Sexual harassment normalized in Britain: Activist
Press TV has interviewed Arzu Merali, with the Islamic Human Rights Commission from London, about a new study that shows more than half of women living in the United Kingdom have been sexually abused at work.
The following is a rough transcription of the interview.
Press TV: Give us your thoughts on the quite shocking findings of the survey.
Merali: This is a really welcome report. It's been an unspoken truth in the United Kingdom. The work environment is highly aggressive for women and sexual harassment has just been normalized.
So, we're really hoping now that this is going to force not just employees but actually the government to be very interventionist about this. It remains to be seen if they will, but it lost at least these truths of being spoken.
Press TV: Well, let's go over some of the findings of this survey. Nearly one in five respondents said the perpetrators were their direct supervisors and they had refrained from reporting the sexual harassment cases. Around a quarter of them rather said they felt they would not be taken seriously or believed if they reported the harassments. Do you think that surveys like this will change that culture of silence from the victims.
Merali: Not by itself, no, because this is a very deeply ingrained problem and said time and again when it comes to the issue of reporting rape or child sexual abuse that there is a very real fear that in reporting, they will either be mocked, disbelieved or even frankly if they are believed nothing will come out of the reporting process.
So, going through reporting is in itself repeating the trauma for many people, but it's a small step. As I said, we have never really recognized this is an issue in the United Kingdom before, rather we've been promoting the idea that somehow we live in a very equal and egalitarian society.
Well, now I think and hope people around the world will see that there are reasons that actually women don't progress very highly in the United Kingdom. They might be widely in the workforce but they're suffering incredible abuse.
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