Drop a stone in a deep enough pond, and you never know how far the ripples will spread. It is more than a fortnight now since Harvey Weinstein was first accused of sexually harassing actresses in an article for the New York Times, and still the repercussions show no sign of ending.
The film mogul now faces police investigations in two countries, including allegations of rape, and the break-up of his business empire after dozens of actresses and assistants came forward to say he had demanded naked massages, had stripped naked or had lunged at them. But the ripples did not stop with Angelina Jolie, Gywneth Paltrow or Lupita Nyong’o.
They spread rapidly through the film and television industry, into modelling and music, politics and sport – with the American gymnast McKayla Maroney accusing a former team doctor of repeatedly molesting her from the age of 13.
A spreadsheet of “shitty media men” to avoid began circulating privately among American women journalists, gathering names as it went. The European commissioner for gender equality, Věra Jourová, told a breakfast meeting in Brussels that she had been a victim of sexual violence, adding: “Don’t keep it with yourself. Don’t be afraid to say it.”
And women were no longer afraid. Urged by the American actress Alyssa Milano to share their stories via the #MeToo Twitter hashtag, thousands of women responded; at its peak, the hashtag was tweeted half a million times in 24 hours.
Before long, in Whatsapp groups and private Twitter messages and real-life conversations, women started to swap names. “X did that to me, too. Y is a creep. Remember when Z grabbed someone’s breasts at a party and nobody did anything.” The simple act of comparing notes turned out to be an unexpectedly powerful catalyst.
“Abusers create an environment where you feel incredibly isolated, and that if you tell anyone there will be consequences; or your shame about what’s happened means that you keep it to yourself,” says Sarah Champion, the former shadow minister for equalities and a longstanding campaigner against sexual abuse. “Realising you’re not alone is a very powerful thing.”
And then the dam burst. On Wednesday the digital media company Vice announced it would no longer commission the leftwing activist and journalist Sam Kriss after an anonymous Facebook post from a woman claiming he had pressured her to drink vodka on a date (when she asked for a soft drink) and forcibly kissed her when asked not to. She was, she said, nervous of offending him because of his influence in the pro-Corbyn Momentum movement. (Kriss publicly apologised for “absolutely unacceptable behaviour”, while adding that the woman had messaged him amicably afterwards). That she was describing an incident outside work did not stop his employer acting, nor Labour later suspending his party membership.
The next day GQ magazine sacked its political correspondent, Rupert Myers, within hours of a female writer tweeting allegations about his conduct over drinks in a pub.
And still the ripples didn’t stop. The singer Tom Jones revealed he had been propositioned as a young star, noting that “what’s tried on women is tried on men as well”. (While research suggests nine out of 10 perpetrators are male, and most victims female, men can also be harassed by both men and women.) Hours later, the Labour backbencher John Mann declared he would report a fellow Labour MP “who behaved appalling [sic] to a young woman” to his party leader and chief whip.
On Friday, Canadian producer Gilbert Rozon resigned from several roles – including as a judge on France’s Got Talent – after a newspaper published allegations of sexual abuse and harassment from nine women spanning decades. Shortly afterwards the editorial director of the US media group Vox Media, Lockhart Steele, was fired following an anonymous social media post alleging sexual harassment. And in Britain a website called LabourToo was launched, allowing victims to share such stories from within the Labour party anonymously and in confidence. Westminster is buzzing with long-buried rumours, stories that may have previously been investigated but never reached the standard of proof for publication. The ripples are still spreading.
For many women this has been a cathartic, almost exhilarating time – an overdue moment of reckoning for abusive men who once considered themselves virtually above the law. There is a sense of citadels crumbling. But it has been an uncomfortable fortnight for many men, forced either to reconsider their own behaviour or confront what was hiding in plain sight all along.
Half of women in a major survey published by the TUC and campaign group Everyday Sexism last year said they had been sexually harassed at work, rising to almost two-thirds of women under 24 (although most of them did not make formal complaints). More shockingly, research from Girlguiding UK found nearly two-thirds of girls aged over 13 had been sexually harassed at school, with behaviour ranging from taunts and jokes to groping.
