When faced with uninvited advances at work, many of us keep quiet, inadvertently protecting our tormenters. It’s one of the myriad complex reasons why, despite zero tolerance policies and the advances of #MeToo, sexual harassment has not gone away.

Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size It was a table for two, tucked down the back of a discreet and exclusive restaurant perched on a tall hotel building, floating high above the shimmering sapphire of Sydney. Walking in to meet this imposing Australian politician for lunch, I faltered for a moment: Why were we here? Even getting to the entrance of this hushed and gleaming place had felt like a succession of doors closing behind me and the rest of the world. It was like going into the lair of a Bond villain. He was already seated and didn’t get up. Wine was poured, chewy political gossip was served. This man was pompous and vain as only one whose power is waning can be – he was far too eager to show that he knew more than I might think. It was the mid-1990s, and the conversation moved to then US President Bill Clinton, and a female acquaintance who had just met him in Washington. He leaned forward, a half-smile: “She said that she never really understood his whole charisma thing until she met him, but when she did she said she just wanted to fall to her knees and open her mouth … you know what I mean?” Why were we here? In my profession you simply can’t ever be lost for words; you have to come up with something. In my memory I simply made stammering noises, but surely I was a little more put together than that. This wasn’t my first trip to maybe-she’ll-go-down-on-me land. And we were sitting here in dazzling daylight with waiters all around. So why did I feel so scared? Me? A senior journalist with a name and reputation? Why did I want to grab my bag and flee? The conversation rolled awkwardly backwards and forwards between us for a while as he continued to drop in oblique sexual references and I kept dragging things back to the politically mundane. Then the strangest but also most banal thing happened: I just decided I’d had enough. I was going to burn this contact, forget about any useful intelligence he might provide me into the future and go home. This whole little scene was bullshit: it was miserably uncomfortable for me while clearly hugely enjoyable for him. Screw that. I thanked him for seeing me, pushed my chair back, and said I had to go. No explanation why. Now it was his turn for his mouth to swing open. I have never let political contacts pay for me – I always cover my own bill. Not today: this overpriced little show was going to be on him. I left and have never spoken to him again. We keep the secrets without even being aware of making the decision. This is the bookend to the truth that we forget more harassment than we remember. In the aftermath of the first waves of #MeToo in 2017, the cry went up very early that men’s lives were being ruined, that accusations were being flung like confetti and even the most “minor” transgressions were being revealed to devastating effect. It’s been an effective counter-strategy used by those hoping to discredit an international movement that was daily gaining ground. Except it isn’t what either a woman’s lifetime of experiences or the available evidence shows: the enduring truth is that we keep men’s secrets.


According to the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC), in the five years to 2018 some 39 per cent of women and, surprisingly, 26 per cent of men experienced workplace sexual harassment. The clear majority of workplace sexual harassment was perpetrated by men: 79 per cent of victims were sexually harassed by one or more males. The numbers are huge, but of all those harassed in those five years only one in five made an official report. In universities the figures are even more alarming: 94 per cent of those harassed on campus, and even more shockingly 84 per cent of those who were assaulted did not report it. We keep the secrets without even being aware of making the decision. This is the bookend to the truth that we forget more harassment than we remember. By the time the heavy door closed softly behind me on that Sydney lunch, I had unthinkingly decided to keep this man’s secret. I told no one, and have never mentioned it again until telling this story here. It’s one of so many. I got a million of ’em, as the comedian said: they’re just not that funny. I was a very different person then to who I am today. I’m pretty sure these days I’d tell my lunch companion that I knew exactly what he was doing and I’d give him precisely one chance to knock it off. Or would I? A few months after I gave a widely reported speech in 2018 about a life of working in the media, I was invited to a friend’s house for dinner. In the speech, I’d told a number of #MeToo stories about various men I’d worked with, including one about the senior editor who said to my manager, when that manager was passionately arguing for a pay rise for me, “Are you f…ing her or something?” (I didn’t get the pay rise, by the way.) We arrived to be told that Mr-Are-You-F…ing-Her-or-Something would be joining us. I’d sometimes wondered if any of the blokes recognised themselves in the stories I told in that speech. (One certainly didn’t: he described my speech as a “powerful contribution to the literature of #MeToo ...” I remember being amazed at his amnesia, thinking, “Well, mate – you’d know.”) Was this man going to recognise the memory as one that included him? If I’ve forgotten more harassment than I remember; maybe he has, too? We walked in, I took one look at his face, and it was miserably clear. He’d read the speech all right, and he remembered, too. He looked like he was going to be sick. We greeted each other warmly, and in that moment, in that extraordinary choice I made to step forward, take his hand and receive the offered peck on the cheek, I took on a time-honoured and self-annihilating role: I was going to keep his secret. We were about to have a lovely night. The food and wine would be superb; we were all dressed up; we deserved a nice evening. As it turned out, like generations before me, I wasn’t going to rock the boat. But here’s the fascinating thing: I wasn’t even aware of making that choice. The part of me trained in being a survivor, in making nice and laughing it off – that part just kicked in and took over without me even realising it. We had a lovely night.


