Creepy sexual harasser on a US government salary

The BBQ Pit
261

I think these two quotes get at what I feel is one of the worst things about this kind of situation. Whatever the victim/target of the inappropriate behavior does in response, it’s wrong. It’s too passive, or it’s too aggressive/attention seeking. It’s overreacting or underreacting. And somehow it’s a much bigger deal than the original offensive behavior. The target of the harassment is held to an impossible standard of perfection in their response, while the harasser’s much more inappropriate behavior is either largely ignored or outright disbelieved.

Like you with the face, I doubt that speaking up in the moment is really going to make much difference to someone who is deliberately groping coworkers. And if the touching is truly accidental, the touch-er is not going to be spared any embarrassment if the touch-ee loudly says “Hey, get your hands off me!” in front of a bunch of other coworkers rather than quietly taking the matter to a superior.

I’m generally in favor of the touch-ee speaking up in the moment mostly because I think that otherwise s/he is likely to be very self-critical (“Why didn’t I just say something?”) later. But I don’t think the targets of unwanted sexual attention are under any special moral obligation to confront the touch-ers. There will be times where doing so would only escalate the situation, but more importantly, the REAL problem is that inappropriate touching was happening in the first place. The victim certainly shouldn’t be faulted for being uncertain, confused, frightened, or angry. Not everyone is going to transform into a hero the moment they become the target of inappropriate behavior, and it’s ridiculous to expect that they should.

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And I don’t think that too many people disagree on what’s sexual harassment. Even the guy with the roaming hands knew that he was crossing boundaries, that’s why he was careful to do so “accidentally”.

I’m sorry you managed to reach the ripe old age of 21 without learning how to act appropriately in the workplace, around women, and around women in the workplace. However, if you were that clueless, quite likely you offended people without sexually harassing them, too. Getting a rep as a sexual harasser didn’t help you, no…but obviously you didn’t read social skills very well if you couldn’t tell that you were offending people.

Would you have protested that your actions were innocent, if one of your female coworkers had told you to cut out the blue jokes, or to give her more space, or whatever you did? Or would you have immediately quit the behavior and offered an apology? Based on my experience, some guys will actually be unaware that their actions offended, but (again based on my experience) more guys will think that it’s hilarious to step up the offending behavior, even if they hadn’t known it was offensive before. “Oh, Sally doesn’t like dirty jokes? Let’s see how she likes THIS one, it’s filthy!”

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I once had a coworker like that. This guy started making offensive jokes one day (not sexual in nature, they were about Nazis and the Holocaust) and wouldn’t stop when I asked him to. This guy wasn’t a neo-Nazi or anything, he was a 20 year old guy with a perhaps less than fully mature sense of humor. I’m sure he thought he was being hilariously shocking. Anything I said in objection only seemed to inspire him further. I finally decided it was best to ignore him for the rest of the shift, although that wasn’t enough to get him drop it either. He kept making similar jokes until I got up to leave. As I was clocking out he asked me if I was really mad. I said yes, I was, and that his jokes had really crossed the line with me.

I talked to our supervisor at the beginning of my next shift, she had a word with him about it, and that was the end of the Nazi jokes.

This guy might very well have become bored with Nazi jokes on his own and stopped even without our boss’s intervention, but I don’t think he’d have recognized that such jokes were inappropriate for the workplace and offensive to his coworkers if he hadn’t heard it from HER. According to our supervisor, this guy was genuinely surprised when she told him that I’d been very upset by his jokes. Maybe he was just playing innocent with her or maybe he honestly hadn’t realized that my objections were serious, but I had very clearly told him that his jokes were inappropriate and that he was offending me. So he was lying to her or he was clueless, but either way my speaking up to him directly hadn’t made much of an impression.

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That has happened to me in my personal life, but not at work (but then, I work with 97% women–the men tend to be maintenance, doctors, and sometimes techs). I don’t like it in my “RL” either. Guys that do this are neither funny or happy sexually, IME. I tend to give them wide berth. But then, I’m not in my 20s anymore, so…

irishman–of course I would just ask the man who is bumping my leg with his bag to stop. That is a straightforward (one hopes) issue. If he continued to do it, though, I’d be less polite and perhaps go to HR. You cannot equate the two scenarios–the fact that the touch is intimate, covert and inappropriate is the complicating factor. Add in social mores, lack of assertiveness skills, potential for embarrassment etc and we arrive at the OP.

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If he hit my leg three times, I’d probably just move my leg out his way, even if it inconvenienced me a little bit. Asking someone to stop doing something accidental is not my style, generally. This is why in the anecdote I relayed about how I was felt up on the train, I initially chose to simply shift my position rather than ask him to back off of me. The latter is more confrontational than it has to be.