Even #metoo isn’t entirely new; the hashtag was first popularised years ago by the black American activist Tarana Burke as a way of encouraging black women who had experienced sexual violence to share stories. (It is revealing on many levels that it only went viral once it was attached to famous Hollywood actresses.)
In short, most men will know someone to whom this has happened – which is why, as the TUC report’s author Scarlet Harris puts it, “the most shocking thing for a lot of women is that anyone could be surprised” by what’s now emerging.
But the speed with which the floodgates have opened brings with it dilemmas, particularly for employers confronted with anonymous online allegations against their staff. Could malicious grievances be aired all too easily alongside justifiable ones? Do men publicly accused of sexual harassment still have the privilege of being considered innocent until proven guilty? Even the #metoo hashtag has been criticised for blurring the line between upsetting comments and full-blown sexual violence, although for many women the whole point is they’re all part of one big spectrum of disrespect, aggression and entitlement.
Uneasy questions remain, meanwhile, about whether clumsy but essentially harmless flirtation can ever genuinely be confused with something sinister.
The law has been relatively clear since 2005, when sexual harassment was first explicitly defined in legislation; it’s behaviour which “violates dignity” or creates an ‘“intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment”. That covers anything from jokes or inappropriate comments – comprising about half of the incidents reported by women in the TUC survey – through to forcible kissing or unwanted sexual touching, which was more rare.
Discriminating against someone at work after they spurn your sexual advances, however politely made, is also against the law. In other words, it’s not an offence to ask a colleague out; but don’t ask them out while making clear their career is doomed if they refuse, or unfairly criticise their work or refuse them a pay rise when they decline. The devil, however, is in the definition of terms like “intimidating” or “offensive”.
And there’s curiously little official data on just how widespread it is. Sexual harassment isn’t recorded in crime statistics or the British Crime Survey, and the government doesn’t keep records that would show if it’s rising or falling. “I don’t think that up until this point enough men have been prepared to admit that this is going on, so this is not something that’s measured,” says Maria Miller, chair of the Commons select committee on equalities, which recently investigated sexual harassment in schools.
“What’s become really apparent to me looking at schools is that it is the start of a conveyor belt, where unacceptable behaviour is ingrained and unchallenged. Girls are having to endure things that are unacceptable, but boys, too, are not being taught that respect is part of a healthy relationship.” And if such behaviour isn’t challenged young, “it’s seen as normalised”.
Meanwhile, adult women often keep quiet about harassment either through shame, or fear that complaining will damage their careers.
“There are valid reasons for not reporting, whether you’re Angelina Jolie or working in Tesco’s,” says Harris. “If you’re feeling degraded and humiliated by something in a professional setting, the fact that it happened is objectifying – you almost don’t want people to think of you in that way. Some of the response to Harvey Weinstein, too, has been shocking – not believing women, questioning, ‘Oh what did you think would happen if you went to the hotel room?”’
Her research also suggests black women face extra challenges, including treatment where “you’d be hard pressed to work out if it was racist or sexist or both”. Interestingly, racial harassment barely got a mention amid the global outpouring of stories about sexual harassment, even though this week also saw a barrister-led inquiry conclude that the former England women’s football coach Mark Sampson had made racially discriminatory comments to two players. (Drew Spence, who is mixed race, was asked how many times she’d been arrested; Eni Aluko was told to make sure her Nigerian family didn’t bring the Ebola virus to Wembley).
The two issues are, shadow equalities secretary Dawn Butler argues, “two sides of a similar coin” and yet one seems to command more attention than the other: “I remember when I first complained about racial harassment I was told ‘well, at least he didn’t touch your tits’. This perplexed me. It was like pitting one form of discrimination against another, with one carrying more weight and seriousness – this is part of the disease which allows this type of discrimination to flourish.”
