Why victims remain silent and then find their voice
TIME Magazine’s announcement comes amid a storm of reckoning with sexual harassment and abuse charges in power centres worldwide. The courageous victims who, over the past few months, surfaced and made public their experiences of sexual harassment have sparked a social movement – typified in the hashtag #MeToo.
One of the features of the numerous sexual harassment claims that have been made public is the number of victims that have come forward after the first allegations have surfaced. Women, many of whom have suffered in silence for a considerable period of time, all of a sudden have found their voice.
As an outsider not involved in these incidents, this pattern of behaviour might be difficult to comprehend. Surely victims would speak up and take their concerns to the appropriate authorities? Unfortunately, we are very poor at judging how we would behave when we are placed in difficult, stressful situations, as previous research has found.
How we imagine we would respond in hypothetical situations as an outsider differs significantly to how we would respond in reality – we are very poor at appreciating how the situation can influence our conduct.
In 2001, Julie Woodzicka and Marianne LaFrance asked 197 women how they would respond in a job interview if a man aged in his thirties asked them the following questions: “Do you have a boyfriend?”, “Do people find you desirable?” and “Do you think women should be required to wear bras at work?” Over two-thirds said they would refuse to answer at least one of the questions whilst sixteen of the participants said they would get up and leave.
When Woodzicka and LaFrance placed 25 women in this situation (with an actor playing the role of the interviewer), the results were vastly different. None of the women refused to answer the questions or left the interview.
In all these incidents of sexual abuse we typically find that an older man, who is more senior in the organisation or has a higher social status, preys on a younger, innocent woman. And perhaps most importantly, the perpetrator tends to hold the keys to the victim’s future prospects.
And there are many reasons why people remain silent. Three of the most common are fear, futility and loyalty – we fear consequences, we surmise that speaking up is futile because no action will be taken, or, as strange as it might sound, we feel a sense of loyalty to the perpetrator or our team.
There are a variety of dynamics that can cause people to reach these conclusions. The most common is power. In all these incidents of sexual abuse we typically find that an older man, who is more senior in the organisation or has a higher social status, preys on a younger, innocent woman. And perhaps most importantly, the perpetrator tends to hold the keys to the victim’s future prospects.
In these types of situations, it is easy to see how the victim can lose their sense of agency and feel disempowered. They might feel that even if they did speak up, nobody would believe their story. The mere thought of challenging such a “highly respected” individual is too daunting. Worse yet, their career would be irreparably damaged. Perhaps, by keeping quiet, they could get the break they need and put the experience behind them.
A second dynamic at play is what psychologists refer to as pluralistic ignorance. First conceived in the 1930s, it proposes that the silence of people within a group promotes a misguided belief of what group members are really thinking and feeling.
In the case of sexual harassment, when victims remain silent they create the illusion that the abuse is not widespread. Each victim feels they are isolated and suffering alone, further increasing the likelihood that they will repress their feelings.
By speaking out, women have shifted the norms surrounding sexual assault. Behaviour which may have been tolerated only a few years (perhaps months) ago is now out of bounds.
But as the events of the past few weeks have demonstrated, the norms promoting silence can crumble very quickly. People who suppress their feelings can find their voice as others around them break their silence. As U.S. legal scholar Cass Sunstein recently wrote in the Harvard Law Review Blog, as norms are revised, “what was once unsayable is said, and what was once unthinkable is done.”
And this is exactly what has happened over the past few months. Both perpetrators and victims alike are now reflecting on past indiscretions and questioning whether boundaries were crossed.
Only time will tell whether the shift in norms is permanent or fleeting. As is always the case with changes in social attitudes, this will be determined by a myriad of factors. The law plays a role but as the events of the past few months have demonstrated it is not as important as one might think.
Among other things, it will require the continued courage of victims. But perhaps more importantly it will require men, especially those who are in positions of power and respected members of our communities and institutions, to role model where the balance resides between extreme prudery at one end, and disgusting lechery on the other.
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BY Dennis Gentilin
Dennis Gentilin is an Adjunct Fellow at Macquarie University and currently works in Deloitte’s Risk Advisory practice.
BY The Ethics Centre
The Ethics Centre is a not-for-profit organisation developing innovative programs, services and experiences, designed to bring ethics to the centre of professional and personal life.
A guide to ethical gift giving (without giving to charity)
It’s easy to be frustrated by “charity giving” during the festive season. Little Billy gets a card from World Vision thanking him for support he never knew he gave. All because his sanctimonious aunt decided a new bike wasn’t particularly important.
