While it's heartening to see some of these high-profile offenders face consequences for their behavior, it's more than a little frustrating that it still takes such overwhelming evidence, and access to major platforms like the Times, for this to occur. Many people have no such access.
Young working women, women of color, indigenous women, and transgender women in particular have experienced disproportionate amounts of sexual harassment and assault.
In particular, sexual harassment is a routine experience for restaurant, agricultural, home care, and domestic workers. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission receives more than 12,000 allegations of sex-based harassment each year, with women accounting for about 83 percent of the complainants. And that's with only something like three out of four people experiencing workplace harassment reporting it.
Harassment on the job is so common that it is typically shrugged off as just part of the job. In a national survey of 4,300 restaurant workers by Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, more than one in ten workers reported that they or a co-worker had experienced sexual harassment. That's likely an undercount.
One focus group respondent put it succinctly: "It's inevitable. If it's not verbal assault, someone wants to rub up against you."
Activist and advocate Tarana Burke, who is black, started the Me Too movement ten years ago, but it took prominent white actresses chiming in for the mainstream culture to finally sit up and take notice.
They've been speaking about this for years. Activist and advocate Tarana Burke, who is black, started the Me Too movement ten years ago, but it took prominent white actresses chiming in for the mainstream culture to finally sit up and take notice. As Jane Fonda put it, people are listening to Weinstein's accusers because "they're famous and white."
As journalist Lin Farley noted years ago, if you're not particularly wealthy or famous, speaking out against predatory behavior is far more likely to result in losing your job and facing economic instability. If your workplace is hostile, including the HR department, there's little choice but to put up with the harassment or leave the job.
Most assaults are never reported, largely because the person targeted feels like they have more to lose by doing so than not. Reality tends to bear that out, with precious few offenders ever facing conviction or even proper jail time for their crimes, and too many victims dragged over the coals in the public square, loss of employment, lawsuits, physical threats, verbal harassment, and more. There's a nationwide backlog of rape kits that need to be tested and no real political will to fix that.
We've made it as difficult as possible for victims to seek justice.