Fighting sex and power

Under-reporting, victimising and a gagged justice system has led to Kiwis feeling entrapped by workplace sexual harassment and violence. Jessica Long reports.

Asenior lawyer in his 60s asks a young, female colleague to work with him on a file at the office over the weekend. A text chimes through on the 22-year-old woman’s phone at the last minute. The meeting would take place at his house, it said.

Feeling she can’t say no to a superior, she heads for his house. There she learns his wife is away for the weekend and he’s booked a table for two at his favourite cafe.

It took five hours, with just 45 minutes of work-time before she felt she could free herself.

‘‘The whole event was essentially a date,’’ she pens in an anonymous article published in the New Zealand Law Society’s Law Talk magazine in December 2017.

A law student who has ‘‘also experienced sexual harassment in legal workplaces’’ while clerking in both public and private firms, writes a letter of support. It highlights the ‘‘power imbalances that seniors have’’.

‘‘We think it is too small to be worth worrying about or too small to let it impact our career. We feel that we need to sweep it under the carpet or that grinning and bearing it is part of what we need to do to ‘make it’ as a young female.’’

There are far worse stories of sexual harassment and sexual assault, the letter says. ‘‘That breaks my heart.’’

All too often women feel they can’t endure the process and subsequent victim-blaming that follows speaking out.

The world is talking about the need for a massive shift in thinking and behaviour within workplaces. It’s been spurred by the #metoo campaign, which came out of Hollywood breaking its silence about Harvey Weinstein’s years of alleged abuse of female actors.

But no-one says it’s going to be easy. Education. Political clout. Judicial upheaval. Workplace culture. Individual responsibility. All are put forward as ways to bring about such a social revolution.

In New Zealand, law firm Russell McVeagh has admitted it let down staff over claims of sexual misconduct and inappropriate workplace behaviour, marking the way for #metoonz.

Interns in a clerk programme in Wellington during the 2015-16 summer reported inappropriate sexual behaviour. Rupturing the silence has led to stories of ‘‘boys’ clubs’’, lewd comments, sex on boardroom tables, drunkenness and drug-use across the legal industry.

But the law isn’t the only area that needs to shine a light on sexual harassment issues. Such abuse has emerged from within the New Zealand Defence Force, police, the health sector and other industries, such as accounting.

For barrister and journalist Catriona MacLennan, it’s not complicated.

‘‘Men could stop it today if they chose to do so. Calling the issue complicated is a way of upholding the status quo and preventing action.

‘‘Assuming that, because sexual harassment victims are overwhelmingly female, it is a ‘women’s issue’ and up to women to fix it is also a way of avoiding action.’’

Academics suspect sexual harassment and violence is as prevalent in New Zealand as family violence, in which we rank highly among Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries.

But there’s little information or reporting for the Government to work from, they say.

Even our rights watchdog has not escaped thus issue. The Human Rights Commission is under review over its response to a young American intern being groped by the organisation’s chief financial officer, Kyle Stutter, at a work party.

The woman says the complaints process felt like attempts to gag her and became about ‘‘protecting the organisation’’. It did not acknowledge the seriousness of the incident, she says.

The commission, which is tasked with investigating unlawful discrimination and racial or sexual harassment, has reported ‘‘steady’’ numbers of sexual harassment complaints in employment and pre-employment over three years.

It reported that it received 30 complaints of sexual harassment for the six months from July 2017. In all of 2016, there were 62; in 2015, 64, and 59 were received in 2014.

Research indicates around nine in 10 sexual offences are not reported to police. In addition, some offences reported as sexual violation may not be recorded as such.

‘‘For too long, we [men and women] have accepted it [sexual harassment] in a veil of silence,’’ says National Council of Women chief executive and Gender Equal New Zealand spokeswoman Gill Greer.

Survivor

Louise Nicholas rocked the police when she accused former police officers Bob Schollum and Brad Shipton, and then assistant police commissioner Clint Rickards of raping her in the 1980s.

The officers were acquitted but an inquiry led by Dame Margaret Bazley formed the basis for a 2007 report describing a culture in which sexual assault claims were often mishandled.

Today, Nicholas supports those who speak out about sexual abuse and harassment, saying the responsibility for change must come from within every New Zealand organisation.

‘‘Sexual violence has been a taboo subject since forever. But what we’re finding now is people are no longer tolerating that. These high-profile cases coming out have helped people who have been bullied or harassed think, ‘If they can do that then so can I’.’’

