What is SHe Box?

The Ministry of Women and Child Development has put in place an online reporting mechanism for filing sexual harassment complaints.

The Sexual Harassment electronic Box (SHe-Box) was launched by the Government of India in July 2017 with the object of providing a single window access to all working women irrespective of their work domain or the sectors in which they are employed. The primary objective behind SHe-Box was to facilitate the reporting and filing of complaints and to provide women with an alternate medium through which their grievances may be redressed/addressed.

SHe – Box aims to provide working women with the requisite strength to report incidents of sexual harassment, free from any pressure or undue influence

2. Distinguishing Features

•It provides for  access to all the working women to file a complaint of sexual harassment.
•Initially covered only the women under the employment of the Government but now covers all working women whether employed in the organized or the unorganized sector or working in the Private or the Public Sector.
•SHe-Box is an online complaint filing system which also gives the service to the complainant to track the status of the complaint.
•Women can file a complaint on the SHe-Box portal along with registering a complaint with their organisation’s Internal Complaints Committee (ICC) or Local Committee Committee(LCC)

3. Important Features:
•SHe-Box acts as an independent alternate means other than the already established modes of filing a complaint. This is a progressive preventive step for making workpalces safe.
•SHe-Box is a convenient system of filing a complaint as the working women can access the portal online from any place and at any time.
•SHe-Box has been designed in as user friendly manner as possible.
•If a complaint is filed on SHe-Box, the data is then directly collected by the government which will in turn help the government understand how widespread the problem of Sexual Harassment is.

A Guide on how to register a complaint:

Step – 1: Access the portal to file a complaint at http://www.shebox.nic.in/

On Opening the link the portal displays two tabs.

i) The first tab is to be clicked for filing of a complainant, it is important to note that a valid email id is required to register a complaint.
ii) The second tab is to be clicked for tracking the status of a previously filed complaint.

Step – 2: Upon clicking on the for registering a new complaint, a pop up screen appears which displays two options for the complainant to choose from
i) Government Employees: There is a further segmentation under this; if the complainant is a central government employee or a state government employee. The complainant has to then give details pertaining to the department as to where the complainant is currently posted.

ii) Private Employees: Initially in July 2017 the SHe-Box complained portal was instituted only for the Government employees and later in November 2017 the SHe-Box portal was made available for the private employees as well.

Step – 3: The complainant, after specifying whether she is a government or a private employee will then be directed to this screen where the complainant is required to provide certain information.

After providing all of the requisite details the complainant has to simply press the submit button to register the complaint.

Upon completion of the above steps and by pressing the submit button the complainant will receive a confirmation email on the mail id provided. The email also has a link which gives the complainant the access to her SHe-Box account.
The complainant can generate a password and access the account in order to track the progress of the application.

Author: Aditya Singh is a fourth year law student at Amity Law School, Delhi affiliated to Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University