Aoibhinn Ní Shúilleabháin’s account in of her two-year ordeal of sexual harassment at UCD described both her power and her powerlessness.
She contributed significantly to our understanding of the work that still needs to be done to attain women’s equality when she told her story. But victims have no duty or obligation whatsoever to make this world a better place.
Here was a highly successful professional with a burgeoning career who commanded authority, with a respected public voice. She resisted and persisted and got the justice that is available to such victims today.
That justice, after two years and many interactions with authorities, was a respite from harassment and some punishment for her harasser.
One of the surprises in this European survey was that the more educated a woman was, the more likely she was to experience sexual harassment
Yet for all her resilience and determination she says “it was just exhausting”, she describes being “nerve-wracked” in the face of this one man’s sexual harassment and the inaction and inertia of the systems that should have protected her but were not designed with her in mind.
Those systems were largely designed to engage in a case-by-case way with individual complaints in a way that discharges the institution’s legal duty of care. They are largely not designed to challenge systems of power and hierarchy embedded in our culture. And so they fail.
Her story tells us of the precarious nature of women’s equality and empowerment when it can so easily and quickly be dismantled. Women and other vulnerable groups, in all walks of life, are impacted and their lives limited by sexual harassment.
A 2012 European study by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights found that 48 per cent of Irish girls and women aged 15 and older had experienced sexual harassment; 12 per cent had been stalked; 40 per cent said they had been shocked and embarrassed; and 13 per cent that they felt guilt at being harassed.
One of the surprises in this European survey was that the more educated a woman was, the more likely she was to experience sexual harassment – 38 per cent of those educated to primary level, secondary 43 per cent and third level 65 per cent. One might almost imagine that sexual harassment was designed to keep women in their place, for indeed it does exactly that.
Survey
In the more recent NUIG Sexual Experiences Survey of Higher Education Institutes by Pádraig MacNeela and his team in 2020, 41 per cent of women said they had changed their own behaviour to avoid the person who had sexually harassed them as much as possible.
Only 24 per cent of the women in the survey said they felt safe from sexual assault and harassment while socialising. For those who had already experienced harassment and other forms of sexual misconduct, only 13 per cent felt safe at night.
When discrimination can disregard women and vulnerable groups’ individual advancements, and women’s only protection is to limit their own freedom, it is clear the system that needs our attention. No institution in any sector which delivers tools against victimisation for its clients, students and staff but without changing its own culture can be trusted.
We would urge the Minister to think of the framework for consent as a sector-wide experiment to create the type of extinction event we need to wipe out sexual harassment
In response to Aoibhinn Ní Shúilleabháin’s calm outlining of the harassment she experienced, the inaction of systems that should have protected her and the impact it had on her life and career, Minister for Further and Higher Education Simon Harris warned that the dinosaurs’ days are numbered.
Dinosaurs are a good analogy: they were not hunted out one by one to extinction, rather they died out due to a global event. This event so radically changed their environment that they could no longer survive.
Asking women and all victims to supply their stories, their trauma and indeed their futures to allow recalcitrant institutions to hunt out perpetrators, one by one, so that we may, through their courage and labour, vindicate them, is an unethical demand.
Framework for consent
The Minister arrived into his post in June with a road map in place to create whole-of-system cultural change in the higher education sector, the ‘framework for consent’.
When I proposed the framework to the minister of State for higher education in 2018, I understood the higher-education sector to be a proving ground for what must happen across all sectors of society.
This systemic activation of our third-level sector is in fact a pilot programme. If we prove this model here we can and must apply it everywhere else.
There are any number of other sectors in our society that do not have an adequate sexual harassment frameworks in place, including our second-level schools, businesses, industries and places of public service.
We would urge the Minister to think of the framework for consent as a sector-wide experiment to create the type of extinction event we need to wipe out sexual harassment.
It is fitting that the testing ground for cultural change is a sector with a mission to shape our future society. This extinction event is a fundamental step in any ambition for an equal society.
Clíona Saidléar is executive director of Rape Crisis Network Ireland