And, crucially, it’s the women with least job security to start with – freelancers reliant for their next gig on not seeming “difficult”, young women in casual or zero hours jobs with minimal employment rights – who may be most vulnerable. “Think about a young woman doing bar work, or working in hotels; all those kind of jobs where you can be replaced overnight if you don’t play along, and the customer’s always right,” says Harris. “The law is only as good as your ability to use it.”
Her TUC report recommended tightening up on zero hours contracts, reinstating the scrapped duty on employers to protect staff from harassment by customers or clients as well as colleagues, and reviving the power for employment tribunals to make companywide recommendations where an individual sex discrimination case reveals bigger issues. But it’s employers, she argues, who can really change the culture, and that’s where things get complicated.
Some men clearly do fear what the director Woody Allen – whose son Ronan Farrow broke some of the allegations against Weinstein – calls a “witch-hunt”. Others worry about being caught out by changing norms they don’t understand, fearing that one “ill-judged attempt at humour” – as a barrister said of Sampson – might get them fired, or as the Times columnist Giles Coren wailed, “one misfired flirt and I could be out of a job, publicly shunned, end up in prison”. To which many women might respond: only if you are extraordinarily bad at flirting.
Not every misunderstanding is a sackable offence, and HR departments are advised to deal with complaints on a sliding scale. “If it’s something minor that made the person feel uncomfortable, there’s a conversation that says ‘did you realise that this was making someone feel uncomfortable; can you stop, or think about it?’” says Brad Taylor of the Chartered Institute for Personnel Development. “That goes all the way through to ‘that was unacceptable and you know it was, when you need to take steps to ensure that doesn’t happen to anyone else.”
There will always be cases, he admits, where men genuinely do not realise that they are causing offence, but good managers can differentiate between that and abuse: “There will be instances where people just need things pointed out to them, and when you help them to see the impact of their behaviour, that’s a good thing. But for situations where people feel ‘my position and power entitles me to overstep the line in a way others can’t’, that has to be dealt with as quickly as possible.”
As for dubious conduct outside the workplace, employees have a right to a private life, but “if you’re doing things that bring your employer into disrepute, then the employer is entitled to respond”.
Yet the speed with which allegations have snowballed since Weinstein was first exposed clearly poses challenges for employers. History is littered with sex scandals, but this one seems uniquely viral, thanks perhaps to the unprecedented opportunities social media now provide for victims to publish their stories anonymously and instantly to millions.
Swapping names via WhatsApp, meanwhile, is an infinitely faster, bigger version of the whispered conversations women have always had in the office loos. All this comes instinctively to millennials used to sharing their lives online, creating the comforting feeling of what Scarlet Harris calls a “collective response” to what was once an individual’s lonely problem.
But unlike face-to-face conversations, electronic ones leave a record that can be leaked. Even more secure databases like LabourToo, understood to have been set up by a group of party members with longstanding concerns, rely on the honesty and goodwill of contributors not to post maliciously.
Champion, who has publicly supported LabourToo, insists it’s not about gathering evidence on individuals but mapping out the problem. Collating information in confidence about when, where and how harassment happens will, she argues, help the party tackle it better: “This isn’t a witch hunt. It’s not looking to name and shame people. It’s looking to see where sexual harassment happens and, therefore, as a party the measures we can put in place to stop it.” However, she says, any evidence of criminal behaviour that could endanger others will be referred to police.
Champion admits there is a risk some could exploit the site but adds: “This isn’t people making formal allegations, this is sharing their personal experience.
“It’s done deliberately on a trust basis. One of the things I have found with all the victims and survivors I’ve been working with is that while there may be one or two that do that, it’s very rare for people to take the time out to make an anonymous allegation if there’s not some truth to it.”
The hope is that sheer weight of evidence may succeed where individual scandals have failed in changing political culture for good.
