Sexual harassment in Westminster
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| The Guardian 05/11/17 |
The Palace of Westminster is an unusual workplace. A clue is in the name: it is the apex of a power structure. By definition, few enjoy the privilege of serving there.
MPs are effectively self-employed. Their staff are doubly vulnerable when it comes to protection from harassment and bullying. First, there is no independent authority, short of the police, to receive complaints. (Yet there are many workplace offences that require disciplinary action, while falling short of the threshold for criminal prosecution.) Second, the culture of political recruitment, with its huge premium on ideological and personal loyalty, militates against disclosure. This vastly inflates the power that a political employer or mentor wields over juniors. And when it comes to sexual harassment, power is everything. The abuser owns a kind of currency that he uses either in a forced trade for sexual gratification or, with sex as the proxy, as a way of asserting control.
It is beyond dispute that British politics has a profound problem in this area. Few – if any – women working in politics needed the disclosures of the past week to prove the point. By contrast, the emergence of first-hand testimony has done little to elicit introspection or contrition from the men who have mostly been running the system.
Among the uglier spectacles of recent days has been the defensive argument that a cultural coup is being enacted by feminists, with men as the victims. In this grotesquely warped analysis, the engine of scandal is a misunderstanding: male politicians with outmoded social habits are being tested against vague standards of behaviour and pursued for actions where culpability is mysterious, subjective or politically motivated. That is abject, dishonest nonsense. The differences between flirtation, professional interaction and harassment are vast and easy to comprehend to anyone who respects co-workers as fellow human beings. So too is the distinction between consent and its absence. These lines have never been blurred except in the minds of men who wanted them to be blurred in the past, and regret that the focus is sharpening now.
The structures of politics bring a particular dimension to the problem, but the problems itself is far from particular to politics. Research by the TUC has found endemic sexual harassment in British workplaces. More than half of women surveyed said they had experienced some kind of unwanted, inappropriate behaviour. One in eight reported physical intrusion such as forced attempts to kiss or the touching of breasts, genitals, buttocks. Sexual harassment – unwanted behaviour of a sexual kind that violates a person’s dignity – is, under the 2010 Equality Act, a form of unlawful discrimination. And unwanted touching can constitute sexual assault in law – a detail that certain politicians who belittle a roving hand or lascivious lunge as some minor peccadillo should bear in mind.
No industry or profession is immune. Nor can any political party or faction claim moral high ground. There are men who will abuse their power over staff and activists on the right, left and centre of politics. The impulse to cover up, to protect allies and to deflect criticism with partisan counter-allegation is also common to all parties. There is a great danger now that the focus on holding perpetrators to account and putting effective protections in place is lost amid tribal (male-dominated) political combat and score-settling. There is also a danger that the whole episode is cast as the latest chapter in the exposure of politics as some especially corrupt profession. In fact, parliament’s inadequacies in this instance are sadly representative of a wider social condition. But politics can at least aspire to lead a cultural change. This might not happen quickly but it can begin immediately, with the establishment of a robust body to hear and investigate complaints in confidence, separate from party structures. It can also be accelerated by a shift in attitude and tone from male cohorts at Westminster. Too many of them still see women’s equality and safety as an optional interest, a second-tier category of politics, a distraction – one for the ladies, while the chaps attend to “real” issues.
Much of Westminster reeks of that stultifying culture of male supremacy, like a club that admitted women only with ambivalence, keeping a residue of fond remembrance for the days when they were excluded. Parliament’s uniqueness lies not in that affliction but in possessing the power to lead by example and be a beacon of change for the whole country.
