Calling It Out (for Representology, a publication of the University of Cardiff)
Perhaps I am contrary by nature, but I’ve never liked being told what to do. The use of the imperative will inevitably initiate a miniature revolt in my brain and my gut: nothing is more likely to dampen my appetite than a restaurant named Eat! or dissuade the purchase of a new sofa than a shop called Dwell. And so it is of little surprise that the proliferation of well-intended Speak Up programmes and policies across our harassment-plagued film and television industries has caused me some anxiety, and I was interested and eager to read Anna Bull’s report, Safe to Speak Up: Sexual Harassment in the UK Film and Television Industry Since #MeToo.
Interviewing 18 subjects (17 women and 1 man) who have experienced sexual harassment and/or sexual violence in the workplace since the seismic reckoning of the New York Times and New Yorker articles outing Harvey Weinstein and gang in late 2017, Bull endeavours to measure the aftershocks of the ensuing #MeToo movement to determine exactly how far afield the tremors were felt, and their ongoing impact on survivors, if any. Bull interrogates the evolution and effect of the UK’s industry-wide trend of telling victims of sexual harassment and/or sexual violence to “Speak up!” and report their experiences, determining the trend’s success or otherwise with a view to identifying obstacles to reporting.
For my palate, there are several flies in the ointment of Speak Up policies and programmes and, therefore, in Bull’s report, making the whole thing rather hard to swallow. First - the duty of care and legal requirement to proactively create a safe place or work, including a place of work that is free from harassment and discrimination, rests with the employers, and Speak Up policies endeavour to shift that duty of care (or a proportion thereof) from the employer to the victims of discrimination, the employees. To be clear, while victims of sexual harassment and sexual violence undoubtedly have an important role to play in initiating formal procedings against alleged perpetrators, they have no legal duty under employment law or criminal law to report their experiences at all. Anna Bull’s report perpetuates the shift of responsibility for sexual harassment and sexual violence in the direction of the victim, interviewing only victims, of which 17 of 18 are women. I would savour the opportunity to read a report that asks the perpetrators of sexual harassment and/or sexual violence, including the business leaders who are responsible for the workplaces where those perpetrators thrive, how we move forwards, and to hear men’s perspective on these matters.
The voice of the cynic in me warns that Speak Up policies are used by employers as a defensive tool, enabling the denial of knowledge of incidents or prohibited behaviours, i.e. “We received no reports and therefore cannot have been expected to act.” Are Speak Up policies really for the victims’ benefit at all or are they an instrument made by and for the employer? To quote Audre Lord, “For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”
Second and moreover - by their very nature, Speak Up policies and programmes begin a discourse in the aftermath of the event, implicitly telling workers that sexual harassment and sexual violence in the workplace are par for the course: “Les jeux sont fait and we, your employers, failed to protect you. Now, where to begin?” In my opinion, the timeline of an incident of sexual harassment or sexual violence does not start with the unwelcome hand on the small of the back, or the inappropriate language, or the implicit threat of violence, but with the culture that endorses, encourages, facilitates and enables these behaviours.
Instances of sexual harassment and sexual violence do not happen in a vacuum, but, to borrow from Liz Kelly, in a continuum where one experience blurs into the next, effecting the next, and the next, and the next (see footnote). While victims of sexual harassment and/or sexual violence live and work in an office, industry, country and world that is neither psychologically nor physically safe, and while the process of reporting instances of sexual harassment and sexual violence may cause as much, if not more, psychological, physical, financial, professional and reputational damage than the event itself, victims must not be pressured into reporting their experiences. Victims may be empowered and supported to report, but we must not be so eager as to oblige them to do so.
Perhaps it is not just my contrary nature that resists the imperative to, “Speak up!”
When I was young, I dreamt of making it in Hollywood and working in the movies, enthralled by showbiz, enamoured by “the industry” and the idea of seeing my name in the credit role on the silver screen. We easily conjure an image of starlets disembarking planes, trains and automobiles in Los Angeles (or at Leavesden), offering themselves up for discovery, but there are equal numbers of young people arriving who aspire to be filmmakers, screenwriters, cinematographers, designers, each fuelled by a dream, perhaps less photo-ready than the ingenues, but each equally vulnerable in the pursuit of an aspiration that can only be realised if they are somehow seen, invited into the inner-circles of studio bosses and cigar-chomping super-producers.
And I got there, kind of. I made a circuitous 5,500 mile journey from London to Los Angeles, attending UCLA, interning for the production company of a bona-fide A-list celebrity and ultimately securing sponsorship for a work permit, the holy grail of the immigrant worker. I was seen, plucked out of obscurity and given my shot, and I couldn’t have had better timing, I thought, landing at a glorious time for independent film as ambitious auteurs and distributors tried to replicate the impressive critical reception and stupendous box office returns of PULP FICTION and Miramax.
You will be unsurprised to learn that the dream was short-lived, and I was back in cold, wet, London within 3 years of graduating from university. When I tell people about some of the workplace experiences that drove me home so quickly - the late night phone calls, the unsolicited gifts of red roses and lingerie, the oversharing of experiences with prostitutes and porn-stars - they are quick (and entirely right) to label the unwanted sexual and romantic attention as sexual harassment. “Why,” they predictably, universally enquire, “didn’t you speak up? Why didn’t you tell somebody what was happening to you?”
It is essential to consider my story in the context of the local, national and global culture in which it and I existed. In the 1990s, in a town run by Harvey Weinstein, Joel Silver and Scott Rudin, to name a few, I did not have access to the lexicon of sexual harassment, of grooming, of coercion and gaslighting. What would I have said, exactly? And to whom would I have said it? I had never seen such a thing as a Dignity at Work Policy or met anyone from HR, although I did once confide in a woman in a position of power about the worst of these experiences, a run-in amounting to physical and sexual assault, and was told it was, “a private matter between you and him.”
