Dealing with sexism - If you could go back......

So many of us had bad and inappropriate experiences.

As a schoolgirl I travelled on the train to Birmingham each day. A man in his 30s and his sister would get on the train a few stations down the line. He would try and sit opposite me and then push and rub his legs against mine. I just tried to sit squashed up so he couldn’t start all this horrible business. Why didn’t I kick him ? I suppose I was just too embarrassed.

On another occasion the lights went out on the train and a male who I knew and disliked put his hand up my skirt. I did nothing except feel embarrassed. I would like to have slapped his smirking face.

What a lot of horrid experiences we have had. Why should some men think they have the right to do inappropriate things and worse just because they fancied doing so.

ToniSH

I agree with you mostly. But looking back at my young self I’m horrified at the risks I took, and the situations I found myself in.

I lived with a lot of other young girls, and we were were pretty much unsupervised , I suppose we could see no danger.

We had lots of fun, and generally I look back fondly on those years, but I think we had some very lucky escapes.

ToniSH, I understand your passion to advance the awareness that no victim is to blame- But it's only a single issue in a series that forms a whole solution- Caution is no less important nor is learning from past mistakes especially in the area of trust- A single mantra simply isn't enough information to proceed-

It's liberating for victims to fully grasp that what happened to them it isn't their fauIt- It initiates healing- But more is needed to proceed, to be informed and wisely apply what been learned-

Had many instances of inappropriate sexual behaviour/abuse, not least from my stepfather. However, the one I'm proud of was when I was working as Girl Friday (remember that job title?) in an engineering and heating company in Lambeth Walk, London. The owner of the firm asked me to make him a cup of tea. I brought it in in front of a young engineer that was in the room with us. I leaned over his desk to deliver the cuppa and he patted my arse. I was 16/17? I turned and kicked very hard in the shin! He got up and started hopping round the room whilst the young engineer was sniggering. He NEVER did it again. That's the thing with this "me too" stuff I don't get. If you're an adult, kick, punch, scream, whatever. "He grabbed my thigh 8 years ago and I'm still traumatised". Really?

toniSH

I agree with you.

grandad, I’m sorry you went through that.

ToniSH - excellent posts

As a young boy of around seven or eight years of age, I was sexually assaulted by a man, but as a male on this forum, i will not go further into that except to say it can as traumatic for male children and young men as it can be for young girls and young women.

However, i have entered this.thread to perhaps offer advice on assaults that take place in the workplace. Protection over the years has been slowly strengthened since the mid-1980s through such parliamentary acts as the Equal Opportunities Act, the Fairness At Work Act and even the Health & Safety at Work Act.

In that mirade of legislation, a major breakthrough came about in 2010 with the introduction of the Equalities Act that encompassed the entirety of some of the above legislation and major parts of others. Through the use of the Equalities Act and knowledge of its provisions on employee grievance procedure legislation and the rights given within it, it is much easier in these times for employees to bring forward Harassment cases against any person in a workplace whether they be senior management, line manager or fellow worker.

The above legislation dictates that all employers must offer a grievance procedure to employees that consists of:-

A) A grievance investigation following a written complaint being received from any employee.

B) A formal grievance hearing at which the employee can be accompanied by a person of their choice or a trade union official. That Hearing must also be undertaken by a person who is not a direct line manager of the employee making the grievance or involved with the day to day conduct of the employee in any way.

C) should the above hearing be dismissed by the employer, then an appeal gearing must be made available to the aggrieved employee at which the employee again can be accompanied, and a senior member of management must undertake that appeal who was not in any way involved in the first hearing.

D) Should the above appeal hearing be dismissed, then provided that the employee has at least two years continuous employment with the employer involved, then the case can be taken to an Industrial Tribunal (industrial court) for an independent adjudication on the issue.

Many cases of sexual harassment have been taken through the above procedure(s) in recent years and won by employees. Sadly, the numbers of employees taking up such grievances have not been sufficient to have alleviated such harassment in workplaces such as has been sighed in this thread which would have eliminated it from working life.

In that, until employees (of both genders) are prepared to take up their rights against harassment (sexual or otherwise) in far greater numbers then such harassment will continue. It has to be remembered that any victim concealing such harassment within themselves only sets up the next victim at the hands of the same perpetrator.

However, the above may appear complicated and in that it has to be if it is to offer equal justice to complainant and defendant in any case. The law is there to be used and until those who are subjected to sexual abuse in the workplace are prepared to make use of the current legislation, then sexual harassment (especially against women) will continue in far too many employees working lives.

The above takes resolve and determination to carry out on the part of an employee, but the legislation is in place these days that will support anyone with a genuine case. In the course of my work in recent years i have witnessed that all too often happen successfully.

Sorry if this brought back any awful memories for commenters. It's just something I'm doing some work on at the moment and feeling very passionate about. I don't think many people believe that "back in the day" it was so commonplace, we usually didn't say anything.
I'm committed to hearing our young women when they say this has happened, and to encouraging them to stamp it out.

@rosecarmel - "Going on solely no victim is to blame, and nothing else, is sending a dangerous message: You'll not be at fault for walking down a dark alley and you get raped"
Being cautious is one thing, but bringing the words "blame", "fault" etc into this is terrible. No victim is ever to blame. We know that already since other crime victims aren't raked over the coals as to what they were doing prior to the crime.
Rapists rape, No one encourages them to do it.

@Sara65 - I respectfully;y have to disagree, although I know what you mean. You didn't put yourself in any kind if "situation" - but someone took advantage of it. We should never have had to live our lives in anticipation of what awful men might do to us. When we say we didn't make the best choices, we're actually saying that we should have allowed more for the fact that men were going to do awful things. While that may have been a reality, the onus and blame is all on them.

