Bring balance to harassment debate
The road to power is paved with hypocrisy and casualties, says Frank Underwood in House of Cards. The world of media and entertainment is often dominated by great shows like Dallas, Friends and Game of Thrones that leave an indelible mark in popular culture.
In recent times Netflix has emerged as a producer of great shows, including the political drama, House of Cards.
Its protagonist, Underwood, played by Kevin Spacey, is a ruthless power-monger who lets neither principles nor practicalities stand in his way.
In his pursuit of power, Underwood betrays friends and foes with equal abandon.
His elevation to power comes at the cost of far too many silent casualties — political allies discarded and loyalties traded for power. Underwood’s character serves as an example of a greater social malaise — the tendency of people in power to harass, belittle and undermine those who are unable to fight back.
Such tendencies — prevalent in political and corporate corridors — create toxic working environments where those without power find themselves at the mercy of predators to whom they report. The corporate world in particular — owing to its ability to pay its way through any hint of a lawsuit, is a breeding ground for sexual predators who use their positions of influence to insulate themselves from accountability.
Women who are victimised within such spaces have the burden of deciding whether to speak out, and stand to lose their jobs or simply soldier on, hoping it will all go away.
In addition, the looming sense of trauma associated with victim-shaming has become not only a corporate ill but a broader social crisis.
For many women who find themselves in such dilemmas, the option between a public, potentially brutal process that would materialise if they come out often has to be balanced against the possibility of a potential settlement that provides financial recourse for the victim.
The problem with financial settlements is that they come attached with disclaimers never to speak out, which simply means that the institutional environment that creates space for sexual predators to thrive remains unchallenged.
While in practice companies have procedures and protocols for dealing with labour matters — including sexual harassment — the actual implementation of such rules against the most powerful leaders within those organisations remains far more difficult than it should be.
Often companies prioritise the protection of the brand and are willing to pay whatever price it takes to keep matters away from public scrutiny.
The Fox News Channel, for example, repeatedly settled harassment lawsuits brought against its prominent stars, Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly, and didn’t seem persuaded to find a way to dismantle the apparent culture of harassment within the workplace. In simple terms, women in corporate spaces find themselves at the mercy of perpetrators — powerful men — and insulators, that is, men (and women) who should have done more to protect them but opted to protect a brand instead.
The recent rise of the #MeToo movement, which has brought into the public eye the institutionalised culture of harassment at prominent organisations, has finally forced us to confront the scale of the problem. Men who have been outed — Harvey Weinstein, Spacey and others — are emerging as the creeps who give a bad name to all men. Such cases naturally call for corporates and society to come up with new ways of confronting the problem. But harassment takes multiple forms — from groping to a lingering hug and an awkward stare. They all fall within the ambit of harassment when such advances are unwarranted.
In response to the #MeToo movement and the Spacey saga in particular, Netflix has, according to reports, undertaken to limit eye-to-eye interaction between staff members to no more than five seconds.
While such a practice presumably has the intention of eliminating even the possibility of awkward stares gravitating towards harassment, it unfortunately comes across as arbitrary and impractical to implement and monitor.
Also, thanks to the actions of creeps, the very nature of engagement between employees now gets reduced to sessions of anxiety where people try to observe and avoid the grey line between casual engagement and harassment.
What corporates need to find is the right balance between the need to protect staff from harassment and the need to maintain an atmosphere of employee interaction that is cordial and collegial without crossing the line towards something less palatable.
All too often, financial settlements come with gagging provisions