CONTENT WARNING: This article discusses sexual harassment.
Harrowing new data shows that one in seven people admit to having used tech — most commonly emails and phones — to sexually harass colleagues, with many admitting they did so not out of sexual desire, but to humiliate and frighten the victim.
Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety (ANROWS) surveyed more than 3,000 people across the country, and found that men were more than three times more likely than women to harass their colleagues using text messages, emails and social media.
Reports of people engaging in workplace online sexual harassment were somewhat lower in workplaces with roughly equal numbers of men and women (39%) and drastically lower in female-dominated workplaces (16%). Unsurprisingly, women and young people were most at risk of being targeted.
People who held sexist and gender-discriminatory attitudes were 15 times more likely to admit to engaging in tech-facilitated harassment of colleagues, and more than half of those who admitted to sexually harassing their colleagues online said they did it because they “thought the person was okay with it”.
Of the perpetrators that admitted to harassing their colleagues, a quarter said they didn’t do so to start a sexual relationship, but to “humiliate”, “frighten” or “annoy” the victim-survivor, with some even saying they did so to “express anger”.
Associate Professor of Criminology at Monash University and lead researcher Asher Flynn found that harassment wasn’t just an issue with boundaries, but often a “deliberate” attempt at degrading and upsetting a person.
“You’re not just accidentally stepping over the line. You’re deliberately doing this to make people uncomfortable,” she said, per ABC News.
The use of technology in harassment also makes perpetrators feels omnipresent to victims.
“If you’re being sexually harassed through technologies, you could be sitting at home on the couch watching the television and you could get an email or a message from someone,” Dr Flynn said.
“And it’s the feeling that they’re always present that really impacts significantly on victims.”
Dr Flynn noted that while the stat of one in seven people is a “significant number”, the fact that around one in three people experience a type of sexual harassment suggests that the truly number of perpetrators is likely higher. In the music industry alone, a review found 81 per cent of women experienced harassment.
CEO of ANROWS Tessa Boyd-Caine has called on governments and workplaces to come together and create policies that protect employees from online-facilitated sexual harassment.
This could look like having clear codes of conduct, or policies about what constitutes appropriate and inappropriate behaviour, as well as action from workplaces if someone is found to have violated these policies.
Image: iStock.
Help is available.
- If you require immediate assistance, please call 000.
- If you’d like to speak to someone about sexual violence, please call the 1800 Respect hotline on 1800 737 732 or chat online.
- Under 25? You can reach Kids Helpline at 1800 55 1800 or chat online.
