A few weekends ago during the course of a conversation with a female University student the young woman declared that the real problem with workplace sexual harassment is that the magnitude of the problem for exceeds official and wider public understanding of its nature and extent. Speaking from what she said was “personal experience,” she declared that “workplace sexual harassment can actually become a kind of long-term prison sentence.” Here, she alludes to what she says is that “terrifying point at which the relentlessness of the predator, on the one hand, and the weakness of the rules protecting the victim, on the other,” makes you believe “that your whole life, your whole career, are on their way to ruins for reasons that you did not create.”
It is the intensity with which she articulates the dichotomy between the severity of the problem of workplace sexual harassment and the frailty of the rules that protect against it, that prompted this editorial.
“To a large extent, what we think of as sexual harassment is limited to a perception that it is no more than a matter of men, mostly those with clout and influence, making a nuisance of themselves, by ‘hitting on’ women over whom they exercise some form of workplace authority.” Then she adds, tellingly, that “actually, it is far, far worse than that. Sexual harassment at the workplace can become a real nightmare. I think we would treat with sexual harassment at workplaces far more seriously if we understood its true nature,” she says. No rules or policies, she added, are going to work if those rules are created against a lack of understanding of the true nature of the problem, particularly of its psychological impact on the victims.
She shifts, momentarily, to what she says, is the seeming absence of mindfulness, at the level of the disciplines of both Human Resources Management and Industrial Relations, to the issue of workplace sexual harassment, which weaknesses, in themselves, significantly inflate the enormity of the challenge that women try to tackle when they decide to “take on” men, mostly well-placed men, in workplace sexual harassment cases. “The gender biases that shape the rules is a problem in itself”, she says.
She contends that workplace rules on sexual harassment are diluted by deep-seated and unyielding gender-based prejudices that frequently make light of what we understand to be workplace sexual harassment, in the first place. An investigation into a case of workplace sexual harassment that goes badly for a male,” she says, can, and frequently does attract negative institutional responses, backlashes, if you will, for the victim as well. In fact, she says that the perpetrator, in the face of serious sanction, may even end up attracting a generous measure of institutional sympathy if not open support amongst colleagues on both sides of the gender spectrum.
Then there is what she says can sometimes be an inherent institutional reluctance to probe reported instances of sexual harassment. In the instance of the 2019 sexual harassment complaint at the Cheddi Jagan International Airport it took the Board of the entity to put policy measures in place to try create an enabling environment designed to help protect women, particularly, against possible workplace sexual harassment. Here, the clear implication was that prior to the incident itself, there had been no strong rules/policies at the day to day management level to protect women against sexual harassment.
In the final analysis, our informant says, workplace sexual harassment amounts, in a sense, to gender bullying, underpinned largely by the perverse exercise of authority that includes functional superiority. Here, she points out, that the real concern, going forward, has to do with the fact that we hear of examples and have even seen evidence of sexual harassment at “some worrying levels of our society,” a circumstance which she says might create what she calls “the impression of institutional legitimization. The rules, such as they exist,” she says, “are far too fragile to cope with the enormous gender prejudices that exist in our society.” Here, she argues, that women’s groups lobbies are unlikely to be effective “except we first find ways of addressing the issue of the way in which women have historically been seen in our society.” Here, she talks about women’s concern about being “both victimized and stigmatized.” Alluding to “two cases” in which she says she “had a particular interest” she spoke of the experiences of women, whose workplace harassment culminated in near rape, but whom, she said, could not be persuaded to go to the police or make any form of official complaint. These were cases of victims fearing that their cases might become instances of ‘blaming the victim.’ Here she adds that “even what we think of as entrenched paper rules, can be diminished by what she calls “more entrenched stronger unwritten conventions. Contextually, she cites instances of workplace sexual harassment in which, she says, female victims can even attract the hostility of workmates of their own gender in instances where the male perpetrator might be sanctioned following institutional investigation.
The problem, as she sees it, may well be good deal worse in the private sector than in the public sector. Here, the basis of her argument is that whereas in the public sector, there is usually resort to some “higher authority,” that option rarely exists in the private sector where, frequently, “the buck stops with the predator himself, who is the business owner. So you remain quiet for one of two reasons the first being the absence of institutional recourse and the second being the reality that in the event of serious protest you will, almost certainly, be ‘shown the door.’
The value of this poignant and enlightening perspective is that one is left to wonder whether, in addressing the issue of workplace sexual harassment our personnel and human resources functionaries and even our policy makers themselves, do not entirely overlook the cultural and psychological dimensions to the problem and whether or not the institutional rules and regulations, insofar as they exist, are not, in themselves, wholly inadequate to deal with the considerable scope of the issue. There are instances, we are told, where women employed in workplaces, in both the public and private sectors must endure the ordeal of being ‘hit on’ by male functional superiors for years, their recourse inhibited by an absence of confidence in the mechanisms (most of these are still managed by men so that there is a fear of the application of inbuilt gender sensitivities) available to them for protest. That, perhaps, is still the most intractable barrier to women, more often than not, failing to get a fair deal.
