Sexual Harassment
Professor Patricia Easteal and Keziah Judd explore media reporting of sexual harassment, and demonstrate the negative use of language focusing on the credibility of the complainant, with sensationalist and melodramatic reports providing lurid details of unwelcome sexual encounters.
The role of the media is very topical given the treatment of Australia’s Prime Minister Julia Gillard, and the national as well as international discussions that this has provoked about misogyny. The media’s presentation of a distorted or incomplete picture of the dynamics of sexual harassment in the workplace means that both men and women are less likely to understand their rights and obligations, or feel comfortable in asserting them in the workplace. A huge barrier women face in making complaints of sexual harassment is the realistic fear that their experience will be minimalised and trivialised, as well as that they will be blamed for inviting it.The unfair allocation of responsibility on the victim is also a strong theme in Professor Patricia Easteal’s and skye saunders’ chapter on sexual harassment in the Australian bush. They found that many people expected women to “set the standard” of behaviour, assuming that women are responsible for men’s behaviour, presumably as they are unable to control it themselves. The striking voices of women interviewed are similar to sexual harassment complaints we receive at the AcT Human Rights Commission: “The boss did tell me that I wasn’t allowed to tell ya, but he pats me on the bum all the time. Which is a bit crap!” Women who do not put up with bad behaviours are perceived as being ‘too precious’, and aggressive rather than assertive. There is also an interesting finding that women in the youngest age bracket are far less likely to blame women for becoming targets of sexual harassment, which shows more recent cultural change possibly being achieved by improved education and community understanding.