Certainly I know we've testified in previous committees about harassment from our clients or the inmates we're in charge of in care in custody. That presents a different element of harassment within the workplace. Aside from harassment occurring with supervisors or even among colleagues where we try to intervene in various ways through mediation, we're faced with harassment from the very people we're managing. This definitely has an immediate impact on the workplace. You're right that often, sexual harassment by inmates particularly is often overlooked, and it's not dealt with very swiftly.
We've testified in other committees, as an example, the status of women committee, where we've raised this issue time and time again that it's not necessarily harassment from colleagues, that it's harassment from the inmates. That's where the environment becomes poisonous. It becomes stressful. It becomes all those things for the people working inside. It's a completely different form of harassment, and it's very difficult to manage. How do we manage that inside? Swift action has to be taken with the inmates who choose to sexually harass or make sexual comments. Often I'm referring mostly to sexual harassment because often our female officers get harassed by inmates in a male facility, and equally, male officers often get harassed by female inmates.
You're right that our work environment is so challenging and that presents a whole different situation. As a union, we try to intervene and say that this is not acceptable. Especially if the comments coming from an inmate are very violent, we try to push on the administration and say they have to do something. Sometimes we'll try to have these particular harassers transferred out of the facilities, certainly for protection and certainly to try to ease the psychological stress. We talked about how it's important to have psychological harassment very much recognized and defined. This is another form of psychological harassment that is very present in our workplace, and unfortunately, it is one of those things that we're expected to do. However, when we know the very serious cases, we take the administration to task, and we have to look very carefully at different alternatives to manage those situations.