Westminster and sexual harassment

A girl being pawed by a lech is so wrong and can be so distressing. A woman trots along to a mans hotel room and doesn't know it's a stupid thing to do ? cannot be compared

I agree Jane about the broad spectrum. There’s behavioir that is clearly criminal ( I’ve just been listening to PM about the young woman who alleges she was raped at a Labour event) and then there’s behaviour which constitutes sexual harassment or is sexualised in other ways. I agree that women should stand up for themselves in an ideal world but that differentials in power, status,age can impact on their ability to do that. However, even if a woman does stand up for herself, she should then report the unacceptable behaviour because no one knows what else has gone on because things have gone unreported by those who felt they couldn’t, or did but weren’t listened to or who just gave in their notice and walked away. Men should not be behaving like this, full stop and it’s their behaviour that has to change

I was once having dinner and was surprised to feel a heavy hand on my knee. I glared at my host and grabbed the 'hand' only to find that it was the friendly paw of his huge cat!
Sorry. Wandering off the point but that was my only experience of wandering hands.
All this is nothing new of course. Old debutantes used to warn each other of men who were NST - not safe in a taxi!

We are not discussing women going to men’s hotel rooms here - this hasn’t been brought up on this thread re the goings on in Parliament. It’s more about the general sexuslised culture that has been far too accepted there. For years and years, when women MPs stood up to speak, male MPs regularly made gestures that mimicked holding breasts. This didn’t happen in a hotel room, no woman invited this ( except of course by being so flagrant as to have breasts) and no one did anything about it. Clare Short was particularly mocked but I don’t recall any male MPs speaking up to support her

For me the key to whether these, admittedly sleazy, incidents are abuse or not is not necessarily about the action per se, but about whether there was an imbalance of power in the relationship. As an employee one's boss usually has the power in the relationship, and for an aspiring musician or actor it is the producer/director etc.

As a 15/16 year old working for a leading firm of Manchester solicitors one of my bosses called me into his office in front of his clerks and other colleagues and asked me to comment on a glossy magazine featuring bestiality. I was frozen in fear and shock so I stood there whilst he went through the pages one by one as I mumbled 'I don't know' as he asked my opinion and questioned me about the photographs. Eventually one of the female secretaries, who like the others thought it was hilarious sport, took pity on me and and told me to go. I felt abused and I have no doubt that my boss, who later became a judge, abused his position of power to humiliate me in a sexualised way.

Maryeliza54 I only mentioned the actress/Hotel room scenario to illustrate the wide range of sexual harassment possibilities. Conflating all the scenarios into a fairly broad term as the media has done is extremely unhelpful.
grannyactivist the disgraceful way you were treated felt more like frank bullying to me. I suppose they all thought it was tremendous fun to try to embarrass the junior. Shame on them.
No man should sexually harass or intimidate any woman but equally women should be encouraged to develop confidence sufficient to enable them to deal with anyone foolish enough to try it on!
Easy for me to say I know. Not so easy for shyer young girls. We can look out for them though.

Some people do not seem to understand that this really is about the abuse of power. It is not about mutual sexual attraction but about one person having power over another.

Employees - male or female - may be many layers down in the management structure from the person who makes improper remarks, behaves improperly or sexually assaults them. Making an official complaint, with no corroborative evidence or the backing of others who have been treated similarly, may well lead to the complainant being, in effect, "blacklisted".

In a very different scenario, building workers who raised concerns to their employers about health and safety issues were put on a blacklist and some of them could never again get work in the industry. Blacklisting had been suspected for several years but it wasn't until the actual list was discovered following a raid that these suspicions were finally confirmed, leading to the workers affected receiving substantial compensation.

Sexual harassment or assault is, of course, completely different but when it involves those with immediate or ultimate authority over hiring and firing intimidating and exploiting workers - be they people working on building sites or in the media - the issue is, in my view, about the misuse of power.

Grannyactivist's account of her truly horrible experience in a solicitor's office, at the instigation of someone she says is now a judge, is a good example of how some powerful people use that power to demean and belittle others. I wonder if the secretaries who were present came to think this sort of behaviour was acceptable or whether they went along with it because they too were relatively powerless.

I absolutely agree that its about the abuse of power in many cases. Thinking about those secretaries, I wonder if they were enjoying being part of the 'in crowd', the 'cool' staff and didn't want to lose their place in the general office banter?
Not all females are angels. They can be quite happy to 'use' men to advance careers or for various perks and benefits etc. History is full of these smart women who have done very well for themselves as mistresses of wealthy and powerful men.
Gosh this is such a huge massive subject with so many facets!

In addition to the power imbalance there are also cultural norms that influence the perception of what is acceptable or not. If the culture is one of 'everyone knows it goes on', but nobody says anything or disturbs the status quo then newcomers feel it is them that is out of step. This is why it is so important to challenge unacceptable behaviours, but also why people need to be encouraged to stand up for themselves if they can. My children would never, ever have been abused as I was because they know their worth and know that they would have support.

Oh that's awful g.a, what a horrible situation to have found yourself in. I can't imagine how I would have coped with that at such a young age. How could anyone be so humiliatingly cruel. I can remember the 'office pest' when I worked for an Insurance Company in the early sixties. Luckily we had three older ladies in our main office and looking back its now obvious that they were well aware of this particular man, managing to appear on some pretext when he was attempting to corner one of us girls, usually in the filing office, or the kitchenette where we took turns to make tea/coffee. Could be a bit undermining, but mostly just boring and tedious.

The woman who told me to leave was the wife of an MP and in addition to being his employee she was also a friend of the solicitor. On one occasion she fondled him, inside his trousers, in the presence of myself and others, whilst explaining that he was impotent so she was just experimenting. That year the partnership between the solicitors was dissolved and I have always wondered if it was because his activities came to light with the other partners.

But the basic point is that if men behaved properly, the onus would be removed from women to react as there would be nothing to react to. grannty there was something seriously sexually deviant going on in that office wasn’t there? I wonder what else those individuals got up to

I've had a look at the Tory spreadsheet and it reads like office gossip. People going to the cinema with their personal trainer and having affairs.
It's difficult to understand what they mean by 'inappropriate behaviour' especially when it's followed by 'before divorce'.
I hope this doesn't push genuine harassment out of the spotlight - it seems people don't know the difference between sexual assault and gossip.

Yes I’ve heard that it’s total muddle and not at all helpful - quite the reverse. If I were a conspiracy theorist.......

It certainly isn’t only Tories btw as Labour and Lib Dems MP’s are also in the frame.It seems to have been the culture at Westminster, male MP’s taking advantage of their position.I agree that it shouldn't become a witch hunt, and old stories of a hand on the knee or a stolen kiss seems OTT.
What staff do need though is a HR to take accusations to in the future, and then maybe this kind of thing would be stamped out.
More complain of a misogynistic atmosphere than anything else, you would think that would have disappeared by now.

I am concerned that a touch on a knee is given the same news coverage as the young labour activist who was raped

Just not true annie. The unasked for hand on the knee was in the news before the rape. There was a long slot on the PM programme today about the rape including an interview with the woman concerned. You are looking for bias when none exists - no one is equating the two - they are being very different amounts of coverage but funnily enough the one that was in the news first was reported first. On this thread several of us have made the point that gat too many disparate issues are being rolled together and that there is a huge difference between criminal behaviour and unwanted sexual attention.

Who said it was only a Tories? Looking for bias that doesn’t exist? Complaints about any unwanted sexual attention are to be taken seriously as for one thing how on earth does anyone know they are one-offs? And ‘stolen kisses’ what on earth - sounds like a Barbara Cartland novel. But if a kiss is ‘stolen’ then that’s without consent so not acceptable

If discussing the Michael Fallon incident I am with Julia Hartley Brewer when she says :-

'' I have not been a victim and I don’t wish to take part in what I believe has now become a Westminster witch hunt,”

“I believe it is absurd and wrong to treat workplace banter and flirting – and even misjudged sexual overtures – between consenting adults as being morally equivalent to serious sexual harassment or assault,” she said.

“It demeans genuine victims of real offences. Anyone with any allegations against an MP, or anyone else, should speak up now and provide the evidence to ensure any necessary action is taken.”

Well said that woman!

Who apart from JHB is actually saying there is a moral equivalence? Just because two things are not morally equivalent doesn’t mean that the lesser one is acceptable does it?

And the whole debate isn’t just between hands on knees and rape - there is a whole range of totally unacceptable behaviour that has been going on between these two poles.

Thank heaven for Hartley Brewer, among all the hysteria a sensible woman speaks.

Sadly there are a lot of perfectly decent men who now might be too scared to look twice at a woman. So many office genuine romances might now never be started. Really clarifying the potentially very subtle differences in acceptability is mind boggling given the differences between situations and personalities. What might be absolutely fine for one woman might be totally unacceptable to another thus leading to confusion and distress all round.

I don't feel sorry for any perfectly decent men - chances are the women they know have the opinion that they are perfectly decent. If they are incapable of talking appropriately to a woman, probably best to work on their emotional development rather than their sex life.