We need to do ‘‘a hell of a lot more work’’, Nicholas adds. ‘‘Once this type of behaviour is embedded in an organisation, it becomes normalised.

Long-serving people just put up with the behaviour for fear of losing their job, and because they want a promotion.

How do we create change? ‘‘It’s just education, really.’’

Hayley Young says she was raped and endured years of sexual objectification while in the New Zealand Navy.

She has fought for a change in the navy’s culture and brought an international legal case against both the New Zealand and British governments, arguing they failed to provide her a safe place to work.

‘‘It started off with bits of banter and lewd sexual jokes. Then it changed to people coming up to me and asking when we would be having sex.

‘‘After six months, I felt like an object. I had really lost sight of what was acceptable and what was harassment,’’ she told Stuff in 2017.

Some officers bet buckets of KFC on which female officers could be sexually ‘‘conquered’’.

‘‘When the rape happened, I said ‘no’ to him 30 times, I was crying,’’ Young said last year.

Academic

Education is the key to prevention and sexual harassment is everyone’s problem, says Massey University social work senior lecturer Dr Shirley Julich.

‘‘The earlier you talk about the concept, the better the issue is dealt with.

But when young employees join a firm they can come up against an embedded culture and ‘‘they’re swayed to the dark side, if you will’’.

Nothing has changed, Julich says, since she worked on a 2015 study, The sustainable delivery of sexual violence prevention education in schools, which found 57 per cent of the 18,806 people surveyed had not told anyone about sexual abuse.

The report found the community had a ‘‘general tolerance of sexual assault’’ and factors such as lack of support from police or judicial systems and social influences based on gender, race and sexual orientation were some reasons for people not speaking out.

Julich says social change is upon us but most don’t understand what sexual objectification is, the difference between bullying and sexual harassment, and how to speak up and say, ‘‘no’’.

‘‘People who have a position of power – usually men but not always – tend to be in a situation where they have authority over other people’s lives. They can lose sight of the fact that when someone is struggling in their career, trying to climb the ladder they hold these people, their lives and their careers in their hands.’’

Julich says we need to be aware too, that men and those within the LGBIT communities are also subjected to sexual harassment and violence.

Corporates

Ernst & Young’s South Australian managing partner, Don Manifold, was suspended on full pay in January for the alleged sexual harassment of a junior female staff member.

The incident sparked a company-wide warning, including to its New Zealand branches, about workplace behaviour.

EY’s New Zealand managing partner, Simon O’Connor, says the message was reinforced that the company is committed to a safe and harassment-free workplace.

Anyone with concerns should feel safe to raise the issue. ‘‘We will investigate things thoroughly and have a zero tolerance policy in place.’’

For NZ Law Society president Kathryn Beck, it is gender equality and gender equity that will bring about social change and a decrease in sexual harassment.

‘‘The issue of sexual harassment within the New Zealand workplace is an issue that we are all highly conscious of. I think we can all agree that there’s a significant level of under-reporting.’’

Politics

Employees have legal protection from sexual and racial harassment in the workplace under the Employment Relations Act 2000 and the Human Rights Act 1993.

Green MP Jan Logie says the legislation doesn’t appear to be ‘‘working in practice’’ and, as the parliamentary under-secretary to the minister of justice (domestic and sexual violence), she will be ‘‘looking into’’ how to stamp out a tolerance of sexual harassment and violence in workplaces.

How bad is the issue? Sufficient data doesn’t exist. ‘‘We weren’t collecting that sort of information so it’s been really hard to piece together the bits of information that might tell us how big a problem this is. It seems a no-brainer that we should be tracking that.’’

Sexual violence agency manager Maggy Tai Rakena says legislative change is needed to lift the conviction rates for sexual crimes. That could empower more people to speak out.

‘‘There’s a huge attrition rate even on what is reported,’ says Tai Rakena, who runs Christchurch’s Start social service. ‘‘To get all the way to a conviction, experience tells us that’s not a strong possibility. We need substantial legislative change.’’

Greer, of the National Council of Women, says sexual harassment and violence has to stop. ‘‘Enough is enough. We can do this. We can make these changes.’’

‘‘Assuming that, because sexual harassment victims are overwhelmingly female, it is a ‘women’s issue’ and up to women to fix it is also a way of avoiding action.’’ Barrister and journalist Catriona MacLennan