Turning the tide of abuse

There is an international seachange under way in our attitudes towards sexual harassment, but they still remain conflicted and contradictory. President Macron’s statement that France is drowning in sexual harassment is just the latest acknowledgement that harassment is rife and reform is needed. It certainly is, but the question is how reform should be done.

The other end of the spectrum is 92-year-old Angela Lansbury’s argument that women are sometimes responsible for sexual harassment because they had gone out of their way to make themselves attractive. Lansbury’s argument really does amount to blaming the victim, because being attractive can never justify harassment or violence.

The case of Tony Veitch suggests that abuse of women has now rightly become a major obstacle to a man’s career in this country as well. The sports broadcaster, who broke his partner’s back in 2006 and bought her silence with money, withdrew from a Sky sports show that was, astonishingly, billed as ‘‘hardhitting’’. Sky’s insensitivity towards public opinion soon changed: there was an uproar and Veitch presumably jumped before he was pushed.

Veitch has learned, as so many other celebrities and politicians have recently learned, that sexual harassment can lead to swift punishment and lasting obloquy once it has been revealed. The careers of Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey are now defunct. A parade of powerful politicians have met the same fate.

here is now even some concern that the campaign to stamp out harassment might punish the innocent as well as the guilty. A woman called Jaime Phillips falsely told the Washington Post that the now notorious Alabama senatorial candidate Roy Moore got her pregnant at 15 and arranged for her to have abortion. Her story was a concoction designed to discredit the American ‘‘liberal media’’ and was part of a wider political movement.

But this attempted hoax alone suggests that the cry, ‘‘Believe All Women’’ is misguided if taken literally. The idea that punishing a few innocent men is a small price to pay for reversing the tide of harassment is hopeless. Injustice is injustice, no matter in whose name it is done.

Powerful men have for too long been able to get away with harassment because their victims are too frightened to blow the whistle. And even now whistleblowers can fail. Presidential candidate Donald Trump admitted harassing and assaulting women, but millions still voted for him, including many women. Apparently we are still too ready to forgive the powerful harasser.

In some ways, however, the victims of the less famous harassers are still in the worst position. Blowing the whistle on Harvey Weinstein or Roy Moore can end the harasser’s career, because studio bosses and political leaders know that the stain on the man’s reputation threatens profits and political power. Small-town harassers with far less at stake too often carry on harassing with impunity.