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Rana Elmir: How Do We Stop Sexual Harassment, Once and For All?
It was a tough week for the Arab-American community.
Our worst-kept secret was revealed by the Free Press and a sexual harassment scandal has rocked the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee — an institution better known for standing with victims of abuse than attempting to silence them for political expediency and financial stability.
I got my start in civil rights at the ADC. In my brief time there, I learned that my passion for justice and equality runs as deep as my intolerance for sexism and the leadership vacuum that plagues the organization then and now.
While I did not experience the pervasive sexual harassment many others have claimed, there were clues. There was a culture of hostility, sexual innuendo and casual touching. There were knowing looks and nervous chatter when pictures of busty women were passed around the office by the director. I, like many others, ignored it. I put my head down, continued my work and eventually left.
Months later, when Rana Abbas, the then-ADC deputy director, confided in me for the first time about the daily humiliation and degradation she suffered, I got queasy. When I learned that the women who came forward over the years were met with silence and, worse, feigned indignation, I was outraged. In that one decision, ADC had reinforced their worst fears — they were powerless to do anything to stop the harassment.
Despite clear and tested federal and state laws outlawing gender discrimination and sexual harassment in the workplace, verbal, physical and psychological harassment on the job is a daily reality for many women — and men.
While strong, zero-tolerance policies and effective complaint processes are ostensibly linked to eliminating sexual harassment, without a commitment to investigating and addressing accusations, employers are ill-equipped to rid the workplace of the pernicious cancer that is sexual harassment.
The allegations leveled at ADC are serious, and everyone involved deserves a fair and thorough investigation, but that investigation should start at the top. There is potentially a lot of blame to go around — the organization that had repeated opportunities and failed to properly investigate the allegations, members of the community who failed to intercede on behalf of numerous young women who had come forward through the years, and the man at the heart of the scandal.
In the past week, many Arab-American leaders across the country have stepped forward, setting their longstanding relationships aside, to call for an investigation. At the same time, community message boards, the comments sections of news articles and social media feeds were flooded with examples of the “just-world fallacy” — our need to make sense out of the nonsensical and believe the world is just and fair at all times. It’s hard for us to imagine that good people do bad things, or that bad things happen to good people, and so we rationalize sexual violence and harassment by blaming the victim or, as ADC apparently did, ignoring the accusations.
We question a victim’s motivations and actions and just hope it will all go away in an attempt to distance ourselves from the possibility that it could happen to us, our sisters or our daughters. Or perhaps it is simply that we can’t fathom that a community leader could be culpable.
Regardless, the end result is the same; by blaming, shaming and ignoring the victim, we fail to hold those responsible accountable, and we discourage other victims from coming forward for fear of being judged.
In our quest for justice, however, our purpose must be broader than punishing individual perpetrators in the courts or, worse, the court of public opinion.
We must also hold ourselves accountable. How did we get to this point and, more importantly, how do we, as a society, build a movement to truly end sexual harassment, sexism and violence against women wherever it occurs?
We must take our words to action and seek fundamental social change. It starts at every dinner table and should reverberate through our schools, religious institutions and community organizations.
At stake is the inherent right of every woman to live with dignity.
Rana Elmir
Detroit Free Press