We’d expect Billy to be pretty upset. But is objecting to “charity giving” childish or is donating on a friend’s behalf incompatible with Christmas giving altogether?
Reminding others of their ethical duties at a time of celebration is, in many ways, noble. There is also value for charity gifts as responses to the hollow commercial practices of modern Christmas traditions.
Charity giving overhauls the tradition of giving. It seeks to fulfil a social need without consideration of the putative “receiver”. As such, the moral case for charity giving isn’t black and white.
While the act might be well-intended, it is poorly executed. When we give at Christmas, presents convey a specific message – one that charity gifts miss altogether.
When we give, we create a sense of shared meaning between individuals. The gift establishes a relationship on the basis of common commitment. In the case of Christmas, the commitment is to one another. Different gifting rituals have other messages.
For instance, during Kwanzaa, members of the African diaspora give homemade gifts to encourage one another to remember their heritage. Kwanzaa emphasises the creation of a moral community in which each member is dedicated to the other. Do-it-yourself gifts foster an attitude where the focus is not on the gift itself, but the recipient.
It might seem as though the charity gift does something similar. By doing good in the name of the recipient, perhaps we foster a relationship based on social justice rather than consumption. But there is a difficulty here.
When our gift is a donation for a distant community, we’re no longer giving a gift to our friend or family member. We’re giving a gift to that distant community.
However deserving the community is, this form of giving is radically different to the form inherent to Christmas or Kwanzaa. We effectively cut the receiver out of the process and instead use the gift ceremony as a means to achieving our own moral agenda.
If charity gifts are a problem, can we give in a way that goes beyond the department store notions of giving and escapes the cycle of consumption?
Yes, but the solution doesn’t lie in what we give, but in how we give.
We can take cues from other cultures. There are entire systems of morality built around the idea of the gift. The famous sociologist Marcel Mauss wrote of gift economies in tribal cultures. He learned how members of traditional Samoan communities gain or lose standing based on their ability to give and to receive well. The exchange of property there is more about establishing relationships than obtaining any particular object or achieving any social goal.
This idea of the giving being more important than the gift isn’t foreign to Christmas traditions. The first recorded act of Christmas gifting was Queen Victoria to her children in 1850. You’d have to rack your brain to find something that the kids of imperial royalty needed. Indeed, the gifts they got were purely symbolic, gestures of goodwill.
So if you’re toying with the idea of ethical giving this Christmas, don’t line up the usual suspects. Make donations to your chosen charities in your own name, but avoid treating them as a replacement for gifting. Charity gifts don’t show others what they mean to you, they substitute the gift for some other moral end.
Give some thought instead to the received wisdom of gift cultures.
Begin by asking yourself, “what does this person mean to me?” “How best can I show them?”
If the gift is a way of sending a certain message, focus on the message. The object is just a means of communication – the message lies in the giving.
Become an artist of the gift – creative, thoughtful and mindful of the recipient – and you can give without being smarmy or sanctimonious.
Truly a modern Christmas miracle.
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Big Thinker: Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft (1759—1797) is best known as one of the first female public advocates for women’s rights. Sometimes known as a “proto-feminist”, her significant contributions to feminist thought were written a century before the word “feminism” was coined.
Wollstonecraft was ahead of her time, both intellectually and in the way she lived. Pursuing a writing career was unconventional for women in 18th century England and she was denounced for nearly a century after her death for having a child out of wedlock. But later, during the rise of the women’s movement, her work was rediscovered.
Wollstonecraft wrote many different kinds of texts – including philosophy, a children’s book, a fictional novel, socio-political pamphlets, travel writings, and a history of the French Revolution. Her most famous work is her essay, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
Pioneering modern feminism
Wollstonecraft passionately articulated the basic premise of feminism in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman – that women should have equal rights to men. Though the essay was published during the French Revolution in 1792, its core argument that women are unjustifiably rendered subordinate to men remains.
Rather than domestic violence, women in senior roles and the gender pay gap, Wollstonecraft took aim at marriage, beauty, and women’s lack of education.
The good wife: docile and pretty
At the core of Wollstonecraft’s critique was the socioeconomic necessity for marriage – “the only way women can rise in the world”. In short, she argued marriage infantilised women and made them miserable.
Wollstonecraft described women as sacrificing respect and character for far less enduring traits that would make them an attractive spouse – such as beauty, docility, and the 18th century notion of sensibility. She argued, “the minds of women are enfeebled by false refinement” and they were “so much degraded by mistaken notions of female excellence”.
