Dealing with Sexual Abuse

SHe-Box portal, an online system designed to help in better implementation of various provisions of ‘The Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace Act, 2013’ (SH Act).The portal is so designed that it masks the details of the complainant to maintain confidentiality.

The Ministry of Women and Child Development recently launched the SHe-Box portal, an online system designed to help in better implementation of various provisions of ‘The Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition, and Redressal) Act, 2013’ (SH Act).

This Act mandates the appropriate Government to monitor its implementation and maintain data on the number of cases filed and disposed of.

The SHe-Box portal is an initiative of the Ministry to provide a publicly available centralised repository of information related to Internal Committees (ICs) and Local Committees (LCs) constituted at various workplaces, across the country, whether in government or private sector and also an end to end integrated complaint monitoring system. It provides for designating a nodal officer for every workplace who is required to ensure updation of data/ information on a regular basis for real time monitoring of complaints.

A complaint on the portal can be filed by an aggrieved woman or any other person on behalf of the complainant. If the person filing a complaint is the aggrieved woman herself, she has to login on to the portal by registering her basic details such as her work status, name, phone number, and email.

If the person filing a complaint is any other person, he/she has to login on to the portal by registering his/ her name, relationship with the complainant and undertaking from the complainant along with the work status, name, phone number, and email of the aggrieved woman/ complainant.

Depending on the status of her employment the person filing a complaint is required to select the IC/ LC of the workplace where they want to submit the complaint. If the IC or LC of the aggrieved woman is registered on the portal, the complaint will be automatically submitted and forwarded to the IC/ LC concerned. In case, the IC of her workplace is not registered on the portal, the portal provides for an online process to obtain details of that workplace from the complainant and inform the State Nodal Officer and District Nodal Officer of the State / UT and district concerned to ensure early registration of that IC.

The SHe-Box portal has a monitoring dashboard for Nodal Officers at the Centre / State/ UT level and District level, to see the number of cases filed, disposed and pending, including those beyond the prescribed timeline. Similar feature is built for the complainant to track the status of her complaint. Further, the portal has the facility to generate reports in respect of IC/ LC of a particular Ministry/ Department/ State/ UT/ Private sector / district, to facilitate better monitoring by supervisory authorities and adherence to the prescribed timelines.

Any complaint filed on the SHe-Box portal reaches directly to the IC of the workplace concerned or LC of the district, as the case may be. The portal is so designed that it masks the details of the complainant to maintain confidentiality. Except the Chairperson of the IC/ LC, no other person is able to see the details or nature of the complaint registered.

The SHe-Box portal has been built in accordance with the provisions of ‘The Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013’. Time prescribed under the Act for inquiry is 90 days.