Your leading article (There can be no excuses: harassment culture must end, 6 November) highlights the dreadful statistics as regards sexual harassment in the workplace, with more than 50% of women surveyed experiencing some form of unwanted, inappropriate behaviour. What your article does not touch on is the abysmally low success rate of the women who try to challenge this behaviour through the courts and to get their employers to actually do something about it. The 2010 Equality Act is clearly deficient in preventing the abuse, and in my view is the wrong way to go about tackling the problem.
With something like sexual harassment you have to start right at the top of the organisation, starting with senior managers and employers who at the moment are only paying lip service to this piece of legislation, and indeed actually ignore it. The best way to tackle the problem is to introduce the concept of vicarious liability and make employers liable for the acts and omissions of the offending employee(s), and to address the issue as first and foremost a health and safety matter. Putting the onus on the employer through health and safety is the only way to get them to do anything about this endemic problem rather than ignoring it.
David Lockwood
St Helens, Merseyside
Your editorial once again brings the rampant extent of sexual harassment in the workplace to our attention. We support your call for shifts in attitude and tone and specific institutional reforms at Westminster to protect those who work and visit there. However, Westminster is the tip of the iceberg, and our leaders in parliament, in business and in trade unions can also have a much wider positive impact on this issue for women in developing countries who also face harassment and violence. The International Labour Organisation (ILO) is currently reviewing the case for a new convention on ending violence and harassment against women and men in the world of work. The UK must support this convention to be a comprehensive and effective framework to protect all workers. The government needs to do this directly within the ILO, and trade unions and businesses should be lending their support. Further, the government and all of us should be calling on our colleagues, allies, and business associates to support the development of an effective new framework and then its ratification and adoption by countries around the world. We need to ensure that the women around the world who make the goods that we buy daily will be as well protected as we wish women to be in the UK.
Gerry Boyle
Senior policy adviser on women’s economic empowerment, Care International
Having been sexually assaulted at the ages of 11 and 14, in the first case over 60 years ago, I have been following the debates about sexual harassment with acute, often emotional attention. I was very touched by Anne Perkins’ thoughtful piece drawing on her personal experiences in the 1980s and 90s, one of the best attempts I’ve seen to place things in a wider perspective from a woman’s point of view (Don’t weaponise the past. But do put an end to harassment, 7 November). However, in common with some other women of her generation, she gives the impression that nothing could have been done in those days to combat the all-pervasive norms of sexism, and that no one ever tried. I would just like to point out that, against the grain of the times, there were in fact success stories in dealing with sexual harassment.
In that period I was a producer in BBC TV and chair of the production branch of the union, Bectu, representing producers, directors, researchers and PAs, with a high female membership. In the 1980s we were acutely aware of a particularly notorious head of department and we discreetly took action, a move supported by both men and women on the branch committee. A dossier of over 20 statements was assembled in conditions of confidentiality, demonstrating beyond dispute that the head was guilty of serious sexual harassment, making the lives of all too many women a misery. When we handed the evidence over to senior management we were delighted to hear that on that side of the table there were plans to deal with this serial offender. He was removed from office with immediate effect. The lesson of this – admittedly rare – success story is that the strongest weapon, then and now, is solidarity. By standing shoulder to shoulder as a union branch we were able to strengthen the hand of more progressive elements within management. You could call it “weaponising”.
Giles Oakley
London
Labour MP Darren Jones offers useful advice to his floundering parliamentary colleagues: “It’s very easy to find out if someone’s interested in you without assaulting them: you just ask them; you don’t need to send them creepy text messages or press your groin against them” (Report, 4 November). But he misses the point that this problematic behaviour is not about sex (mutual sexual attraction and the possibility of dating), but the routine abuse of power and male dominance by heterosexual men. As Hadley Freeman neatly sums up (Weekend, 4 November) for those men who don’t yet get it: “This is about men. Men harassing women, men dismissing women who say they’ve been harassed and now men bleating that they don’t know how to behave around women today, because not inserting sexualised banter into every conversation they have with women is apparently too difficult a concept for them to handle.”
Which surely makes these “old-fashioned” heterosexuals, of limited intelligence and social awareness, and hitherto unregulated predatory inclinations, unfit for any job in the public domain which is not a men-only environment.
Val Walsh
Liverpool
Am I missing something? Damian Green, the deputy prime minister and close friend of the PM, is under investigation in connection with alleged inappropriate behaviour towards one or more women, and for alleged pornographic images on his computer, which he denies. The investigation is being led by a senior civil servant at the Cabinet Office, a department for which Green carries ministerial responsibility. How can anyone believe that this does not constitute an unacceptable clash of interests? That he has not suspended himself from his ministerial role constitutes a serious lack of judgment on his part, and the fact that the prime minister did not immediately suspend him illustrates her personal weakness and even worse lack of judgment. Whether or not Green is eventually found to have done nothing wrong, do we really want to be led by people who demonstrate such an appallingly poor grasp of the seriousness of what is happening?
Alan Healey
Bishops Castle, Shropshire
I tentatively propose, from the perspective of my 70s, that there is (at least) a considerable overlap between those men who are overentitled, aggressive towards, and invasive of, women with those who are overentitled, aggressive towards, and invasive of, their fellow men. Nasty “male banter”, aggressive management styles and narcissistically overblown self-belief are just some of the symptoms in some of my fellow men which lead me to this belief.
Henry Fryer
Bishop’s Waltham, Hampshire
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