What is sexual harassment?
Sexual harassment is unwanted behaviour of a sexual nature. The law (Equality Act 2010) protects the following people against sexual harassment at work:
employees and workers
contractors and self-employed people hired to personally do the work
job applicants
To be sexual harassment, the unwanted behaviour must have either:
violated someone's dignity, whether it was intended or not
created an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment for them, whether it was intended or not
This is from https://www.acas.org.uk/sexual-harassment.
Personal story
The reason I am blogging about this is because I have gone through somthing similar myself and I would like to bring it to peoples attention more and to see if I can make a safe place for anybody to talk about their own experience. You are not alone, this is what I have to keep telling myself.
Just before Christmas at a works Christmas party I had a male employee try to move my dress across to reveal my breast. I reported it and nothing was done because there was no evidence.
Fast forward a month I had a new male employee in my office. He knew about the previous incident but he thought it would be okay to try to kiss me at work and do sexual gentures to me while nobody was around or while nobody was looking. I did not report this as I thought there was no point as nothing was done previously, however I confided in (what I thought was a friend) another employee and that helped to talk about it.
I had a week off work and I gave a phone call from my manager to say I had 2 grievances in against me. I was so shocked and upset I had to go hone. What could I have done to upset someone?
Turns out it was the 2 people who sexual harassed me who put the grievances in against me.
The employee who i thought was a friend went to my harasser and asked him about it so he decided to put a grievance in against me for spreading lies and the other employee thought I was spreading shit about it around the company.
So now my mental health has declined rapidly and I struggle now to step into work. I keep telling myself I havnt done anything wrong but I had somone tell me well if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck or looks like a duck it's probably a duck. So I keep thinking this is all my fault, 2 instances from 2 difference people. I must be doing somthing to lead these guys on.
Well what I didn't mention is that I am happily married with a 4 year old. How could I be leading these people on?
I have no idea if anybody would be reading this blog or if one person reads it. If I can help one person to realise they are not alone with this, then that is definitely good enough for me.