Break The Cycle

Sexual abuse and harassment in the workplace causes lasting trauma

In the 2000s, I went up to my supervisor of mine, a woman, to share with her some inappropriate behavior a male colleague was exhibiting towards me. After only getting out a few sentences, she laughed and said, “if you think that’s bad, you don’t want to know what it was like in the 80s.” That was the end of it.

We would all like to think we’ve made enormous progress regarding sexual impropriety and abuse of power in the workplace over the past 20 years or so, but unfortunately we have not.

Any concern we tried to show for survivors was quickly eclipsed by desperation to not harm the careers of predators.

There is still an attitude of, “harassment isn’t that bad, get over it.” I liken that to attitudes around spanking children, “my parents spanked me and I turned out fine.” However, we now have plenty of data showing that spanking can lead to negative outcomes later in a child’s life. The same is true for sexual harassment and abuse in the workplace. We have data showing that survivors of sexual trauma at work experience deteriorating mental health with higher rates of substance abuse, depression, anxiety and PTSD. Those conditions are exacerbated when victims are not believed, not cared for, and when predators face no consequences.

My goodness, we sure do demand a lot of victims, don’t we? We ask them to retraumatize themselves by voluntarily participating in an investigative process where the entire burden to prove what happened to them weighs on their shoulders. It’s hard to think of any other process, whether civil or criminal, where the victim is responsible for proving the crime. Ahhh, yep. Except for other sexual crimes, of course. Sigh.

Even when survivors do participate, even when they bring boatloads of evidence proving what was done to them, the predators largely face no consequences.

It continues to be perplexing that one the one hand, we understand the severity of this kind of behavior from a predator because it would “ruin their career” if it were revealed, but we tell the survivor, “oh it’s not that bad.”

There is also still a massive assumption that victims, who are largely women, will just make this up to hurt a man. Ridiculous. Sexual offenses have a rate of false-reporting similar to other offenses and crimes; less than 5%. Add to that the number of actual incidents that go unreported and I bet that false reporting rate would be less than 1%.

Anecdotally, I have had several instances of sexual harassment and abuse perpetrated against me throughout my professional life, but the example I mentioned at the beginning of this article was the only time I reported it. A subsequent incident involved my male supervisor pulling my top down and when I slapped his hand away, he said, “oh calm down.” Even though this disgusting display was witnessed by two of my coworkers, I didn’t even bother reporting because I knew it would be pointless.

That feeling of defeat, knowing that all reporting will do is make your life a living hell is still very real.

The Indiana Democratic Party has instituted a new Ethics Process and Code of Conduct that seems like a good step, however something is still missing. It references possible “sanctions” or “consequences” that may result at the end of an investigation, but it does not detail what those may be. If these processes and codes are teethless, then they are worthless and no one, especially survivors, should be expected to participate in a traumatizing exercise in futility.

Specifically regarding Indianapolis Mayor Joe Hogsett, 5 survivors have come forward to share their experiences of abuse perpetrated by him and under his leadership beginning in 2015 through 2024. Even after hundreds of thousands of dollars of taxpayer money has been spent “investigating” and ample proof has been provided, justice is nowhere to be found.

As of today, the Indiana Democratic Party has issued no statement of condemnation for the actions of Mayor Hogsett. Members of the party, including Chair Karen Tallian recently supported Hogsett by attending his fundraiser.

Seeing that, how can the party expect anyone to have confidence in this new Ethics Process?

Democrats say “we are the party of women,” but those are just words. Words that are becoming more hollow with each day that passes without action.