Sexual harassment, assault, violence: 'It happens all the time, in all walks of life'

It’s still all too common for powerful men to abuse their positions by sexually harassing or assaulting women. The effects range from anger to deep psychological scars

‘ALL SEXUAL VIOLENCE is an abuse of power. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the head of an internationally renowned body or the most popular guy at your local bar,” says Cliona Saidlear of Rape Crisis Network Ireland. Saidlear is responding to a story that made international headlines this week when Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who had been staying at the Sofitel hotel in Manhattan last week as the head of the International Monetary Fund, was arrested and charged with the attempted rape of a hotel employee who had gone to clean his room. That Strauss-Kahn, who resigned from the IMF on Wednesday, was such a powerful and influential man has meant the fallout from the alleged attack is being analysed all over the world.

“What is interesting about the Strauss-Kahn case is how as a society we respond to these kinds of revelations,” says Saidlear, whose organisation is under threat of closure because of the withdrawal of funding. “The language we use is often very interesting. For one thing, the woman in the case has been consistently referred to as a maid rather than a woman or a hotel employee, a salacious piece of detail which serves to depersonalise her.”

One Irish victim of sexual violence draws parallels with her own experience, despite the fact that she was a child when her abuse happened. “Strauss-Kahn is an international power player,” says Deborah, a 44-year-old from Co Waterford who was sexually abused from the age of five to 13. “In my case I was the victim of a local power player, a pillar of my community. It happens all the time in all walks of life where a powerful member of the community has a sense of entitlement and an insatiable appetite for taking something against another person’s will.

“This has gone on since time began. It’s only now we have freedom of speech about it all, and that’s a huge plus. In the past, women shut themselves up about these things; other women shut women up, too. It has a clamming effect on the physical body,” she says. “I suffered with chronic fatigue just with the effort of trying to keep a lid on it.”

Deborah says she was deeply damaged but that there is hope for anybody who has been through such an ordeal. She has had years of counselling, and studied yoga, and is now in a position to help others affected by similar issues.

At the other end of the scale, many young women have become immune to low-level sexual innuendo and offensive workplace banter, a far more benign form of sexual power play. When Jennifer, now in her early 30s, began working in her first job, at a large law firm in Dublin, she remembers, along with female colleagues, being graded in the style of the women in the PricewaterhouseCoopers case last year.

“Lists were emailed around for each department, grading the women, with seating plans so that the women were available for viewing. It was all discussed openly; it wasn’t done behind our backs,” she says.

Taking offence or complaining was not the done thing. “If you are with 100 people and 99 of them appear to think that what is going on is okay, then you are unlikely to put your hand up and complain even if you know it’s not right,” she says.

Sarah was in her early 20s when she started working for one of the main political parties, only to find sexism and innuendo were par for the course. “It was mostly older and some quite senior male politicians making inappropriate remarks. Things like, ‘Oh, aren’t you a lovely girl: you are the only reason I am here; it makes it all worthwhile.’ The thing is, it still happens and it still goes unchallenged,” she says, adding that there is a tendency to excuse people, particularly older men, too easily.

“We make allowances for them because they grew up in a different era and they don’t know what is wrong with what they are doing. But sometimes I wish I was more vocal about it.”

THE HARASSMENT MONOLOGUES blog (harassmentmonologues.wordpress.com) was set up late last year by the Irish Feminist Network after the PricewaterhouseCoopers ratings came to light. Women were invited to submit their experiences of sexual discrimination and harassment to show solidarity with each other.

One comment on the blog points to examples of harassment from childhood into adulthood. “I’m not sure which example to pick first,” the woman writes. “They meld into a uniform blur of anger and disempowerment in my mind. I grew up and still live in an area where sexual harassment is seen as at best a minor irritation and at worst not even an issue, something I really should shut up and stop making a fuss about.”

She describes how, at school, aged 12, “a certain underclass of boys” thought it was funny to grab girls’ breasts and fondle them. “This was accepted as harmless messing around and never punished,” she writes. “Yet if I so much as used a swear word when ordering a boy to stop his harassment, I got into trouble. If I slapped a boy for grabbing my breasts, I got into trouble. The one-sidedness of that treatment bothers me to this day.”

As a vulnerable child, she says, she was expected to tolerate the behaviour. “If I mention these things a common reaction is ‘cry me a river’. This dehumanising behaviour affected me for quite a while. I never felt okay about becoming a woman, and the behaviour exacerbated my feeling that my body had gone from being mine, my machine for running and jumping and dancing, to being a mere sex object.” She adds that retaliating or reacting negatively was viewed as unreasonable.

She describes being yelled at by construction workers who went on to launch a sexually explicit verbal attack. “I was very shocked, and I reacted by striking an aggressive stance, locking eye contact and shouting, ‘You f***ing sick monster!’ I then told my mother about the incident, and she couldn’t understand why I was so angry. I was angry because I was shocked and felt violated. In any other context, roaring at someone in the street and giving them a shock is called harassment or antisocial behaviour. But for some reason, when it’s in the context of male sexual behaviour towards a female, it’s totally okay. It makes me sick.”

She says she will never understand “why a smaller, weaker female is expected not only to tolerate this behaviour from larger, stronger, threatening males, but to see it as harmless and acceptable and even funny.”

For Deborah, a victim of extreme and prolonged sexual abuse who has emerged from years of counselling with a profound sense of “inner strength”, an important message is often lost when this issue is highlighted in the media.

“I’ve seen some commentators talk about the ‘noisy and hysterical’ reaction from victims, and, while it might sound surprising, I agree with them,” she says. “I don’t think that kind of reaction is constructive. I think the debate needs to move on from angry, hysterical reactions to the communication of the message that people can get through this if they avail of all the help that is out there.

“I am not minimising the devastating effects of sexual violations – it is a nightmare – but when I was at my worst the main message I heard was that I was going to be in that place of pain for the rest of my life, but that just isn’t true. With help and care and hard work you can come through it.”