When I was 17 I used to catch a train to our nearest city once a week. A railway employee, probably in his 50s, used to sit right next to me and put his arm behind me on the bench. Nothing much except he gave me the creeps. Some time later a girl reported him for sexual assault. I knew she was telling the truth. But he got off because of lack of evidence. I wished I had spoken out.

70s sexism in abundance at workplaces, and I we the years lots of fondling and groping, I wonder if there is a woman who has never had a y groping or more

I would ask my first boss, I was 15 and had a weekend job in a shoe shop, why he thought it was ok to display his collection of porn magazines in the staff toilet.
Apart from him everyone who worked in the shop was female,with an average age of around 18. It was my first, but not my last, experience of sexual harassment.

Perhaps the women posting on this thread condemning and questioning the motives of young women who come forward to tell their story of abuse at the hands of older, powerful men are themselves victims and are conditioned to see themselves as subservient to men.

My mother was evacuated from London to Radeltt. Every day she would walk home from school, 8yrs old, and at least weekly a man who used read to evacuees at her school would stop her when she passed his house and make her go into the garden to look at the rabbits in a hutch. She didn’t want to KEEP looking at the rabbits but she did as she was told. She said he would press against her back and if she tried to look round he would sternly say “Look at the Rabbits” so there she was, totally sexually innocent and unaware looking at these bloody rabbits whilst he pressed against her.
Suddenly he would stop and tell her to go, sometimes giving her a penny.
She would see him in school expecting a smile from the rabbit man but he would never look at her in school.
Roll on 20 years and she was working for social services discussing an abuse case and it all cane flooding back - the rabbit man! The penny dropped! Dirty old git...we actually went to look for his house but it had changed so much she couldn’t find it.

Tigertooth

You most certainly aren’t on your own with your response, same old story I suppose, your word against his, not wanting to cause problems with your boyfriend.

So many sleazy men got away with so much, because we just didn’t know who to tell, or if we would be believed.

I worked for the lindon fire brigade, admin. We used to go for drinks after work and my boyfriend was a firefighter. One day a very senior DO Firefighter told me that he needed to speak to me outside the pub. I was totally unaware, at 21, he was 40, and he just grabbed me and tried to kiss me. I pushed him off and just got really embarrassed and told no-one.
He was my boyfriends boss and in a very senior position and I was mortified. It seems so daft now that I didn’t say anything.

M0nica

You are absolutely correct, whatever the rights or wrongs of a situation, we have to teach our children that they need to take sensible precautions, and hopefully stay safe.

I cannot say I met much sexism or sexual harrasment, even though I worked mainly in the engineering industry. When I met it, I treated it with the contempt it deserved - and that was clear to the perpetrator.

There was one incident when I was followed along a road by someone trying to pick me up as a prostitute and I remember that very clearly because it was the only time something like that happened to me. But no physical contact was made.

I quite agree that the woman is not to blame if she is attacked or raped , but it is common sense for anyone male or female not to take risks.

When DS was between 16-18 we forbade him to walk home from town after dark, because we lived in the university area of town and at the time groups of roaming riffs from other areas of the town used to amuse themselves by wandering round the university area looking for students to duff up and he could easily be mistaken for a student. DS would not have been to blame if he was beaten up but nevertheless it was sensible to not take the risk.

I agree with you rosecarmel at the same time I had a route from home to the railway station that took me down a couple of little alleys, but I took a longer route after dark to avoid the alleys, not because I was fearful of a sexual assault, I wasn't, but because I was worried about being stopped and robbed or attacked and injured during the robbery.

The fact of it 'not being your fault' doesn't mean that you should take risks. I can see no advantage in being dead right. I would rather be living carefully.

Message withdrawn at poster's request.

yes it is shocking. most of my memories have been forgotten but even this thread is disturbing them...
I think most women I know can also recount very similar stories and experiences.

I used to have days when I deliberately dressed down to avoid attention.

Being assertive and feisty doesn't stop rape or assault.

It's horrific, isn't it? We're just a small, random bunch of women on one forum and look at how many of us (often at a very young age) have experienced sexual assaults and violence.

It seems we’ve all been subjected to some horrible experiences, little girls with no resources to deal with what happened to us, and without the vocabulary to explain what was happening, or the expectation that anyone would believe us. Sad.

When I was 11 (eleven!) and an early developer, I got seriously harrassed by much older men. I remember one particular occasion, two men in a car stopped and grabbed hold of me. They didn't try to force me into the car, but were CLEARLY after sex. I was so scared . ELEVEN. Just because I was growing boobs.

You can't go back and change society's attitudes. If I could I would have given the job centre ( can't remember what it was called way back then)the real reason why I had left my job in the 80s - sexual harassment and then would have taken my boss to court. Just didn't happen then.

grannybuy your description of being a lone 10 yr old reminds me a lot of me.
Only once, and I was a latchkey kid, when I was followed home and opened the door and hid in the dark house did I do something about it.
I could see or sense that the man was still lurking about but we had a telephone so I edged my way to the phone and called my mum's work. She told me to phone a neighbour which I did but infact my mum returned from work at the same time as a couple of police who searched around outside the dark houses but found no-one.
I felt such a relief but didn't feel like answering a lot of questions. A friend from school had recently been attacked on her way home from hockey practice at dusk.

There was a lot of talk at the time about not talking to strangers, or going in cars etc but nothing practical was changed and it was as if I was a nuisance and why did I get followed home!!!
Would I encourage the report of a rape of my DD or DGD. I would like to think I would.

DD was given a lot of freedom too and albeit with a mobile phone has spent time abroad and hitchhiking, things I would have been much too afraid to do. I was a very timid child and could not understand why anyone, let alone a smart, young, good looking man, would be interested in a little girl in school uniform!! I told you I was naive.