Mother of feminism and victim blamer?
Some readers of A Vindication for the Rights of Woman argued Wollstonecraft was only a small step away from victim blaming. She penned plenty of lines positioning women as wilful and active contributors to their own subjugation.
In Wollstonecraft’s eye, expressions of feminine gender were “frivolous pursuits” chosen over admirable qualities that could lift the social standing of her sex and earn women respect, dignity and quality relationships:
“…the civilised women of the present century, with few exceptions, are only anxious to inspire love, when they ought to cherish a nobler ambition, and by their abilities and virtues exact respect.”
While some might find Wollstonecraft was too harsh on the women she wanted to lift, her spear was very much aimed at men, “who considering females rather as women than human creatures, have been more anxious to make them alluring mistresses than rational wives”.
Grab it by the patriarchy
Like the word feminism, the word patriarchy was not available to Wollstonecraft. She nevertheless argued men were invested in maintaining a society where they held power and excluded women.
Wollstonecraft commented on men’s “physical superiority” although she did not accept social superiority should follow.
“…not content with this natural pre-eminence, men endeavour to sink us still lower, merely to render us alluring objects for a moment.”
Wollstonecraft’s hammering critique against a male dominated society suggested women were forced to be complicit. They had few work options, no property or inheritance rights, and no access to formal education. Without marriage, women were destined to poverty.
What do we want? Education!
Wollstonecraft pointed out all people regardless of sex are born with reason and are capable of learning.
In a time where it was considered racial to insist women were rational beings, Wollstonecraft raised the common societal belief that women lacked the same level of intelligence as men. Women only appeared less intelligent, Wollstonecraft argued, because they were “kept in ignorance”, housebound and denied the formal education afforded to men.
Instead of receiving a useful education, women spent years refining an appealing sexual nature. Wollstonecraft felt “strength of body and mind are sacrificed to libertine notions of beauty”. Women’s time was poorly invested.
How could women, who were responsible for raising children and maintaining the home, be good mothers, good household managers or good companions to their husbands, if they were denied education? Women’s education, Wollstonecraft contended, would benefit all of society.
Wollstonecraft suggested a free national schooling system where girls and boys were taught together. Mixed sex education, she argued, “would render mankind more virtuous, and happier” – because society and the term mankind itself would no longer exclude girls and women.
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BY Kym Middleton
Former Head of Editorial & Events at TEC, Kym Middleton is a freelance writer, artistic producer, and multi award winning journalist with a background in long form TV, breaking news and digital documentary. Twitter @kymmidd
BY The Ethics Centre
The Ethics Centre is a not-for-profit organisation developing innovative programs, services and experiences, designed to bring ethics to the centre of professional and personal life.
Ethics Explainer: Tolerance
For some people, the value of tolerance is simply the opposite of intolerance. But to think of tolerance in simple binary terms limits our understanding of important aspects of the concept.
We gain greater insight if we consider tolerance as the midpoint on a spectrum ranging between prohibition at one end to acceptance at the other:
Prohibition ————— Tolerance ————— Acceptance
The Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle called this middle point of the spectrum, the golden mean. Approaching tolerance this way, makes it what philosophers call a virtue – the characteristic between two vices.
For example, Aristotle places the virtue of courage at the midpoint (or golden mean) between cowardice and recklessness. So, a courageous person has a proper appreciation of the danger to be faced but stands steadfast and resolute all the same.
Cowardice ————— Courage ————— Recklessness
Although Aristotle’s doctrine of the golden mean can help us understand tolerance, quite a bit more needs to be said. Some things deserve to be rejected and prohibited. And some things ought to be accepted.
We should neither accept or tolerate behaviour that denies the intrinsic dignity of people – for example, the defiling of synagogues by anti-Semites. Instead, we should have a general acceptance and respect for everyone’s intrinsic dignity. People should neither be rejected nor merely tolerated.
Unacceptance ≠ Prohibition
However, there are some things you might reasonably not accept, yet not want to prohibit. This is typically the case when you encounter an idea, custom or practice that is either unfamiliar or at odds with your own convictions about what makes for a good life.
For example, a vegetarian might be convinced it is wrong to eat animals. Such a person may never accept the practice as part of their own life. However, they may not want to stop others eating meat. Instead, they will tolerate other people’s consumption of animals.
