Thank you.
He said that a human rights “education begins in the workplace, in the micro-democracy of the work environment, rather than in society at large”.
It is not enough to give workers a definition of sexual harassment and then tell them not to do it. We must develop a collective responsibility model that empowers bystanders to step in and speak up effectively and safely. Ervin Staub, professor of psychology emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, has written extensively about bystanders. He reminds us that:
Just as passive bystanders reinforce a sense that nothing is wrong in a situation, the active bystander can, in fact, get people to focus on a problem and motivate them to take action.
Indeed, people can exert positive influence on each other. We have to prepare employers, supervisors, and co-workers if we want them to be active bystanders who will draw awareness to potential harassment, and who will take action when harassment occurs. To do this we must challenge social norms, or the agreed-upon expectations and rules which govern our workplaces behaviour. The old, “It's just a joke,” “She must have deserved it,” and “It's none of my business” attitudes reinforce harassing behaviours.
Before we can develop effective training to empower bystanders to intervene in situations of potential or actual sexual harassment and before we can shift social norms to reflect an acceptance of collective responsibility for ensuring everyone is treated respectfully, we need to ask questions, collect data, and share findings on the experiences of sexual harassment in Canadian workplaces. We have to understand better why we have a gap between policy and reality, and we have to gather up our collective thinking on how we can bridge the gap.
Thank you.