Still the last great open secret: Sexual harassment as systemic trauma

ABSTRACT

Despite being illegal for more than half a century, sexual harassment remains today the most pervasive form of violence against women, often encompassing other forms of violence in its ambit. This stubborn and pernicious persistence rests largely on (1) a pervasive system of attitudes and beliefs, accruing over centuries and embedded in a variety of cultural institutions, that denies and rationalizes systemic abuse of women; and (2), the organizational and institutional actors that serve to maintain this system, a phenomenon that has come to be known as institutional betrayal. These phenomena, the attitudinal aspects of “rape culture” combined with the iatrogenic features of organizations, institutions, make clear that sexual harassment and the cultural system in which it is embedded is best understood as “systemic trauma” requiring multilevel prevention and intervention systems that are yet to be fully identified or understood.

Sexual harassment remains today the most pervasive form of violence against women, not only the most prevalent¹ but often encompassing other forms of violence in its ambit. Women are raped and sexually assaulted in their workplaces (Duhart, 2001)² and many, particularly in the blue collar world, are victims of interpersonal violence at work (Baker, 1989). Women are harassed in their schools and universities by their teachers and professors and even in their homes by their landlords and property managers (Reed, Collinsworth, & Fitzgerald, 2005), and this includes only the forms of harassment that are statutorily prohibited.³

How does a civilized society tolerate this situation? What influences serve to maintain it? What can be done to change it? Many possible explanations have been offered: biological, feminist, organizational, even evolutionary theories have been proffered, some with better evidence than others. Even the best of these are partial, however; we know that some men are more likely to harass than others (an individual deviance explanation; Pryor, 1987), but also that organizational contingencies can facilitate such behavior or constrain it (an organizational-level explanation; Fitzgerald, Hulin, Drasgow, Gelfand, & Magley, 1997; Willness, Steel, & Lee, 2007) even among those who would otherwise do so (a person X environment interaction explanation; Pryor, Giedd, & Williams, 1995). Male dominance most certainly plays a major role (Fiske & Glick, 1995; MacKinnon, 1979); research shows that men are more likely to harass women in nontraditional jobs, harassment that is generally intertwined with various forms of hostile sexuality. Indeed, sexuality is frequently the stage upon which male dominance is played out. Harassment can be hostile (“Suck this, bitch”⁴) as well as sexual [“(Her supervisor) also began making sexual advances to (her), asking her to join him at a motel and on a trip to the Bahamas.”⁵] as well as sexist (“All that bitch needs is a good lay;” “women are only fit company for something that howls;” “there’s nothing worse than having to work around women.⁶) as well as violent “[(She)…was handcuffed to the toilet, the drunk tank, and inside the elevator…had her head forcefully shoved in her coworkers’ laps and an electric cattle prod shoved between her legs”⁷].

Such experiences, encompassing the entire ugly mosaic of sexual violence, persist as endemic in women’s lives for at least two reasons,⁸ reasons that blend at their edges and in the world (MacKinnon, 1979): first, the pervasive system of attitudes and beliefs, accruing over centuries and embedded in a variety of cultural institutions, that denies and rationalizes systemic abuse of women; and second, the organizational and institutional actors that serve to maintain this system.

The first is the most readily apparent in the concept of what are generally referred to as myths about sexual violence. Myth, a concept arising mainly from anthropology and sociology, is defined as ideas that are widely believed despite being empirically false and that embody concepts to make sense of the world. In other words, myths make sense of what would otherwise be mysterious, inexplicable, or unacceptable.

The most familiar of these, those having to do with rape, rose to awareness in tandem with the modern study of sexual assault (Burt 1980; Brownmiller, 1975; Schwendinger & Schwendinger, 1974), gaining fresh currency in the mid- to late-1990s (Lonsway & Fitzgerald, 1994; Payne, Lonsway, & Fitzgerald, 1999) and continuing today. Lonsway and her colleagues (1994;1999) emphasize that rape myths are functional concepts, paralleling the original sociological concept of myth; for example, “(Rape myths are) attitudes and beliefs that are generally false but…widely and persistently held, and that serve to deny and justify male sexual aggression against women” (emphasis added; Payne et al., 1999, p. 134).