This reveals an essential aspect of tolerance. Toleration is always a response to something that is disapproved of – but not to such a degree as to justify prohibition. Tolerance is, by definition, a mark of disapproval.
And so some people seek from society something more than ‘mere tolerance’. Instead, they look for acceptance.
Tolerance to acceptance
The word ‘acceptance’ rang out loud when it was revealed a majority of Australian voters answered yes to the same sex marriage postal survey in 2017. For gay and lesbian couples, the result is evidence of wide acceptance of their equality as citizens.
Individuals and communities are not only entitled to think about what should be accepted, tolerated or prohibited. We can also be obliged to consider these things.
Without wanting to confuse ethical with legal obligations, this is the difficult task of parliaments. To continue with the same sex marriage example in Australia, they were obliged to consider what behaviours should be accepted, tolerated, or prohibited in terms of wedding services and religious freedoms.
The ethics of tolerance
Ethics calls upon people to examine their lives – including the quality of their reasons when forming judgements. An ethical life is one that goes beyond unthinking custom and practice. This is why judgements about what is to be accepted, tolerated or prohibited need to be made free from the distorting effects of prejudice. Beliefs, customs and institutions should be evaluated for what they actually are – and not on the basis of assumptions about people or the world. The quality of our judgment matters.
There can be sincere disagreement among people of good will. Respect for persons – and the general acceptance this requires – can sit alongside ‘mere’ tolerance of each other’s foibles.
And that may be the best we should hope for.
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Ethics Explainer: Conscience
Conscience describes two things – what a person believes is right and how a person decides what is right. More than just ‘gut instinct’, our conscience is a ‘moral muscle’.
By informing us of our values and principles, it becomes the standard we use to judge whether or not our actions are ethical.
We can call these two roles ethical awareness and ethical decision making.
Ethical Awareness
This is our ability to recognise ethical values and principles.
The medieval philosopher Thomas Aquinas believed our conscience emerged from synderesis: the ‘spark of conscience’. He literally meant the human mind’s ability to understand the world in moral terms. Conscience was the process by which a person brought the principles of synderesis into a practical situation through our decisions.
Ethical Decision Making
This is our ability to make practical decisions informed by ethical values and principles.
In his writings, Aristotle described phronesis: the goodness of practical reason. This was the ability to evaluate a situation clearly so we would know how to act virtuously under the circumstances.
A conscience which is both well formed (shaped by education and experience) and well informed (aware of facts, evidence and so on) enables us to know ourselves and our world and act accordingly.
Seeing conscience in this way is important because it teaches us ethics is not innate. By continuously working to understand our surroundings, we strengthen our moral muscle.
Conscientious Objection
In politics, much of the debate around conscience concerns the “right to conscientious objection”.
- Should pro-life doctors be required to perform abortions or refer patients to doctors who will?
- Must priests break the confessional seal and report sex offenders who confess to them?
- Can pacifists be excused from conscription because of their opposition to war?
For a long time, Western nations, informed by the Catholic intellectual tradition, believed in the “primacy of conscience” – the idea that a person should never be forced to do something they believe is against their most deeply held values and principles.
In recent times, particularly in medicine, this has come to be questioned. Australian bioethicist Julian Savulescu believes doctors working in the public system should be banned from objecting to procedures because it compromises patient care.
This debate sees a clash between two worldviews – one where people’s foremost responsibility is to their own personal beliefs about what is good and right and another where this duty is balanced against the needs of the common good.
Philosopher Michael Walzer believes there are situations where you have a duty to “get your hands dirty” – even if the price is your own sense of goodness. In response, Aristotle might have said, “no person wishes to possess the world if they must first become someone else”. That is, we can’t change who we are or what we believe in for any price.
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Ethics Explainer: Progressivism
Progressivism is a political ideology based on the possibility of moral progress. In practice, this looks like an optimism about the future of humanity.
Progressives believe the course of human history is moving us closer to a state of peace, equality, and prosperity. They also tend to believe in human perfectibility. Politics, technology, and education can overcome human failings to create a utopia.
We can see this in the work of philosophers Steven Pinker and Michael Shermer. Pinker says since the Enlightenment, altruism has been on the rise and violence is declining around the world. Shermer suggests each generation has been smarter than the last, which he believes, has continually reduced impulsive violence.
Hegel’s synthesis
German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel believed moral progress was inescapable. He thought the forces of history shape humanity for the better, pushing it toward perfection.
Hegel believed history unrolled according to a “dialectical” pattern. This was where opposing sides clashed and compromised with one another. These opposing forces, which he called the “thesis” and “antithesis”, would clash before reaching a “synthesis”.
