THE SECRET WOMEN ARE SO AFRAID TO TALK ABOUT!

Work Online Sexual Harassment

By Majed G Taifour

“We must send a message across the world that there is no disgrace in being a survivor of sexual violence. The shame is on the aggressor.”– Angelina Jolie

During COVID-19, women are being increasingly harassed at work, but in a different way — it’s now online!

In fact, the pandemic has offered men at work new ways to pester women sexually through the virtual world. As a result, sexual harassment no longer needs to happen in a physical workplace — it can arise digitally too.

So, as the pandemic persists, social distancing is forcing rapid changes in working environments. At the same time, workplace sexual harassment persists too as the physical workplace is mutating into an environment that is both digital and increasingly out of the office.

According to some sources, downloads of one popular videoconferencing app increased from 56,000 to over 2.1 million per day between January and March this year. The widespread use of those remote-working technologies brought with it problems no one could have anticipated prior to the spread of the Coronavirus. This is why, amid Coronavirus quarantines, workplace sexual harassment around the globe has gone virtual.

Gone are the days when women before COVID were sexually assaulted in New York’s subway system or London’s public transport — nowadays, the fear of public and workspaces has changed from urban spaces and transit environments over to the web.

In fact, Zoom meetings, direct messaging and email exchanges have become more flirtatious than the old days. Ironically, although sadly, a man was recently arrested in the US for sending a photo of him naked in his home workplace to a female colleague.

But although it is still too early to know how much sexual harassment has moved from physical to virtual workspaces, there is at least one prominent example of how harassers are misusing videoconferencing technology — it’s called Zoombombing!

Named after the popular videoconferencing app Zoom, Zoombombing refers to the use of multi-user conference calls to display inappropriate or offensive materials, chant racial slurs, or engage in other disturbing behavior. It usually happens in conferences that anyone can join, so it is less likely to affect private work meetings. However, something similar is eventually likely to happen in work-related calls.

And the trend is becoming more awkward.

Before COVID, women at work were able to file a complaint about sexual harassment. Nowadays, working online at home has left them with no other option but to tremble in fear and suffer from panic attacks, not knowing what to do next. As such, instead of sexual harassment at work being curtailed by the Coronavirus, it has become more predominant, with less power and fewer options for remedy.

This means one thing — sexism is malleable and sexual predators are adaptable. A woman in the UK recently told the story of a stalker at work who used her personal mobile number to locate her home address and show up at her door to invade her privacy. So, instead of women at work being able to break the pattern of sexual harassment post COVID, they’ve become more subjected to it. A woman in France said her boss had asked her to wear revealing clothes while joining Zoom calls.

And what makes it easier is that there are no witnesses online.

In Australia, for example, it’s been reported that working from home has made it more challenging for women to declare sexual harassment. And although physical abuse of women at work may have decreased post COVID, emotional distress has been on the increase.

Victoria, which has been the epicenter of the virus in Australia, is said to have witnessed the highest growth in sexual harassment, with cases rising by 8% compared to 2019. Recent reports counted 39 sexual harassment complaints by women working from home between March 1 and July 31, 2020, in Victoria alone. In one case, a woman was messaged approximately 300 times a day and consistently at night.

Prior to COVID, statistics reveal that one-in-three Australians — two-in-five women and one-in-four men — experienced sexual harassment in the workplace between 2014 and 2019.

This tragic transformation is happening already by working remotely and suffering silently.

According to statistics released by the United Nations, reports of domestic violence in France increased 30% following the country’s lockdown on March 17. During the first two weeks of lockdowns in Spain, emergency numbers for domestic violence received 18% more calls, while helplines in Singapore received 30% more calls. As NBC News reported, law enforcement agencies across the US have seen domestic violence cases rise up to 35% in recent weeks. And in a recent study of harassment in Sweden, women who have been promoted into leadership positions faced even more harassment.

The world is certainly changing, and definitely not for the better. In fact, things seem to have taken a turn for the worst. To an unprecedented degree, women employees are becoming more vulnerable to unchecked regimes of abuse, microaggression, and surveillance in the workplace. As a result, many are at risk of falling off the radar altogether.

And if history has taught us anything is that economic vulnerability can breed harassment. In the US, workplace harassment charges surged during the 2008 great recession to a two-decade record. In fact, harassment cases during that year increased to 33 per 1,000 employees, a rise that was four times higher than the rate of increase in the decades before.

This could mean only one thing — harassment spikes with insecurity… and that’s the danger of it! This is why, today, more women are approaching life coaches for advice as they are uncertain how to complain about sexual harassment while working from home.

However, in my opinion, it’s more of a technology problem than a guidance one.

Today’s remote workspace threatens the ability of women to speak, prevent, and respond to sexual harassment. In response to the “‘Wild West” work environment introduced by COVID-19, employers are scrambling to offer mobile resources for female employees to report sexual harassment. These include anonymous, confidential, and social-media-based reporting apps like Callisto, STOPit, and TalkToSpot, among others.

As COVID-19 alters the landscape of sexual harassment in the workplace, employers may even enlist in the near future Slackbots to flag toxic behavior in virtual work environments and to trigger employee conversations about inclusive language and communications norms, community standards, and professional expectations in the remote workplace.

Among other technological tools, Virtual Reality (VR) may hold the greatest potential to change how the world perceives and understands sexual harassment. VR is often celebrated for its unique capacity to foster empathy by immersing users in alternate realities.

Data from Gartner also tells us that by 2030, the demand for remote work will increase by 30%, when “Gen Z” enters the workplace. Before that happens, employers should be cognizant of this extension of the workplace and must take all necessary steps to ensure that the parallel virtual workplace remains as safe and free of intended or unintended harassment as the brick and mortar one.

Until that happens, women in remote workplaces should not allow anyone to take away their worth, their privacy, their energy, their time, their safety, their intimacy, their confidence, and their own voice.