"There is no kind of harassment that a man may not inflict on a woman with impunity in civilized societies." - Denis Diderot
It happened a long time ago. I was a young woman living in the big city, trying to find my way in the workplace. It was a fact of life for women in those times. We all talked about it, shared information about who to avoid, how to handle the attackers. It didn't even occur to most of us to go to someone for help. Those who had sought help from management or Personnel (as Human Resources departments were called then) were told to toughen up or just avoid the problem. One woman was told to lock the door to the secretarial pool at 5 o'clock to keep out the man who routinely assaulted women when they were required to work after hours.
It wasn't one incident, it was hundreds. There were the events that took place in my workplace when I had full-time work. They range from being groped and fondled to dealing with a man who exposed his penis and tried to force me to gratify him orally. There was the boss who hit me when I was trying to clean up the coffee I had accidentally spilled on the floor. There was the colleague who groped me in his car while he was driving 120 kilometers an hour on the 401. I had asked him for a ride home from a company sponsored golf tournament that I was ordered to attend. It was more than 100 kilometers away and I didn't have a car. A very nice man on the executive team drove me there but once there he asked me to find another ride home. Fair enough. He didn't live in the city. A man who had been harassing me jumped up to volunteer. I didn't want to go with him so I asked another colleague who lived very near to me. I thought I could trust him. I thought he would protect me.
There was a time when I didn't have a full-time job. To meet my rent, I temped. Every new assignment was a minefield to be navigated. Some of it was easy - the pornography, the disgusting notes that would be left on my desk when I went to lunch. I threw them in the trash without reacting and moved on. Much of it was harder - being grabbed or chased around the desk by men who seemed like the least likely aggressors. Sometimes the other women would warn me who to avoid ahead of time. But sometimes I think they were just grateful there was someone else there to take the hits.
I remember the first time I went to management with a complaint. I worked in Human Resources and one of my responsibilities was to take new employees on an orientation tour. The walls of the mail room which was on our tour, were covered with pictures of naked women. I wanted them taken down. I was accused of being a prude. I wouldn't back down and neither would the manager of the department, a woman who had worked at the company for many years. In his wisdom, the head of H.R. decided on a compromise. On days I led the tour, the breasts and genitals on the offending photos would be covered up. The other times that I needed to visit the mail room, I would just have to suck it up.
A couple of years later, I was assaulted by a member of management. It was a vile attack that ended worse for him than it did for me. I took my complaint to the company president. It takes a special kind of stupid to assault an employee in the H.R. end of the business. An investigation was launched and my attacker was dismissed. The company kept things very quiet which I appreciated. But soon after, the phones began to ring. Women who had left the employ of the company, some of them without giving notice, called to ask if it was true he was no longer there and if so, could they come back to work. Not a one of them had ever come to register a complaint - at least not to me.
I've had a very long and very successful career and it has been many years since I was the woman facing sexual harassment and abuse aimed at me. But I'm still in the Human Resources end of business. I've investigated many complaints of sexual and workplace harassment over the years. Women are still getting groped. Still getting assaulted. Still getting harassed. By now, I'm shock proof.
Pornography isn't posted on workplace walls anymore. Reading the news about Jian Ghomeshi and the CBC, the complaints against Members of Parliament, Scott Andrews and Massimo Pacetti and the comments made on social media by OHL players, Greg Betzold and Jake Marchment, it would seem that little else has changed.