This synthesis would then spark a new antithesis and the process would continue. Hegel thought each stage in the thesis-antithesis-synthesis series moved us closer to a state of perfection. His work is said to have inspired other progressive thinkers, most notably communist philosopher Karl Marx.
The darker side of progress
Today, new forms of genetic editing promise a cure to a range of illnesses and maybe even death itself. Transhumanists believe we can overcome the limitations of our humanity and mortality. They suggest a range of options, from changing our biology to uploading our consciousness into a supercomputer.
But practical efforts to create this perfect world have not always been pleasant. At times it has been outright barbaric.
One example is the eugenics movement. It aimed to breed some people, like those with disabilities, out of society altogether, and cited social progress as their defence.
This is one reason why conservatives often urge caution around progress. They encourage us to be mindful of the potential unintended side effects of new policies or technology.
But progressives are often concerned this will inhibit life changing new developments. They suggest we deal with issues as they arise, rather than trying to predict them in advance.
Heaven on earth
Progressives often see education as the silver bullet solution for social problems. Like Ancient Greek philosopher Socrates, they tend to believe all vice is the result of ignorance, not malice. They suggest humans are fundamentally good and education will bring out the better angels of our nature.
But some are sceptical whether education alone will fix all humanity’s woes. They agree humans are mostly good but don’t blame ignorance for evil. Instead, they see war, conflict and violence as the product of oppression and inequality.
Karl Marx believed conflict between the wealthy and the working class was a central theme in human society. He believed the power imbalance between rich and poor was bad for everyone. He famously claimed people would be better throwing away hierarchies based on class and wealth. Only when we’re all equal, he thought, will we be able to perfect ourselves.
English philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft suggested the path to human perfection might require both politics and education. She argued that political change requires us to educate marginalised groups. Otherwise, any change will continue to exclude the groups already on the fringes of society.
This explains why more women and culturally diverse people have contributed to progressive thinking in recent decades. In the past, the leading progressive thinkers tended to be white men. Improved access to education has enabled a greater range of voices to contribute to the larger conversation of what a perfect world might look like and how we could create it.
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Big Thinker: Socrates
Socrates (470 BCE—399 BCE) is widely considered to be one of the founders of Western philosophy.
Stonemason, soldier, citizen, philosophy’s first ‘martyr’, Socrates helped shape one of the major intellectual foundations on which Western civilisation has been built. Yet, no work of philosophy bears his name as the author. All we know of him is derived from the work of others – especially Plato, Xenophon and Aristophanes.
The rise of ethics
Prior to Socrates, ancient philosophy tended to focus on questions that today might be considered the domain of physics. ‘Pre-Socratic’ philosophers tended to focus on fundamental questions about the nature of the universe – like the building blocks of matter or the nature of time and motion.
When Socrates came along, he proposed a completely different set of questions for philosophical deliberation. He drew attention away from questions about how the world is and towards questions about how we are to be in the world. While he made valuable contributions to the evolution of thought about epistemology and politics, it is this turn toward ethics that introduced a fresh practical dimension to philosophy.
Earlier philosophical debates of Thales, Anaximander and Democritus, for example, were all theoretical. Human knowledge and understanding might have advanced, but nothing in the world was directly changed by their deliberations.
Socrates’ focus on ethics was intended to generate practical outcomes. He expected philosophical work might lead to a change in both attitudes and (importantly) actions of people. In turn, this was intended to produce effects in the world. Although we have only come to see Socrates through the eyes of others, his friends (like Plato and Xenophon) and foes (like Aristophanes) agree he wished to have an impact on the people around him and the kind of society they were creating as a result of their choices.
What friends and foes disagreed on was Socrates’ motivation. His critics lumped him in with the Sophists who were looked down on as philosophical guns for hire.
A new focus on ethics repositioned philosophy as something relevant to everyday life. Socrates’ core question, ‘What ought one to do?’ does not apply in a limited set of circumstances. It is a question of general application to any situation where a choice is to be exercised – and is applicable to every person, whatever their station in life.
In some sense, this is what made Socrates such a troublesome – or dangerous – person. In one fell swoop, he brought philosophy into the agora (the marketplace), making it relevant and accessible to people of all ages and degrees.
This upset hierarchies and orthodoxies. As we know, a gadfly is rarely welcome. Socrates was eventually executed for crimes of ‘impiety’ and ‘corrupting the youth’ – in short, for teaching and encouraging them to question established norms and think for themselves.
The virtue of ‘constructive ignorance’
On being asked who the wisest person in Athens was, the Oracle of Delphi nominated Socrates. Socrates was astounded – he believed himself to know nothing. To prove his relative ignorance, Socrates sought to find wiser folk amongst the citizens of Athens, questioning them at length about the nature of things like justice and love.
His questioning had practical implications. At that time in democratic Athens, citizens were actively involved in enacting laws or judgements in the courts.
In the end, Socrates came to believe the Oracle of Delphi was correct – but only because his superior wisdom lay in his realising the limits of his knowledge.
Along the way to this realisation, Socrates developed the process of elenchus (the ‘Socratic method’). It is a distinctive form of questioning designed to open space for insight and self-knowledge. The idea we have much to learn about ourselves and the world might suggest we are ignorant. Such a view could position the Socratic method of questioning as a mean spirited exercise. Those subjected to it did not necessarily enjoy the experience or see it in a positive light. This no doubt contributed to the belief Socrates was an impious trouble maker.
The importance of the examined life
Although Socrates contributed many insights that are still drawn upon today (but not necessarily accepted), one of his most famous and profound is his claim that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’.
This claim goes beyond being a recommendation we should think before we act – which may be a prudent thing to do. Socrates is attempting to draw our attention to a deeper truth about the human condition. He encourages us to participate in a form of being that has the capacity to transcend the requirements of instinct and desire in order to make conscious – that is, ethical – choices. Socrates claimed if we fail to do this, we live a lesser life.
One of the effects of examination is, according to Socrates, the development of phronesis (practical wisdom) which is the foundation for virtue. For Socrates (and later for Aristotle – in a slightly different form), the possession of virtue is not just a matter of interior orientation. It is essential to being able to see the world as it is and be able to make good decisions.
Like Aristotle, Socrates sees vice as the source of defective vision. Socrates thought people make bad choices and do bad things out of ignorance. He thought if people could only ‘see’ what is good, they would choose it.
This all finally comes together in the way Socrates challenged the status quo. To live an examined life is to reject things ought to be done just because they have always been done.
Instead, Socrates is an early exponent of an inner voice that (in Socrates’ case) is supposed to have warned him against making an error. Socrates called this voice his ‘daimōnic sign’ – something Aquinas would call ‘conscience’ over a thousand years later.
It may be difficult to distinguish the real Socrates from the versions of the man created by others – which were either celebratory or lampooning. But this we know. When given the chance to escape and avoid the sentence of death imposed on him by the Athenians, Socrates chose to stay. In defence of his ideas and in conformance with his ideals Socrates drank the hemlock and died.
He can hardly have imagined the impact he would have on the world.
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The pivot: Mopping up after a boss from hell
How would you feel if you had been harassed on an internet dating site and blocked the person, only to turn up for a new job and find out that they’re your boss?
It gets worse. The harassment continued outside of work and then the new boss started “performance managing” the employee out of the business, making complaints about the quality of their work.
This actually happened and I found out about it when the mother of the victim phoned me (as a HR executive) to say, “This is what happened to my son in your business”.
The young man, who we shall call Darren, had been an ambitious high performer. But, after a 12-week period with his new boss, he resigned – blowing up his career to escape the situation.
Now, he was seriously depressed, could not get out of bed and his mother was very concerned about his mental wellbeing.
There was some conjecture it may not have been a coincidence that the harasser had turned up as his boss. He may have deliberately sought to connect with his new team outside work before starting in the job.
The path forward was not totally clear. Darren had not made a complaint himself. It was his mother who made the call and supplied me with screenshots of text messages, without Darren’s consent.
He had also already left the company, but was obviously in a very bad space. Also, if he had resigned because of the harassment, it could potentially be regarded as “constructive dismissal” (an unlawful termination of employment).
And I now had someone working in the business who had apparently been a harasser on social media and had forced his victim out of his job. You don’t want a leader who performance manages people who won’t date them, or even someone who allows that perception to take hold.
It had to be investigated because, if it was true, I couldn’t just leave it as a time bomb waiting for the next person to attract his interest.
My legal and moral obligations were not necessarily the same. I had to respond to the situation as both a HR person and a leader, because I had executive responsibility for the part of the business they both worked in.
From a moral perspective, I had to consider whether my response was an almost parental reaction. Had I wanted to protect an employee who I discovered had been harassed out of his job because a complaint came from his mother?
It was a tricky situation, but we went through a quiet investigative process. I contacted Darren and he didn’t want to come back to the company.
The really important lesson in dealing with cases such as these is to discuss the human impact at the same time that you are discussing the legalities. They need to come together, they can’t be separated.
I arranged for better support and counselling for him. That was a risk because, in a court case, it could have been construed as an admission of responsibility and it could have gone on to become a Workers’ Compensation or Human Rights Discrimination issue.
But there must be a degree of humanity – you can’t just leave someone broken and walk on by.
When I called his former boss into an interview, he became very angry. He said his activity on the dating site was his private life and none of our business.
A mature leader would have disclosed the conflict in their relationship as soon as they started at the company, so that it could be managed ethically. Instead, he went for Darren, hammer and tongs with the performance issue.
We disciplined him and he ended up resigning shortly afterwards of his own free will.
The really important lesson in dealing with cases such as these is to discuss the human impact at the same time that you are discussing the legalities. They need to come together, they can’t be separated.
It is also important to deal quickly with these things because nothing gets better if it festers away. If I look at the really bad cases I have mopped up, there have been a lack of investigative outcomes, a lack of definitive decisions and/or lack of clarity about what will be done.
Some of these cases drag on for years and someone leaves the workforce, broken. They progressively end up in really bad financial shape as well. Time stands still for them because they are either coming into a workplace where someone is continuing to harass them or they are isolated at home. While you’re deciding what to do, the issue is overwhelming their every day.
This article was originally written for The Ethics Alliance. Find out more about this corporate membership program. Already a member? Log in to the membership portal for more content and tools here.
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BY Rhonda Brighton Hall
Rhonda Brighton-Hall is a non-executive director of the Australian Human Resources Institute and founder of MWAH (Make Work Absolutely Human), Chair of FlexCareers, Former Telstra Business Woman of the Year and HR Leader of the Year.
BY The Ethics Centre
The Ethics Centre is a not-for-profit organisation developing innovative programs, services and experiences, designed to bring ethics to the centre of professional and personal life.
Big Thinker: Dennis Altman
Dennis Altman (1943—present) is an internationally renowned queer theorist, Australian professor of politics and current Professorial Fellow at La Trobe University.
Beginning his intellectual career in the 1970s, his impact on queer thinking and gay liberation can be likened to Germaine Greer’s contributions to the women’s movement.
Much of Altman’s work explores the differences between gay radical activists who question heteronormative social structures like marriage and nuclear family, and gay equality activists who want the same access to such structures.
“Young queers today are caught up in the same dilemma that confronted the founders of the gay and lesbian movements: Do we want to demonstrate that we are just like everyone else, or do we want to build alternatives to the dominant sexual and emotional patterns?”
Divided in diversity, united in oppression
Altman’s influential contribution to gay rights began with his first of many books, Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation. The 1971 text has been published in several countries and is still widely read today. It is often regarded as an uncannily correct prediction of how gay rights would improve over the decades – something that would have been difficult to imagine when the first Sydney Mardi Gras was met with police violence.
Altman predicted homosexuality would become normalised and accepted over time. As oppressions ceased, and liberation was realised, sexual identities would become less important and the divisions between homosexual and heterosexual would erode. Eventually, openly gay people would come to be defined the way straight people were – by characteristics other than their sexuality like their job, achievements or interests.
Despite gay communities being home to diversity and division, the shared experience of discrimination bonded them, Altman argued. Much like women’s and black civil rights advocates could testify, oppression has an upside – it forms communities.
End of the homosexual?
Altman’s 2013 book The End of the Homosexual? follows on from the ideas in his first. It is often described as a sequel despite the 40 years and several other publications between the two. He wrote it at a time when same sex marriage was beginning to be legalised around the world.
Altman recently reflected on his old work and said he was wrong to believe identity would become less important as acceptance grew but right to predict being gay would not be people’s defining characteristic.
He has come across as both happy and disappointed by the normalisation of same sex relationships. While massive reductions in violence and systemic discrimination is something you can only celebrate, Altman almost mourns the loss of the radical roots of gay liberation that formed in response to such injustices.
Without the oppressions of yesteryear, what binds diverse people into gay communities today? What distinguishes between a ‘gay lifestyle’ and a ‘straight lifestyle’ when they share so many characteristics like marriage, children, and general social acceptance?
Of course, all things are still not equal today. While people in the West largely enjoy safety and equality, people in countries like Russia are experiencing regressions. Altman hopes gay liberationists could have impact there.
