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ABSTRACT
This article examines how and in what ways workplace ‘sexual harassment’ achieved social and legal recognition in the UK news press following its importation from North America in the mid-1970s. It assesses the role of feminist campaigners working within institutions (trade unions, human rights advocacy, the Equal Opportunities Commission and journalism itself) in shifting public discourse and in using the media to educate and promote social change. We demonstrate that the trajectory was far from a linear progression. Initial hostility within the popular press in the early 1980s was replaced with sympathetic coverage across the party-political spectrum by 1990. However, this consensus broke down in the 1990s as a result of politicised and polarised coverage of a series of claims brought by women in the services and armed forces against the backdrop of debates about ‘compensation culture’ and membership of the European Union. Whilst change was effected at the level of employment law, formal practice and in the human resources policies of larger employers, ‘sexual harassment myths’ were resilient as a thread within ‘everyday cultural discourse’ and, by implication, within informal workplace cultures.
Acknowledgments
We are extremely grateful to our expert Advisory Group (Gender Equalities at Work project) for their invaluable guidance as we have developed the work over the last few years. We are grateful, too, to the journal’s anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. Farley, Sexual Shakedown, 33.
2. Boyle, #MeToo, 24.
3. Ibid., 120.
4. Lambertz, ‘Sexual Harassment’; Barber, ‘Stolen Goods’; Moss, ‘Sexual Harassment’; on New York, see Keire, ‘Shouting Abuse.’
5. Wise and Stanley, Georgie Porgie.
6. Zippel, Politics, 71.
7. TUC, Sexual Harassment, 4.
8. London Rape Crisis Centre, Sexual Violence, 5–6
9. Jolly, Sisterhood, p.173.
10. Rees, ‘Look Back.’
11. Browne, Women’s Liberation; Flaherty, ‘Women’s Liberation’; Jolly, Sisterhood, 170. See also Setch, ‘Women’s Liberation.’
12. Browne, Women’s Liberation.
13. Bingham, Family Newspapers.
14. Ibid., 6.
15. Nicholson, ‘Digital.’
16. The Mirror was the most popular UK paper with a circulation of 3.85 million in 1976, until overtaken by The Sun in 1978 and then the Daily Mail by 1999 (when its readership had fallen to 2,307 million). The circulation of the Daily Mail was 1,755 million in 1976 and 2,378 million in 1999. Readership of the Guardian (306,000 in 1976 and 403,000 in 1999) and The Times (310,000 in 1976 and 735,000 in 1999) was much smaller. See Negrine, ‘The Media,’ 197 and Bingham and Conboy, Tabloid Century, 18–19.
17. Nicholson, ‘Digital’; Bingham, ‘Digitization’; Crymble, Technology.
18. Bingham, ‘It Would Be Better’; Entman, ‘Framing.’
19. Entman, ‘Framing,’ 52.
20. Faludi, Backlash; Mendes and Kay, ‘Feminism’; Mendes, Feminism in the News.
21. Farley, Sexual Shakedown. See also Zippel, Politics, 58–61: as chair of the EEOC in the USA 1977–81, Norton was responsible for issuing guidelines on sexual harassment that framed them as a violation of the Civil Rights Act 1964.
22. Mendes, Feminism, 553–4; Bingham and Conboys, Tabloid Century, 161–2.
23. NALGO, Sexual Harassment.
24. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act 1964. Mackinnon, Sexual Harassment, 5–6.
25. SDA 1975, respectively, (s.1(1) a)) and (s.6(2)(b)).
26. Sedley and Benn, Sexual Harassment, 30.
27. Whilst the NCCL was an established institution (founded in 1934), its Women’s Rights Committee had been set up in 1973 specifically to lobby for the introduction of a sex discrimination bill. See Moores, Civil Liberties.
28. NCCL, Annual Report 1982.
29. Sedley and Benn, Sexual Harassment, 5–6 and 20.
30. NCCL, Annual Report 1982.
31. Although its print run was limited to around 20,000 (insignificant in comparison to mainstream news media), Spare Rib was one of the most important publications that had grown out of the women’s liberation movement because of its longevity (1972–1992) and because it was stocked in ‘mainstream’ newsagents such as John Menzies and W H Smiths; and Delap, ‘Feminist Business,’ 255 and 259.
32. Chambers et al., Women and Journalism, 37–39.
33. NCCL, ‘Press ridicules,’ 2.
34. Wise and Stanley, Georgie Porgie, 32.
35. Galt, ‘Researching Around.’
36. Chambers et al. Women in Journalism, 12. Helen McCarthy characterises ‘post-feminism’ as ‘a new sensibility, culturally resonant in Britain from the 1990s, which denies or downplays the persistence of structural gender inequalities and interprets women’s actions as expressive at all times of free choice’ (McCarthy, ‘I don’t know how she does it’, 146). Also useful here is Angela McRobbie’s evaluation of ‘post-feminism’ as ‘new constraining forms of gender power which operate through the granting of capacity’ (McRobbie, Aftermath,12–13).
37. Morris, ‘Newspapers,’ 42.
38. Hall, ‘Encoding and Decoding.’
39. On ‘personalisation’ as a news value in the 1970s in relation to criminal court cases specifically, see Chibnall, Law.
40. EOC, Legal Committee, Briefing on Sexual harassment, L/03/NOV/99.
41. Under the 1976 Sex Discrimination (Northern Ireland) Order (the equivalent of the 1975 SDA in Britain).
42. EOCNI, 8th Report; interview with Evelyn Collins, conducted by Ashlee Christoffersen, 7 April 2022 (withheld for anon review process).
43. EOCNI, 7th Report, 6.
44. EOCNI, 12th Report.
45. Strathclyde Regional Council v. Porcelli [1986] IRLR 134.
46. Coote and Campbell, Sweet Freedom, 9 and 47.
47. