The last couple of years have produced seemingly endless stories about the sexual assault crisis on American college campuses. But the threat of sexual assault doesn’t end when a woman turns her tassel and picks up her diploma from the framers.
Anonymous secret-sharing social network Whisper isn’t just for people who have peed in their office percolator and want to giggle about it with cubedwelling strangers, or cheated on their wives with Very Famous Male Celebrities, or who secretly hate their kids. It’s become a repository for stories told by people who feel like they have no one to talk to about the sort of creepy, predatory garbage person shit that goes down every day in offices headed by folks who think that being the boss means having free rein over their employees’ bodies.
Whisper is depressingly rife with stories of people — often women — who have found themselves on the receiving end of unwanted sexual attention from a coworker or superior. In some cases, they did the “right” thing after the harassment and reported what happened to them to a superior.
Results? Mixed.
Like many cases of women who remain silent after being raped by college athletes, women who are victimized by predatory bosses and coworkers often remain silent because economic cost of coming forward seems too high to be worth it.
The best case scenario for many victims of workplace harassment is that, at the very least, the offending coworker faces some sort of consequences and learns from the experience. Worst case? Ostracization, demonization, demotion, termination for the victim of the harassment. None of those scenarios are ethical and and some are blatantly illegal but, then again, most people aren’t stupid enough to believe that HR exists for any other reason than to protect a company from lawsuits/get rid of troublemakers.
Work, for many women, is yet another step in the “obstacle course of sexual menace” they have to navigate day in and day out.