Same sex marriage
Although he’s considered a pioneer in queer theory, a field that questions dominant heterosexual social structures, Altman does not support same sex marriage.
Some people might feel a sense of betrayal that such a well respected gay public intellectual has not put his influence behind this campaign. But Altman’s lack of support is completely consistent with the thinking he has been sharing for decades. Like a radical women’s liberationist, he has reservations about marriage itself – whether it’s same sex or opposite sex.
Altman takes issue with traditional marriage’s “assumption that there is only one way of living a life”. He has long been concerned the positioning of wedlock as the norm forgets all the people who are not living in long term, monogamous relationships. He argues marriage isn’t even all that normal in Australia anymore with single person households growing faster than any other category.
Altman was with his spouse for 20 years until death parted them. While that may sound like a marriage, the role of state and Church deeply bothers him, and so they were together without the blessings of those institutions. He has expressed confusion over the popular desire to be approved by the state or religious bodies that do not want to sanction same sex relationships. It’s because he doesn’t consider same sex marriage a human rights issue, when compared to things like starvation, oppression, and other forms of suffering.
Nevertheless, Altman recognises the importance of equal rights and understands why marriage for heterosexuals and not homosexuals is unfair. True to form he continues to question the institution itself by flipping the marriage equality argument on its head. He advocates for “the equal right not to marry”.
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BY Kym Middleton
Former Head of Editorial & Events at TEC, Kym Middleton is a freelance writer, artistic producer, and multi award winning journalist with a background in long form TV, breaking news and digital documentary. Twitter @kymmidd
BY The Ethics Centre
The Ethics Centre is a not-for-profit organisation developing innovative programs, services and experiences, designed to bring ethics to the centre of professional and personal life.
Ethics Explainer: Respect
The concept of respect arises in two major forms. We’ll call them respect (lite) and respect (full).
Respect (lite)
Respect (lite) is in play when being polite, considerate and mindful of another person. It can also be demanded from another as a mark of deference to their rank, seniority, experience or standing in the world. We see it in statements like: “respect your elders”, “show a little respect”, or “with all due respect”.
It tends to be allied to the claim that respect is best earned rather than demanded. However, the idea that respect (lite) needs to be earned is one of the most important ways of distinguishing the ‘lite’ concept from the ‘full’ form.
Respect (full)
Respect for persons may perhaps be the most fundamental principle in all of ethics. Respect (full) calls on each and every one of us to respect the intrinsic dignity of all other people. If something is intrinsic to us, it is essential to our being and cannot be earned. It is a property of being a person.
The source of intrinsic dignity has varied over time and across cultures. For example, within Judaism, Christianity and Islam (at least), the intrinsic dignity of persons comes from being made in the image of God. In each of these traditions, the image isn’t literal. Rather, the reference is to being made in the ‘moral image’ of God – and most importantly, being endowed with free will.
There are also secular sources of personhood. Perhaps most famous is Immanuel Kant’s linking of personhood and intrinsic dignity to our rationality. This quality of ours means we all belong to what Kant calls the ‘Kingdom of Ends’.
‘The Kingdom of Ends’ is a thought experiment Kant created in which all human beings are treated as ends (where they and their wellbeing are the goal), and not as a “means to an end” (where the benefit of others is the goal). You’ve probably heard someone say, “My job is a means to an end”, meaning they don’t care much for their work but do care about the rent, family or travel their work pays for.
Having made a distinction between means and ends, Kant goes on to say a person should never be used as a means. Unsurprisingly he had a prohibition against slavery, the ancient institution where people become the property of someone else who uses them as a tool for their own benefit.
Respect (full) is what we count on as the source of principled opposition to all forms of discrimination against persons – whether it be because of age, gender, sexuality, race, religion… whatever.
Joining the two ideas together
These two versions of respect are clearly related. It is just that we tend to lose sight of the connection. Polite, respectful debate about contentious issues is not just about avoiding harmful consequences. It can (and should) go deeper – right back to recognition of the intrinsic dignity of others.
That is ultimately the reason why we should listen to their opinion. It is why we should attack the arguments and not the person. It is why we should refrain from insulting, bullying, silencing or oppressing others even if we fundamentally disagree with them.
Of course, civilised and principled disagreement can help avoid matters getting out of hand when tempers fray. But safer, better forms of deliberation are collateral benefit of acting on the principle of respect for persons – and acknowledging their intrinsic dignity – even when we are opposing them.
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