"she knew her friends would flirt with us"
Oxford University student Khadijah Ali, who undertook an internship in India, claimed that her female boss frequently engaged in inappropriate behaviour.
According to Khadijah, the internship organiser’s behaviour was initially minor but it ultimately became more serious.
It got to the stage that several of Khadijah’s fellow interns quit the programme early due to safety worries.
The day after she arrived in India to begin the internship, Khadijah noticed something off about the organiser.
They spent the night in “an unexpectedly luxurious 4-star hotel” and went swimming before having dinner with the internship organiser.
Khadijah said: “[The organiser] kindly took us to a fancy restaurant, and filled us in on some interesting details about India and the internship.
“She told us that she had selected only 6 interns out of a pool of 30 candidates.”
When Khadijah inquired about how the interns’ hosts had been chosen, the mood altered:
“The hosts were four male friends of hers in their mid-to-late twenties.
“She told us that she sent her friends the bios we had written and photos of us [but] that ‘they probably didn’t read [the bios]’ and ‘had probably picked us based on just our appearances’.
“It suddenly became clear why two brunettes and two blondes were paired together for different hosts.
“I felt deeply uncomfortable when she added that she knew her friends would flirt with us, and encouraged us to ‘have a summer fling’ and ‘to wander in and out of their bedrooms’ if we wanted to.”
Additionally, Khadijah recalled feeling uneasy when the host revealed after dinner that the town where the interns would be stationed in had “the second highest number of rape incidents in India.”
On being told about the number of rape cases in India by her boss, Khadijah told The Oxford Blue:
“That’s not exactly what you want to hear when you’ve just arrived in a new country.”
She describes the first evening as “distressing”.
After enjoying a day of excursions during the internship, her experience went from bad to worse. Khadijah alleged:
“But then, at night, our boss chose to sleep in the same bed as an intern.
“She got into the bed after that intern was already asleep, and I imagine it was a shock to the intern when she woke up and found her boss sharing a bed with her.”
Khadijah reacted to her boss sharing a bed with a fellow intern:
“I found it really bizarre because there was no need for her and the intern to be in that double bed together.
“There were a couple of single beds available that some of us were using, but we could have swapped around so that two interns were sharing the bed, which is what I did the next night because this made the other intern more comfortable.
“This seemed to offend our boss, and she questioned where she was supposed to sleep even though my bed was free.
“I wasn’t really sure what to make of it.
“In the moment, there was a funny side to the bizarreness of the situation, but it was also obviously deeply inappropriate.”
Khadijah also alleged that her boss did not intervene when the interns’ hosts drunk-drove them on more than one occasion.
After some of the interns left, the relationship between the remaining interns and the organiser significantly deteriorated.
Khadija claimed that their boss would only be seen sporadically and when she was seen, she would gossip about the interns who left.
Due to the little exposure to her ethnic heritage and the majority of her childhood spent in the UK, Khadijah Ali describes herself as “half Indian”.
The student’s expectations for the renowned internship were not met in its entirety.
As her summer internship offered the possibility to “reconnect” with her roots, Khadijah had great expectations for it – but this was not the case.
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