In my opinion, it isn’t harassment if you haven’t voiced any displeasure. In fact, at this point, you can even voice it more casually than has been indicated here. “Hey, man. I don’t like having my butt touched,” is how I would say it, modified to the colloquial language used in the office.
I’d save the stern version for if that doesn’t work.
Oh what a difference a comma makes.
knees, and hands…
It’s a legitimate question to ask. A lot of minor things like this can be resolved simply by saying “Please don’t do that.” The manager may not realize that it bothers you (regardless of whether you think he should or not) and will stop. If it works, problem solved. A lot of people jump immediately to formal action for some things which could better be resolved between the two parties directly.
Conversely, you could answer HR’s question by saying “Because I’m afraid of negative repercussions” or “Because he intimidates me” or even “Because I consider this serious enough to warrant formally reporting it”. In which case you were right to take it to HR.
Now, admittedly, HR are frequently a bunch of ineffectual jerks who minimize your complaints and make the situation worse. But that has nothing to do with asking that question.
Whether it’s technically sexual harassment or not is moot, in my book. The key point is that your colleague doesn’t like it. I assume if he were comfortable in telling his supervisor to quit it, he would have done so by now. Your question about using the anonymous line also indicates that one or both of you are intimidated by the supervisor. I’m assuming that your co-worker is concerned there might be repercussions from the supervisor if he mans up and tells the supe to knock it off.
Yet that really is what he needs to do, maybe in a firm-but-humorous way. The other thing is to document, document, document. He should write down the date and time of every butt smack. You (independent of him) should document every time he’s told you of an incident. Without documentation, it’s tough to make a case later on, if it comes to that.
HR* is* there to protect the company, mainly from lawsuits. Their acronym should be CYA (or COA). They are not going to offer your colleague support. If he talks to HR, he should be prepared that they may blame the victim; however, there will be a record of him talking to them, which may also be valuable later on. The company will not want a wrongful discharge suit, if it comes to that. They may also tell your colleague it’s his fault for not speaking up or some other BS, but behind the scenes, there’s a good chance they’ll tell the supervisor to knock it off. (They’re not there for him, either.)
Your work partner does need to find out if this is happening to other people, and if so, how they’ve responded. And no, IANAL. This is just from training sessions and personal experience.
I feel like I need to defend HR here. Disclaimer: I work in HR, but not in employee relations and I do not deal with sexual harassment complaints.
The first thing to do, in a healthy working environment, is to give everyone involved benefit of the doubt until there is evidence of malicious intent. That’s why the first step, if the aggrieved employee is comfortable, is to ask the manager to stop hitting him on the butt. This might be awkward but it doesn’t have to be confrontational and 90% of the time it will end right there.
If the employee feels any negative repercussions from that discussion, or if the manager continues the unwanted behavior, at that point its appropriate to go to HR. If I were the employee I would also write down each time the unwanted contact of behavior happened, so as not to rely on his own memory when describing the situation to HR.
Do you pay HR or does the company pay them?
Now that that’s established, who do you think HR is looking to protect here? In my experience, HR is interested in mediating everty issue in house, utterly regardless of justice, fairness, and what actually happened, towards their ultimate goal which is to prevent the company from being sued over negligence in preventing sexual harassment. If this means asking an innocent person to apologize in writing for doing something he/she never did, so that the complaining person will sign an agreement saying that the matter has been settled and she/he will not seek further legal remedies, then that is what they’ll do–anything up to and including peddling your rights away to the extent you’ll let them.
HR is NOT your friend.
If it’s a ‘just a guy thing’, then the smackee should respond in the ‘just a guy’ way:
“Dude, you spank me once more, I deck you.”
If you say it with a smile on your face, you can get away with saying almost anything to a ‘good ol’ boy’.
Sports I accept, but social situations? Cite? Not in my neighborhood, anyways.
ETA: What digs said, except my comment would be more along the lines of, “Touch me again and I’m gonna fuck you up.”
Yeah, survey says “only if those ‘social situations’ are drunken gay disco parties”.
