It sounds to me like you didn’t adequately train them for the job if that happens. No one should endure ANY sexual harassment at work, and expecting women to ‘brush it off’ is disgusting. If a person can’t handle the basic requirements of the job, they shouldn’t be in the job, and since it’s not the 1960s anymore, ‘not sexually harassing coworkers and/or customers’ is part of any job.
There are plenty of special needs people who manage to hold down jobs without sexually harassing people, blaming the victim of harassment, don’t try to make it the victim’s fault for standing up to bad behavior.
Oh sure, you’re fine with double standards when they benefit you, but as soon as one works against you, it’s all, “Oh noes, the horror!” Damn, talk about your dou—
There are people who are born without filters between their brain and their mouth, for whatever reason (certain forms of autism and various intellectual disabilities come to mind). No amount of “training” can create that filter. It’s like “training” somebody with congenital blindness to distinguish colors–the basic equipment isn’t there.
Assuming that every special needs person has the exact same abilities and disabilities as every other special needs person is, however, disgusting.
That’s right. Besides a grown adult and a mature professional person should be able to handle the odd comment here and there and filter out something said by a person with a disability.
If someone is actually so severely developmentally disabled that they can’t learn not to make explicit sexual comments to other people, then they should be on disability as they are not able to actually perform the requirements of a real job. Same thing if they can’t stop hitting people, or fondling people, or if they yell and scream and high volumes routinely.
Plus if you actually read Urbanredneck’s post, the people he’s talking about ARE clearly trainable, because he says that the company they’re placed at should provide them with training on how not to sexually harass people. Why would he say that the company should provide training if the training wouldn’t actually work?
“A disability” is not a license to treat other people badly, and a grown adult should not have to tolerate sexual harassment at work, and certainly a customer of a store shouldn’t have to tolerate it from employees of a store. There’s also a pretty big difference between ‘the odd comment’ and ‘behavior that, when reported, leads to an immediate firing’. And there’s a big difference between blaming the victim of harassment for reporting it instead of the company for being too quick to fire if it’s actually inconsequential.
‘Think of the developmentally disabled’ doesn’t excuse your blaming the victim of sexual harassment for daring to report it.
I don’t think you’ve been around very many people with different kinds of mental disabilities, and this is influencing and impairing your views.
A person doesn’t have to have very severe developmental disabilities to lack the filter I mentioned. Apparently you are presuming that only gibbering idiots are in that position, and you are incorrect.
Think of an analogy such as dyslexia. Some people’s brains are just wired differently; there’s evidence that people with dyslexia have observable structural differences in the anatomy of their brains. They may be of near-normal or even above-normal intelligence, but the neurons fire in different patterns. There are no intervention methods that can “cure” dyslexia. The methods (“training”) concerns how to manage and compensate for symptoms. Even after years of training, your brain still fires in different patterns and you still have many of the same difficulties in reading and/or hearing language; you are just better at handling those difficulties.
Similarly, people who make inappropriate outbursts may be quite intelligent and very good at their specific job tasks, and thus consigning them to live on disability is entirely inappropriate.
If you actually read Urbanredneck’s post, he’s talking about two separate groups of people (that’s why there’s a “1” and “2”). One group of people lack the filter altogether; training is unlikely to be of much use here because you can’t be trained to use a filter that simply doesn’t exist. The mouth goes into motion before the brain goes into gear, so by the time you think about what you are saying, it’s already been said.
The second group of people are those who simply lack social intelligence, who can’t tell when a woman is being polite versus when she’s flirting. THIS group can benefit from training on social interactions; it’s not training on how not to sexually harass people so much as training on how to read body language and interpret speech to grasp who is being minimally polite and wants you to go away versus who is showing genuine interest and would appreciate you coming around to talk frequently. Such training is not guaranteed (misinterpreting a situation happens to everybody), but it can improve reactions.
The odd comment from the special needs guy in the mail room is in fact grounds for immediate termination in many companies; this “pretty big difference” you see doesn’t exist in large swathes of the real world.
Definitions of sexual harassment usually revolve around the intent or purpose of creating a hostile environment, or of making sexual favors or submitting to sexual conduct a condition of employment. Is the guy in the mail room who simply doesn’t grasp that “nice boobs” isn’t appropriate to say really INTENDING to harass you?
There are a lot of people in bad bad workplace situations. Making a huge stink every time the disabled guy in the mail room says something inappropriate is trivializing and detracting from real problems.
Part of being grownup and mature is recognizing when people are doing something because they want to versus because they have little or no control.