Payne and her colleagues (1999) provide a number of core examples, including she lied/made it up (denial); he didn’t mean to or it was no big deal (justification).

Lonsway, Cortina, and Magley (2008) identified similar beliefs supporting sexual harassment; although they identify slightly different examples, the functional similarity is clear: to deny the reality of what is happening and to justify it when denial is no longer possible.

It is likely that such myths function broadly to underpin all forms of violence against women; for example, Peters (2008) has shown similar patterns of denial and justification reflected in beliefs about domestic violence, a pattern also demonstrated by Collings (1997) with respect to childhood sexual abuse. That these patterns permeate many of our cultural institutions (e.g., the law requires that a complainant demonstrate that she did not welcome the sexual harassment of which she is complaining; popular romance novels depict savage rapes by romantic strangers culminating in shattering orgasm; movies and even literature portray ever younger girls, even children, as sexually desirous and seductive) lends credence to the notion of the self-perpetuating reciprocity between cultural myths and cultural institutions (see also Edwards, Turchik, Dardis, Reynolds, and Gidycz (2011).

It is an interesting (if dispiriting) exercise to examine these phenomena in light of recent months. Anyone who hasn’t spent this time relaxing on the shores of New Guinea is aware of the serial accusations of sexual harassment and assault levied against the new American president by nearly 20 women from various walks of life—beauty contestants, receptionists, journalists, business executives, aspiring television actresses—a series culminating in a live video of the President-to-be bragging that his fame allowed him to sexually assault women with impunity.

The immediate public reaction to these revelations was widespread shock and disgust; many thought the contest was over; however, the candidate and his supporters countered with what became a successful national “teach in”⁹ on harassment mythology: he claimed his accusers were lying (“It’s one big ugly lie”), that they had ulterior motives for their accusations (“They want their 10 minutes of fame”); it was a trivial issue (“locker room talk”, “boy talk”), and the problem is women’s to solve (“(F)ind another career, find another company”). This last point was made most clearly by the candidate’s son in an interview on national television: “If you can’t handle some of the basic stuff that’s become a problem in the workforce today, then you don’t belong in the workforce. Like, you should go maybe teach kindergarten.”

She lied. She had an axe to grind. She didn’t handle it properly. And, anyway, it was no big deal. Thus is the inconceivable transformed into the quotidian and explained away, gone, disappeared from public view.

Organizational tolerance and institutional betrayal

Such beliefs have consequences on many levels and become imbedded in societal structures that then serve to maintain them. In 2014, Rachel Goldsmith and her colleagues (Goldsmith, Martin, & Smith, 2014) coedited an issue of this journal devoted to what they termed systemic trauma. According to these authors: “As trauma professionals, it is necessary to acknowledge facets of institutions, cultures, and communities that contribute to trauma and subsequent outcomes. Systemic trauma—contextual features of environments and institutions that give rise to trauma, maintain it, and impact posttraumatic responses—provides a framework for considering the full range of traumatic phenomena” (p. 117), not just the acts themselves.

Although some researchers have conceptualized systemic trauma in terms of how the effects of a specific trauma can extend to others within the victim’s circle (e.g., partner, family, caregivers), Goldsmith et al. reverse this lens to explore how the features of environments and systems can themselves maintain trauma and affect its course. They note the importance of various aspects of context and environment as a corrective to solely focusing on and dissecting the traumatic experience itself.

A number of articles have appeared demonstrating the importance of this insight in instances of sexual harassment. Hulin, Fitzgerald, and Drasgow (1996) discuss the importance of what they label organizational tolerance of sexual harassment, that is, a condition in which employees believe their organization does not take complaints seriously, that it is dangerous for them to complain, and that there are few sanctions for offenders. They later demonstrated that such tolerance not only is a strong predictor of the presence and prevalence of harassment, but also contributes to psychological damage among victims over and above that attributable to the harassment itself (Fitzgerald et al., 1997).