Seriously, smacking someone’s butt… at work? Ewwwwww…
Please let us know as soon as your friend stands up to this guy and hopefully tell us it’s resolved.
If I had trouble having this discussion, I’d probably use a polite excuse.
“Hey, I have a zit back there… please don’t.”
“I had Mexican last night, man, it hurts back there anyway. Please leave it alone.”
No hurt feelings, and I doubt if the problem will recur.
How do people even ever think this is OK? Touching someone’s butt, even in a friendly smack?
Because football coaches do it, and they’re technically management.
In my professional capacity I would advise against threats of physical violence, which HR tends to take very seriously.
Sorry, but someone smacks me on the ass and a threat of physical violence is going to be an absolute best case scenario.
No, that’s an issue that goes directly to HR because it is an unambiguously sexual act that the reasonable person could be expected to find offensive.
The standards laid out in the sexual harassment training I had to take when starting my new job were pretty clear that the reasonable person test is a major factor in determining whether or not something is actionable sexual harassment. Things the reasonable person could be expected to find sexual and/or objectionable (dick-waving, boob-grabbing, quid pro quo offers/demands, kissing/licking, nasty jokes or questions about someone’s sex life or body) are automatically considered harassment. Things outside that range, that might not bother other people but make you uncomfortable (think the Drew Carey episode with the French fry cartoon), can be considered sexual harassment, but only if you tell the other person their behavior is unwelcome or objectionable and they then continue it. Basically, if someone has no reason to think they’re offending you, it’s just innocent social interaction, but if they know they’re offending and deliberately continue, that’s harassment.
The situation in the OP is a fuzzy area. Opposite-sex ass-smacking is considered open-and-shut harassment because there’s no commonly-acccepted non-sexual context for that. Same-sex butt-smacking, otoh, does have such a context. People on sports teams do it all the damn time, and apparently nobody but me thinks it’s at all homoerotic. At least one of the butt-smacks mentioned has happened in exactly that sort of context, a team-based “go get 'em” thing, which makes it hard to argue that this is clearly sexual behavior the reasonable person would find offensive.
For anything that’s not completely unambiguous, your best bet is to notify the offender that they’re being offensive and document it. A whole lot of the time, that alone will stop the behavior, because people are more likely to say/do offensive things through thoughtlessness than a deliberate desire to make you uncomfortable. And if it doesn’t stop, you then have a clear-cut, unambiguous, documented case that someone is deliberately and repeatedly engaging in behavior they know is offensive, which makes you more likely to get results when you go to HR.
I was going to chime in to support the “man up and say something to the boss” advice, but this reminded me that some individuals are so close-minded, defensive, and unreasonable that it can be dangerous to say anything to them at all.
How? Is the manager going to physically assault the person? This is a manager who is clueless as to what is appropriate behaviour for his environment. Having worked with guys like the manager, I am guessing that his intentions are good, he is showing his appreciation by trying to be the cool guy. The manager is a doofus. Running off to HR without attempting to solve the problem is only going to make things worse.
The recipient should not say ‘please’ when addressing the manager. I will not ask you to stop good-gaming me, I will instruct you. There will not be a question, and there will not be a respectful tone.
I would find it odd and be a little uncomfortable too. But I would have dealt with it straight off. First time, no later than the second time it happened, I would have said in a light hearted tone: Dude, I’m not really a butt-smacking kind of guy.
If it happened again I would approach him alone in his office and explain that I don’t care for it.
After that I might speak to HR.
As a former consultant to HR, add my vote to exactly what toofs said.
That looks about the right pace Khadaji.
People are just different in how physical they are. I walked past a woman at work today, that I know but haven’t really spoken to much. She was talking with someone else and as I passed she squeezed my arm and smiled at me, nodding hello without interrupting her conversation. I assumed it was related to the fact that we were in a group together at a conference last week, but it seemed odd to me.
I mentioned it to my boss just gossiping, saying that I thought it was odd, that had it been someone I was close with it would be meaningless but… He said he had it happen with her too and that’s just the way she is.
It doesn’t annoy me but now that I know who cares. If it did annoy me I’d let her know.