(If he hit my leg three times, but there’s NOT enough room for me to get out his way, then I’d say something politely to him. Clearly, if it’s so crowded that I’m not able to move my leg, mulitple bumps are quite likely and will likely not raise my suspicions. This is common sense.)

If, after moving my leg, he still found a way to keep bumping it (or some other part of me in an incongruous manner), then I’d probably say something harsh or at least give him a scary stare. But by the time I’m doing all of that, my opinion is pretty firm that something fishy going on. The only reason I’m telling him to stop is because he’s ticking me off and he needs to know that I’m about to hurt him if he doesn’t quit. It’s NOT to put him on notice that the clock on harrassment started at the point that I told him to stop, which is what you seem to be saying is important to defining harrassment. The clock started as soon as he touched me in a way that was unlikely to be accidental. And I trust myself to be able to appraise the circumstances well enough to ascertain that.

Do you really think there is even a remote possibility that a man who is intentionally doing this is really going to confess to what he’s doing? We wouldn’t need defense lawyers in the land you’re living in because every criminal would confess to their crimes. “Oh yes, sweetcheeks, I’m quite aware that I’m bumping your leg…and that’s not the only thing I’d like to bump, teehee!” Questioning the guy is not going to get you anything but denials, either truthful or dishonest ones. Asking him “are you aware you’re bumping my leg?” may be a nice way to get him to squirm and possibly shame him in front of his peers, but it’s not going to tell you anything about his intentions.

As to third parties, I’d talk about the incident to a friend (not necessarily a witness) and ask them if they thought I was overreacting about what seems like a pattern of suspect behaviors. And I wouldn’t tell them who I was talking about, just to preserve some objectivity. That seems like a pretty reasonable thing to do, actually. I’d trust a friend to give me some straight talk, not the guy who I have problems with.

Yes. I have a lot more control over myself than someone else, so why wouldn’t my first impulse be to move out of their way? That’s just common sense. Are you aware that most people are the same way? In a crowded train, most people don’t stand around saying “stop touching me…back up off me…please desist in touching my arm, sir.” They move to create space for themselves and others when the contact they perceive is accidental or incidental.

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Wanted to edit in but was too late:

Regarding my shifting over because of leg bumps, it really does depend on the circumstances. I might say something after the third tap if I think he’s honestly accidental, I might say something after the second if I suspect that he’s being inconsiderate about others’ space but is not being untoward. I might say after the 4th because I’m getting mad, regardless if its a “mistake” or not. Since this scenario doesn’t match the OP, though (bumping a leg with a bag sounds like something a kid would do for attention, not a sexual harrasser), we shouldn’t be overanalyzing this. My threshold of suspicion for a tap on the leg with an inanimate object is higher than a brush on the neck, thigh, or mid-back with a hand.

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TLDR

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No, we all seem to agree that reporting him to HR is right. Some are saying that confronting him first would be better. So, where re you getting that reporting him is wrong?

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I wasn’t speaking so much about this thread in particular but more about society in general, but Boyo Jim said he didn’t think this was worth going to HR about (#163). He did say Johanna was within her rights to do so, but he didn’t think she should. In the post just before that (#162) Malacandra does not say anything specifically about going or not going to HR, but says that Johanna should have seen the incident as “pretty small beer”. I don’t think one reports “small beer” to HR either. Irishman has indicated in several posts (see esp. #252) that he thinks some kinds of offenses should be dealt with personally instead of (not merely before) being reported to HR because otherwise you wind up with a “lawsuit culture”.

If you go back to the first page of the thread, before this man had even touched Johanna, you’ll see several posters suggesting that the other woman was probably “overreacting to an innocent accidental bump up against her” (MovingTarget, #13), which I’d also take to mean that the incident was not worth reporting.

That’s as much digging back through the thread as I’m willing to do.

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Well, yes, before when it was a 2nd hand FoaF story and one possible incident, things were different. Still, although some have said talking to/confronting him may be a better 1st step, no one has said she’d be **wrong **(your word) if she reported him. I think that talking to him 1st would be ideal,but I understand that that’s very difficult for some

Sure, we have a difference of opinion on what would be the best 1st step, but that hardly equates to "Whatever the victim/target of the inappropriate behavior does in response, it’s wrong. " Not even close, in fact it’s more like we have suggested a variety of *right * responses.

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I guess I’m not seeing a big distinction between saying that someone shouldn’t do something and saying that they are wrong to do it. You can split that hair if you like, but I think this thread is long enough without a bunch of bickering over semantics.

Indeed, if everyone can agree that Johanna did the right thing in reporting this incident then this thread should have ended several days ago. But if we’re all unanimous in feeling that she did the right thing then we can all stop here, with the final words on the subject being “Good for you, Johanna.”