'The part of me trained in being a survivor, in making nice and laughing it off – that part just kicked in and took over without me even realising it': Virginia Trioli. Credit:Kristoffer Paulsen We keep men’s secrets, and the aching burden that comes with them, and probably always will – this is the reality check that needs to be made against the impression that 2017 sparked a free-for-all of destructive and baseless accusations from women everywhere. The truth is that people rarely move quickly and without hesitation to make complaints – and if ultimately they do decide to complain, it’s not without grave reflection and often after being seriously advised against it. The figures show that women, and men, keep their counsel – and they have good reason: “I’ve heard from several women that #MeToo galvanised them to come forward but now they wish they hadn’t – because the cost has been too high: a reputation ruined, job prospects affected.” That’s Kate Jenkins, the sexual discrimination commissioner with the AHRC. She’s been working in discrimination and equal opportunity law since graduating from university. Jenkins says that for her, one of the best things about #MeToo is that by sheer weight of numbers it started to reveal the cost, and the harm, of sexual harassment. In 2018, the AHRC launched the National Inquiry into Sexual Harassment in Australian Workplaces, looking at the prevalence, nature and reporting of harassment, as well as its drivers. As you would expect, it was inundated with public submissions – almost 500 of them – and so many of them read the same way. The submissions reveal harassment of women and some men that made the victims worried, anxious, angry and sick, and they almost all share similar qualities: there’s the stonewalling from personnel and management if they decide to make a complaint; poor if any resolution of the matter (“Just tell him it’s making you uncomfortable”; “Well, nobody else has seen him do this”); and finally, the complainant leaves: unwell and in no fit state to work again. “You’re socially punished if you complain,” says Jenkins. “If someone speaks up, the response seems to be deny, defend and accuse: rarely to admit and apologise. Many people still don’t report – and that’s because they doubt anything will change and they fear it will just make things worse.” Luke Foley, the former NSW ALP leader, and ABC journalist Ashleigh Raper (inset). Credit: My ABC colleague Ashleigh Raper has lived the most painful example of this. At a Christmas party in 2016, she says the then NSW opposition leader, the ALP’s Luke Foley, came up behind her and placed his hands down the back of her dress, inside her underpants and rested them on her buttocks. “I completely froze,” she said. The incident was witnessed by another reporter, whom she implored to tell no one. “I just didn’t need that shit in my life,” she tells me.


