We get exposed to sexual harassment in everyday life, in the street, in our homes, in our school or office. There’s a true challenge in spotting them, but the hard one is once you spot a sexual harasser in your office or workplace, how should you behave? What’s the right protocol for such a tough situation? This one is tricky. Below is a guideline protocol to help you deal with sexual harassers in the workplace and protect yourself, your dignity, and your job from being sabotaged.
What is harassment – Sexual harassment?
“Harassment is any unwelcome behavior or comments made by one person to another. Sexual harassment is a term usually used to describe unwanted sexual contact or behavior that happens more than once at work, home, or in school.” (Source)
Shouldn’t be your burden
Sexual harassment shouldn’t be your burden at all, it should be the employer’s. But life isn’t perfect, the harrasser could be your employer himself. How would you act then? That’s even more tricky, because first thought you should leave this job. But on second thoughts, everyone has a boss, you should escalate the problem. Also, it’s a developed world we live in, and social media has never failed us down in brining up those issues to the crowd.
If you’re going to escalate the problem, worst case scenario is camera footage be deleted, your complaints can become lies, and the whole thing get turned against you, upove all, you could get fired.
However, if you were able to take evidence, you could leave the job without sabotaging your career, instead, sabotaging his. Making other people aware of his actions in order to prevent him from taking advantage over other employees as well.
What if you’re sexually harassed by a woman?
Sexual harassers aren’t always men figures, although it’s most common for men to more likely expose their power over all other creatures, even of the same sex sometimes. But there are times when superior women in your workspace expose you to unwanted sexual touches that they think goes unnoticed, but if it makes you uncomfortable, and can’t talk about it, chances are you’re being harassed.
Try to politely note to your rights for personal space, or if it was tensed, the harasser usually knows what he’s/she’s doing. Try escalating the problem anonymously if possible.
Apply the Grey Rock Method
The grey rock method is a practice advised whenever you’re forced to deal with a predator of any kind; psychopaths, harassers, toxic, etc. Basically people who just won’t leave you alone if you told them, instead, they’d get stalky and threatening. You stop responding to any of their drama, you become emotionally non-responsive. Become as boring as you can be, and virtually act like a grey rock.
If you can emotionally detach yourself from their interests, their insults, their claims, it will serve a huge deal to undermining a narcissist’s attempt to manipulate you or get you involved in any way, this causes him to get bored of you and lose interest in being any way near you. The grey rock method takes away his desire of attention and kills it with boredom.
In order to implement the grey rock method you need to minimize your conversation response and any verbal interactions as much as you can. That doesn’t mean you should ignore him, instead, reply but with minimal, short, limited responses.
This way you can limit further conversations and will kill hope for future conversations to come. Also, focus your responses to a monotonous, boring answers or topics, one word answers serves you great in this situation. Don’t elaborate or discuss your true opinions. Invest in times where you can only nod or smile for avoiding further engagement.
How to eliminate sexual harassment in the workplace? Let us know other methods you heard about or even tried to avoid sexual harassment in the comments below!