Sexual harassment in the ACT is now legally everybody’s problem

Legislative reform in the ACT will impose a positive duty on organisations, businesses and even individuals with management responsibilities to take reasonable and proportionate steps to eliminate sexual harassment. 

The legislation includes chancellors and vice-chancellors at universities, sole traders and owners of small private businesses, educational authorities, sporting clubs and churches as examples of those who newly bear this responsibility, giving it broad scope.

Reasonable and proportionate steps could include improved transparency about policies and responses to sexual harassment and high-quality training that goes beyond pls don’t sexually harass 🙂

The significance of this legislation is that it represents a shift in the burden of responsibility, completely reframing how we understand the root cause of sexual harassment and to whom we attribute it.

See, in the best traditions of Australia’s attitude to sexual violence, our institutions and systems predominantly retain an approach that is less do no harm and more give no fucks — at least until a harm occurs. Once something happens, we might respond at an individual level — and even then, there’s only so many fucks to give, it seems.

As a society, we have historically engaged in a sort of cognitive dissonance. On one hand, we think of sexual violence and harassment as perpetrated by other individuals — creeps and sleazes who are separate from us. But on the other hand, when confronted with the reality that perpetrators are among us, we often find ways to excuse the behaviour: this one’s a good bloke; he was drunk; it was a clumsy attempt at a compliment; is it worth ruining his career?

These responses are two sides of the same coin we use to buy our own absolution. Neither response requires us — our communities, our institutions, our places and spaces — to look at ourselves. We make sexual violence and harassment an individual, event-based issue, refusing to recognise that it is a product of an ecosystem to which we all contribute.

The beliefs, values, expectations and choices that drive individual events of sexual violence and harassment do not come from nowhere. 

I have been sexually harassed on enough occasions — years apart, in different industries and at different stages of my career — to know that it wasn’t just poor luck that I encountered bad apple after bad apple. Those men exist in a world where that behaviour is permitted, excused, even facilitated. They weren’t bad apples. The barrel was riddled with rot. 

On one occasion, I was sexually harassed at a work-related event and later learnt the man had “a reputation” for it. The fact that the community permitted him to continue to attend those events despite that reputation, to continue to behave the way he did, is the kind of inertia this legislation is aiming to address. 

But it’s not just that, after the first time he behaved that way at such an event, there should have been an intervention. He should never have felt able to behave that way in the first place.

The ultimate sanction applied to him should never have come as a surprise. He should have felt far too embarrassed at the thought of ever behaving that way. He should have known the community would do more than shoot him a collective side-eye. He should have felt the full weight of community expectation that he not behave that way, feared the collective disapproval that would surely follow. Even better than fearing public shame, he should have been intrinsically motivated not to do what he did because he would felt neither the desire nor the right. 

We will only get to that place if, as a community, we recognise our collective role in cultivating an ecosystem that allows sexual violence and harassment to flourish. That is what this legislation attempts to address, to make changes to the ecosystem itself — the environments, the institutions, the cultures — rather than to simply wait for yet another apple to behave badly.