It is not true to suggest there were not protections against sexual harassment in law in the United States at the time: the Civil Rights Act 1964 had made discrimination on the basis of sex illegal, while the Equal Employment Regulations 1980 had extended the definition to include sexual harassment, and the Civil Rights Act 1991 had enshrined the right to sue and claim compensatory and punitive damages. As I completed my university education, the effectiveness of the legal framework had been demonstrated to me and other women through two principle avenues:
Through politics: in 1991 Anita Hill accused Supreme Court Justice nominee Clarence Thomas, her one-time supervisor at the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission (of all places), of sexual harassment, citing his persistent petitions for dates and his insistence on sharing graphic descriptions of bestiality and rape. Despite taking and passing a polygraph test, Hill was not believed, and the US Senate confirmed Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court (and if you want evidence of Liz Kelly’s continuum of sexual violence existing over time, I direct you to his concurring opinion overturning Roe v Wade in 2022)
And through our most powerful cultural medium, film: arguably in response to Thomas’ Supreme Court confirmation and associated hearings, in 1994 Warner Brothers released an adaptation of Michael Crighton’s DISCLOSURE, wherein Michael Douglas is sued for sexual harassment by a former lover turned boss who initiated the act forcefully, threatening both his career and his personal life. Yes, Michael Douglas plays the victim of a psychopathic woman who sexually harasses him and then exploits the legal protections to seek further revenge.
Suffice it to say that as a consequence of the context in which I was living and working , I do not believe that speaking up in the late 1990s would have done anything good for me or my career. I believe that Liz Kelly's continuum extends far beyond each person’s individual experiences, beyond geographical and temporal boundaries and into the political, social and cultural spheres that shape our understanding and expectations of each other and the world. While my individual experiences undoubtedly met the legal threshold of sexual harassment and/or sexual violence, I existed in a context where reporting my experiences was not a possibility for reasons including the normalisation of the behaviour, my belief that nothing would be done, my ignorance of what to say or to whom it should be said, my previous experiences, my overwhelming feeling of blame and complicity and fear of losing my job, reputation and opportunity to continue working in the industry in which I desperately wanted a future.
Anna Bull’s research is not going back nearly so far as the 1990s, of course, but limits itself to experiences of sexual harassment and/or sexual violence since late 2017, seeking evidence of change catalysed by the #MeToo movement and ensuing Speak Up trend. While the majority of interviewees had taken some step or steps towards formal reporting - anything from disclosing the experience to family or friends to leaving the job - the most interesting part of the report, in my opinion, is the list of reasons why interviewees had not formally reported their experiences of sexual harassment and/or sexual violence to their employer, namely -
Sexual harassment was normalised or tolerated in the workplace
Believing that nothing would be done and/or they wouldn’t be supported in reporting
No information available about reporting or no-one to report to
Interviewees had previous experienced and/or reported sexual harassment or sexual violence
Interviewees felt complicit; or that it was their fault; or that it wasn’t serious enough to report
Their workplace had wider discrimination issues, a toxic culture or difficult working conditions
Fearing losing the job or damaging one’s reputation
Blocked or dissuaded from reporting
And through this all too familiar list, an uneasy nostalgia is detected: forget 2017, the reasons for not reporting are unchanged since my first experiences in the 1990s. While we may have started to see the evolution of the legal frameworks that aim to prevent discrimination and some commendable improvements to employers’ policies and procedures, the continuum and context in which these experiences are happening are insufficiently changed. My suspicions are confirmed by further research including the 2021 UN Women UK report into the prevalence and reporting of sexual harassment and sexual violence in public spaces, and further observations of current affairs and culture highlights including enquiries into Jimmy Saville, Philip Schofield and Russell Brand, and BAFTA’s choice of recipient of their 2021 Outstanding Contribution to Film Award, Noel Clarke.
So, where do we go from here? How do we move the dial towards a culture in which it is safe to report without putting victims of sexual harassment and/or sexual violence at risk of further harm? How do we protect workers without shifting the duty of care onto their already embattled shoulders, respecting their very good reasons for not reporting? How do we move forwards, respecting the context and continuum in which we exist and in which these behaviours persist?
Having returned to the UK at the start of a new millennium, I found the opportunities in the much smaller film and TV sector hard to secure, but the sexual harassment equally unavoidable, prevalent and as damaging. I retrained as a consultant, attending law school and working across the arts and cultural sector, only returning to film and TV after a ten year hiatus for recovery and rehabilitation, open eyed to the many and various pitfalls before me. I spoke with other women and I began to find my voice and niche, and in 2021, in the wake of the suicide of Caroline Flack and the allegations against Noel Clarke, I shared some of my experiences with two other loud-mouthed women who had found their voices, too, Jules Hussey and Delyth Thomas, a producer and director respectively. Together, we developed the Call It! App, a data collection and signposting tool.
Call It! is an incredibly simple piece of technology addressing incredibly complex issues: if workplace culture (including workplace discrimination, sexual harassment and sexual violence) were climate change, then our app is a thermometer. We don’t pretend that an app can solve the problems we face, but an app can help us measure and better understand those problems, and in so doing, it can improve leaders’ opportunities to create safer, fairer places of work while engaging with victims where they are, here and now, in a world that is far from perfect and where, despite the best of intentions, it is not always safe to speak up.
You can learn more about the Call It! app here: www.callitapp.org
Kelly, Liz (1988). Surviving Sexual Violence. Polity Press, p.74, 91