A more complete systems approach to sexual harassment was provided by Smith and Freyd (2013, 2014) in their work on institutional betrayal, that is, institutional actions and inactions that members experience as violations of trust and/or dependency. As they note, this framework is directly applicable to harassment in workplace organizations. Similar to Fitzgerald et al.’s (1997) work on organizational tolerance, Smith and Freyd (2013) demonstrate that an environment marked by institutional betrayal exacerbates the impact of experienced trauma, producing increased levels of psychological distress and increasing our understanding of the process and impact of traumatic experience.

It seems reasonable to argue that the institutional betrayal of victims functions to operationalize in the “real world” the mythology it reflects. What is lack of prevention but denial that there is anything to be prevented? How to understand the hostile and aggressive questioning of victims, or the lackadaisical response to complaints, except as the reflection of the belief that “She’s lying” or, if she isn’t, “It’s no big deal”. Why argue that it was “only words” except to imply that words are trivial, neither serious nor harmful, an argument that at the least elides the issue of what exactly was said and by whom.¹⁰

Toward change

And so, what to do? Dismantling a belief system so entrenched in history and culture is an undertaking so vast as to seemingly defy solution. Individual- and group-level interventions do exist and can be effective (Fitzgerald & Cortina, in press); necessary and worthwhile though these undoubtedly are, they can seem dwarfed by the sheer immensity of the task that faces us. This is particularly true in a time when many major systemic interventions and changes are in danger of being rolled back; the new US Secretary of Education has declined to commit to enforcing Title IX; the website for the White House Council on Women and Girls has been archived; and uncertainty exists concerning how aggressively the acting Chair of the US EEOC will enforce or even implement new policy guidance on sexual harassment enforcement (Feldblum & Lipnic, 2016).

Yet the history that burdens us can also offer hope. The public outcry following the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings was most certainly a double-edged sword; the multitude of women who came forward to share their own experiences received a nationwide object lesson in the disbelief and derision that can follow such disclosures. Yet 25 years later, Title VII has been strengthened, Congress has enacted an individual right to sue for monetary damages, and policies and procedures, however imperfect, now exist in virtually every work organization in this country. Claims of harassment continue to be met with resistance, yet women are increasingly emboldened to make them; the not-yet-President’s denials were met by a national outpouring of women describing their own assaults, and vowing defiance and support.¹¹

We cannot lose courage nor our faith in such efforts. Systemic trauma must be met with systemic solutions, solutions that carry within them the ability to transform women’s experiences. Like water eroding the most unyielding of boulders, individual voices, magnified by thousands, can yet prevail over eons of silence and resistance. As a leading Senator recently insisted with unintentional irony: “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.” Words to live by.

Notes

^1. Rospenda, Richman, and Shannon (2009) report that 50% of the women in their national sample had experienced sexual harassment in their workplace in the previous year alone.

^2. The Department of Justice reports that 8% of rapes occur in the workplace (Duhart, 2001).

^3. Street harassment is rampant (Kearl, 2010) though only spottily prohibited, and the vicious harassment and sexual shaming of women and girls via the internet and social media are ubiquitous but virtually totally unpoliced.

^4. Galloway v. Gen. Motors Serv. Parts Operations, 78 F.3d 1164 (7th Cir. 1996), abrogated on other grounds by Nat’l R.R. Passenger Corp. v. Morgan, 536 U.S. 101 (2002).

^5. Bundy v. Jackson, 641 F. 2d 934—Court of Appeals, District of Columbia Circuit, 1981

^6. Robinson vs. Jacksonville Shipyards, Inc. 760 F. Supp. 1486—Dist. Court, MD Florida, 1991

^7. Reed v. Shephard.929 F.2d484 (7^th Cir.1991).

^8. There are doubtless many more. I focus here on these two aspects of social systems.

^9. The phrase “national teach-in” was first used in this regard (and for much the same reasons) in the aftermath of the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings of 1991.

^10. The hostile, vicious, and downright ugly nature of what often passes for “unwanted sexual attention” is difficult to convey within the traditional discourse of academic journals; it can perhaps best be inferred from testimony such as that of an HR representative in an automobile assembly plant who testified to routinely editing employee complaints lest upper manager be “offended” by what they read (Rapier, et al. v. Ford Motor Company, 1999).

^11. https://news.vice.com/article/trump-tapes-prompt-thousands-of-women-to-tweet-about-their-sexual-assaults. Retrieved 3/12/2017.