“I knew that mine would be a very public, high stakes thing; it wasn’t even an option that I would raise it.” But time went on and the secret became a burden. Women were starting to speak out about their harassment, and Raper wondered if she’d done the right thing. “A lot of women were being brave – and I wasn’t.” Then the matter was taken out of her hands. In a stunning display of political opportunism, the incident was raised two years later by Foley’s political enemies under parliamentary privilege at the state, and then federal, level. It was astonishing: the woman had remained silent, but two blokes decided to speak out “for” her. The revelations forced Raper’s hand and she went public with the story. Foley initially rang her to apologise after the parliamentary allegations, but then he stood down from the leadership, publicly denying the matter and promising to sue. He later withdrew that threat. In an echo of the eternal hopes of mothers for their competent daughters to just handle it themselves, Raper wryly remembers her progressive mother telling her she should have just “punched him on the nose” but that he didn’t deserve to lose his job. Raper thinks a bit differently: “I was never out to get him, but I did think NSW deserved a better premier than that.” No one has yet been able to put a price on the cost to business of sexual harassment: reputational damage, loss of key performers, high staff turnover and poor productivity is hard to quantify. The personal cost for the person making an allegation is also incalculable. Jenkins shares with me the story of a female lawyer who was harassed at work by a colleague years ago. She complained, the matter became excruciatingly difficult to handle in the workplace, she was offered a financial settlement and she left. The man who harassed her is now a global partner and the woman, 20 years later, is not earning anything near the level she would have been if she’d stayed. I read through some of the submissions to the AHRC’s sexual harassment inquiry at random. There is the woman working with one of the state police forces who was offered massages and repeatedly badgered and called at home by an officer. When she complained to her superiors, she was told to say, “Thank you for the offer of the massage but I will have to decline.” The attention didn’t stop. He told her it was all a joke. She left. There is the PhD student whose supervisor referred to her at a work dinner as “one of my bitches” and threatened to “wipe my arse with you” if her work went in a direction he didn’t approve. She left. One man in an HR consultancy was repeatedly harassed by his female director, who told him stories of sleeping with clients, called him “hot” and rubbed his thighs. He left.


The stories are old, sad and tired. The same old unwanted attention and sexualised behaviour. The same old slow and gutless responses from the managers (“Oh, is he doing that again?”). And the same desultory exit from a place where a worker simply couldn’t get their job done in peace. But the most powerful shared element of these stories is the one that loops us right back to the 1992 controversy at Melbourne University’s Ormond College. There, two female students went to the police with complaints of sexual assault against the college master, Alan Gregory, following the college’s decision to stand by the master after the two complainants, along with a third woman, said he’d sexually harassed and groped them at a college party. The cases went to court, where one was dismissed; the other was found proven but overturned on appeal. Alan Gregory then resigned. Helen Garner wrote her 1995 bestseller The First Stone about the furore, polarising readers over whether the students had been right to take their allegations to the law. I responded a year later with my own book, Generation F, in which I argued that the women had the right to use laws that had been created by Garner’s generation of women and feminists exactly in this way. Nearly 25 years on, it seems we still find it impossible to understand why someone should be so traumatised by something that seems so minor. Admit it – we can read all the studies by all the agencies and still not get it. It’s one of the great failings of our imagination, and perhaps even our shared humanity, that often we can’t put ourselves in another’s place and understand why they weren’t able to be stronger, more resilient, more light-hearted. Why has, say, an unwanted shoulder massage left them broken, and unable to work, for god’s sake? The submissions are raw, first-person narratives, and the authors cannot disguise their vulnerabilities and insecurities: the hyper-vigilant nature of one; the combative and offence-taking personality of another. One has a ready-made anger, seemingly waiting to be found. She has been harassed, she says, “everywhere I go”, and while it’s possibly true, it doesn’t take too much imagination to envision the pursed lips and raised eyebrow of the HR employee taking down this declaration. Another troublemaker. I’m reminded of the work of US journalist Rebecca Traister, who in 2019 looked at the life and work consequences for the women who spoke out about harassment as part of #MeToo. She wrote: “We crane our necks to see the wreckage of powerful male careers without even bothering to wonder about the women whose lives and careers those men damaged … a scrap of ambiguity entrances us in powerful men, while we find less dramatic or interesting the complexities and internal contradictions of those who stepped forward against them.” Anyone working in sexual assault knows this conundrum: the victim’s ordinary complexities and contradictions become, when held up to the scrutiny of the law, the very weaknesses and vulnerabilities that can be exploited to diminish credibility and damage a claim. You know how it goes: she’s not a team player, she’s overly familiar; she didn’t complain at the time, she makes a big deal of everything; she once said nice things about her assailant, she’s a difficult woman.

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