The Conspiracy of Inaction on Sexual Abuse and Harassment
Caution --- This Video Contains Sensitive Material In Brutal Adult Terminology:
When Gretchen Carlson spoke out about her experience of workplace sexual
harassment, it inspired women everywhere to take their power back and
tell the world what happened to them. In a remarkable, fierce talk, she
tells her story -- and identifies three specific things we can all do to
create safer places to work. "We will no longer be underestimated,
intimidated or set back," Carlson says. "We will stand up and speak up
and have our voices heard. We will be the women we were meant to be."
The Horace Mann School in the Bronx
I
caught the journalism bug in high school. I was fortunate to be a
scholarship student at a rigorous New York private school with a weekly
newspaper, and some of the older students I admired taught me the power
that the written word could have.
When
we complained verbally to teachers or administrators about a problem,
they could ignore us.
When we put our arguments in writing, they tended
to pay attention. So we became teenage crusaders, inveighing against
perceived injustices. Sometimes, the subjects were sophomoric
(“censorship” of the talent show), but often they were serious
(inequality, racism, South African divestment).
Three decades later, I look back on the experience with deep gratitude. I also look back with haunting regret.
For
all of our crusading, we ignored the biggest story at the school. We
were aware of the rumors — the teachers who made comments about girls’
bodies, the teacher suspiciously friendly with female students, the
music teacher solicitous of male students.
But
we never wrote about it. As best as I can remember, we didn’t even talk
about writing about it. We didn’t know how. It seemed too dark, too
uncertain.
In 2012, thetruthcameout.
My school — Horace Mann — had tolerated sexual molestation for decades.
Administrators whose most solemn responsibility was protecting children
instead chose to look the other way and protect child abusers. The
music teacher, a cultish figure named Johannes Somary, was the worst
abuser during my time. One of his victims later committed suicide.
The current torrent of harassment revelations — following Jodi Kantor’s and Megan Twohey’s Times exposé
of Harvey Weinstein — has caused me to think back on high school again,
because every big case has had something in common with Horace Mann.
People knew.
Even
if they didn’t know the details — I didn’t know what Somary was
actually doing — they knew that something was wrong. At Fox News, many
knew that Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly mistreated women. At ABC, The New Republic
and NPR, respectively, people talked about the harassment by Mark
Halperin, Leon Wieseltier and Michael Oreskes. In Hollywood, people
talked about Weinstein and Kevin Spacey — not to mention Donald Trump,
who nonetheless became a heavily promoted reality star.
As the screenwriter Scott Rosenberg has written
about Weinstein, “Everybody knew.” (The full quotation includes a
colloquial adverb of emphasis between “everybody” and “knew.”)
“Maybe we didn’t know the degree. The magnitude of the awfulness,” Rosenberg continued. “But we knew something.”
And
yet no one did anything about it. People were afraid to, or didn’t know
how. So they — we — became part of an unwitting conspiracy of inaction.
This
conspiracy has spanned the relatively powerless, like interns,
secretaries and teenagers, to the wealthy and famous, as well as every
level of power in between. Jill Abramson, my old boss, is one of the
toughest journalists I know. Still, as a midlevel manager two decades
ago, she didn’t go over the head of her old boss — Oreskes — to report
his behavior at The Times, as she regretfully said last week.
Post-Weinstein,
the emphasis has been on holding other abusers accountable. So far,
each seems to deserve his delayed consequences. (And, yes, the severity
of the various abuses varies.) I hope the exposés continue.
But
post facto truth and punishment are not enough. We also need to figure
out how to prevent future abuse. We need to make inaction feel
unacceptable.
Doing
so will require changes from both organizations and individuals. Every
workplace and school should be asking itself: Do people here know how to
report a suspicion of abuse? Do they feel comfortable doing so even
when, as is typical, they have only an incomplete sense of it?
At most places, the answers remain no and no.
Organizations need “multiple, accessible avenues of complaint,” as a federal task force
concluded. These avenues should be blazingly obvious, not buried in a
corporate policy that nobody reads. They should include anonymous
reporting options. They should feed into a process that’s confidential
and fair, including to the accused.
Every leader should also read case studies, to understand how frequently other leaders, at Horace Mann, NPR
and elsewhere, have bungled these situations, usually through
cowardice. Often, a victim or someone else did summon the courage to
come forward, only to have the institution do little or nothing.
But
the changes can’t be only about policies and organizations. They need
to be personal, too. I’m guessing that you get angry when you think
about the abuse committed by Weinstein, O’Reilly, Trump or Somary —
about the long-lasting misery they have inflicted on other human beings.
I certainly do.
The
next time I see something that doesn’t seem quite right, I’m going to
remember that anger. One conspiracy of inaction is more than enough for a
lifetime.