What few understand about sexual harassment, says Bridget Harris, is how “deeply crushing” it is. “You’re ambitious, you work hard, you’re networking, sitting opposite someone more important than you …and then they turn around and proposition you,” she says. “You’re worth nothing in that person’s eyes. They’re just interested in the prospect that you’ll sleep with them, and that strips away any sense of self-worth you have.”
In 2014, she was one of four women who accused Liberal Democrat peer Lord Rennard of touching them inappropriately. She was a special adviser to party leader Nick Clegg, then deputy prime minister, and having a coffee with Rennard at party conference when, she alleged, he repeatedly touched her legs and asked her to his hotel room. Similar complaints, it emerged, had been washing around the party for years. Surely, women at Westminster told each other, this was a watershed moment.
An inquiry concluded the women’s testimony was “broadly credible” but found that there was not sufficient evidence to bring any disciplinary charges. Rennard apologised for “anything which made them uncomfortable” but insisted any intrusion was inadvertent and denied sexually inappropriate behaviour. He still takes the party whip in the Lords, his case illustrating both the difficulty of proving or disproving something that by its nature rarely happens in front of witnesses and the frustration that can easily result. Party whips are arguably less tolerant of predatory behaviour than they were (when the Spectator journalist Isabel Hardman complained of being addressed as “the totty” by a Tory MP, she got a swift apology and he a lecture on appropriate behaviour). But asked if she is confident that a young researcher would be safe from harassment in parliament today, Miller pauses before answering: “No. Researchers are often very young, vulnerable, just starting out on their careers and I think the House of Commons and the way it’s run doesn’t give me full confidence.” It’s not just women, she adds, but gay men who are vulnerable; it’s difficult for young male aides who are not “out” at work to report pestering from older men.
But if the Rennard affair wasn’t quite the tipping point some imagined, there is one silver lining to the story. Since leaving politics Harris built and ran a successful software company with her husband; as an employer, she prides herself on fostering a culture of respect for women and sees that as the ultimate way forward.
One male employee told her recently, that “in his 20s he’d been in a company where in a meeting he’d see a woman being belittled, or some kind of aggression, and he knew it was wrong but didn’t know what to do. He just basically froze. He said ‘now I never would do that’. And that’s the key, working out how you get good men and women to speak up.” Even in tech, once a byword for testosterone-fuelled behaviour, she believes recent scandals have prompted a realisation that sexism is bad for business.
Four years on, Harris doesn’t regret speaking up, and says she would have done it earlier had she realised she wasn’t alone. “Older women, who did put up with [something similar], came up to me saying ‘it was really good to hear you talk, that happened to me in the 1950s and I could never talk about it’. People who are further ahead in their careers, we have to say something because our 20-year-old sisters starting out need to hear from us that it’s not acceptable.”
Those ripples may still have quite a way to go.
#MeToo: other industries speak out
Fashion
Model and activist Cameron Russell: “I’ve been called a feminist for reporting unwanted groping, spanking, pinching, pressure for dates, phone calls and texts of a sexual nature, lack of appropriate changing areas, etc.” Russell has encouraged others to share their stories on Instagram using the hashtag #MyJobShouldNotIncludeAbuse.
Sport
McKayla Maroney, an Olympic gold medalist, says she was abused by her US gymnastics doctor from the age of 13. “I had flown all day and night with the team to get to Tokyo,” she says. “He’d given me a sleeping pill for the flight, and the next thing I know, I was all alone with him in his hotel room getting a ‘treatment.’ I thought I was going to die that night.”
Media
Rajini Vaidyanathan, a BBC correspondent based in Washington DC: “I was horrified but at first I thought I needed to be polite, as there was a chance we’d work together again. But his messages continued and became more creepy. He said he’d fantasised about sex with powerful women. I told him to talk to someone else, not me, and to get help. I didn’t tell anyone at first. I felt disgusted but kept it to myself.”
Politics
Maria Miller, the Conservative MP and former culture secretary, said she had experienced sexual harassment: “Of course, we all have ... it’s something that, particularly in very male-dominated industries, women are still experiencing. We should not talk about it in the past tense.”
