because she already said "I don't like you".

In 2012 the OSCE conducted a survey in Kazakhstan regarding perception and awareness of sexual harassment among population. It appeared that the level of awareness of discrimination and different forms of sexual harassment is rather high. Also there is high prevalence of sexual harassments in general, and also in workplace. However amazingly large number of respondents (generally men) who were sexual harassment witnesses did not take any action.