One of our esteemed Overland bloggers, Trish Bolton, has an opinion piece about sexual harassment in the workplace in today’s Age, ‘Women are no longer prepared to put up and shut up’:
HE CORNERED me at the back of the shop, stood over me and ripped open my vest, swearing when he saw I was wearing a bra. This was the 1970s, I was 18 and he was my boss.
A year or two later in another workplace, a senior sergeant flung a notebook in my face after I refused an invitation to after-work drinks. On yet another occasion, I accepted a lift home from a respected male colleague and sat mortified beside him as he relayed to me in graphic detail his wife’s sexual failings.
I might have thought I was just plain unlucky, had female friends and colleagues not regularly shared similar stories. More amazing is that not once did any one of us consider reporting the perpetrator.
More than 30 years on, I still hear stories from women who think they have no choice but to tolerate men touching them up or making crude asides in the workplace: men of every age and from every walk of life, men who go home at night to wives and children and men who are pillars of the community.
Read the entire piece over at the Age.