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From Malacandra, just upthread, post # 259, who says that his HR record followed him throughout his civil service career. He didn’t tell us exactly what he did to deserve a little interview with HR, but apparently it was noted in his record, and he was shut out of the social aspects of his job. I believe that there have been more people who said that the person who experienced the harassment should just confront the offender and not get HR involved, but I’m not going to dig through this thread to find the posts right now.

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Sorry I wasn’t able to get to this sooner. Real life interfered.

eleanorigby said:

Thank you. That is the distinction I am trying to understand. If you have the same level of ambiguity, why does one circumstance rate immediate reporting to HR, while the other circumstance starts with a comment to the offender? Is it because of the nature of the offense?
you with the face said:

Fair enough.

No, it’s harrassment the moment you are harrassed. I just think that in ambiguous situations a direct comment can end the situation rather than waiting around to find out if he’s a harrasser or just clumsy.

I guess I’m trying to understand what are the real implications for a situation where the totally ambiguous bumping is wrongly interpreted and reported to HR as sexual harrassment when it wasn’t intended by the offender. Maybe a response from someone who works in HR can clarify.

The fear is that it is reported to HR, they investigate, and though the guy claims that it was inadvertent and unintentional, he is warned to be more alert, and then a note is placed in his file about “potential sexual harrasser” or “be on the lookout for masked sexual harrassment by touching in a manner that looks accidental” or whatever. Now this will follow him around. So even if there’s never another incident, suppose he wants to shift to another department, maybe for a pay grade increase. His new potential supervisor sees the note, thinks “I don’t need that problem”, and doesn’t transfer him. All over a misunderstanding?

That’s the concern being expressed by men. Sure there are creeps, and they need to be dealt with. But misunderstandings happen. Given the culture of sensitivity to SH claims and concerns over women feeling intimidated and all, is there a potential for the response to make a victim of the man?

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Man, this thread is STILL going?

I intnentionally stay away from the personnel side of my office’s practice, and I do not know if rules are different for sexual harrassment, but I do know that many disciplinary actions w/in fed gov’t employ are of limited duration. My agency - and I believe most if not all others - practices progressive discipline. For most first offenses you get verbal counselling, then a letter in your file, then a suspension, before dismissal. (Of course, something like workplace violence allows a more severe initial response, or skipping intermediary steps. Like I said, I am unaware if SH also allows such an exception.)

But say you are charged with violating some policy and a letter to that effect is placed in your personnel file. At some point - generally 12 months - that letter is removed from your file. And if you have not repeated that particulr offense during that period, you have a clear slate. After the period has run, a prior personnel action cannot be used as the basis for escalating the response to a subsequent offense. So conceivably an individual could be accused of the same type of violation every 13 months, and keep getting away with it.

But the guy in the OP’s case would most likely not bear a permanent scarlet letter as the result of this accusation. If he kept his hands to himself for 12 months or so, the accusation would likely be purged from his file.

I’ll also note that this type of progressive discipline is a reason why each victim of SH ought to report it each and every time. In the situation the OP mentioned, if the 2 reported it separately, it might have been viewed as a first and second offense, or a pattern, allowing more severe discipline. If they don’t report it, for disciplinary purposes it never happened.

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i’m an older guy. can i get her number?

276

Thanks, Dinsdale.

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This seems to me to be a case of the system working well - he was way over the mark, you had a word to boss, boss had an off the record word to offender, he wised up and stopped. All’s good - no need to go to HR.

I think that in the case of the OP the right thing was done by going to HR. The only thing that gives me a sense of disquiet is that the touching of Johanna was read in context of what happened to the younger girl. By the time Johanna was touched she had already labelled the guy a sexual harrasser, so of course she was going to react that way.

For the sake of argument, what if the touch to the younger had never happened, or if we accepted that it was accidental - would it still have been ok to report the guy for a few touches “near” the breast?

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There is a post on Jezebel about subway harassers that, although a bit of a hijack, is worth a look if you can’t wrap your head around the idea that women could doubt or misinterpret ‘overly friendly’ touches. Some of these women had guys’ crotches pressed against them – by strangers, in front of strangers, people who couldn’t have cared less if they made a scene or jabbed the guy – and they hesitated for fear of being wrong, kicking themselves later when they realized what had really happened. And there’s some bonus hair stroking.

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bengangmo said:

Yes.

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Sometimes that “natural fight response” can be the right one. I already posted my opinion - the creep should have been reported immediately.

As for myself, I’ve never had any problem bellowing “BACK OFF NOW!” There are those creeps who see anything less as a sign of weakness.