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Preventing
Sexual Harassment
Benefits All
Jeff Harlig
(appeared in Rights
Stuff, newsletter of the Bloomington Human Rights
Commission, September 1999, p. 2)
Anti-sexual
harassment training for employees tends to be straightforward:
“Don’t do it, and if it happens, complain about it and/or
report it.” The problem is that adults have strong, ingrained
tendencies to deny their own faults and to stay silent about the
faults of others.
One approach
that a company can use to overcome this reluctance is to
supplement the employee’s emotional involvement in potential
sexual harassment with a clear picture of the whole company's
stake in the issue. The starting point is a simple idea: “This
company cares.” It cares about its employees, and — no
surprise — it cares about its own image and financial
well-being, and that applies in the area of sexual harassment,
too.
Recent court
decisions make clear that harassment is not only the victim's
and the harasser’s affair. It literally is the company’s
affair as well, since there is an increasing tendency to assume
that executives knew about harassment on their premises even
when they actually didn’t. Pointing this out in advance can
help victims overcome their natural reluctance to tell on
someone else, and can explain a zero-tolerance policy for
harassers.
It's not
realistic to pretend that employee-to-employee relations are
“nobody else's business.” If an employee finally decides to
lodge a harassment complaint or file a lawsuit, it may make it
to the courts and will make it to the media. A major
financial and public relations blow to a company affects
everyone in the company, and that is why it is in the best
interest of all workers to prevent sexual harassment. |
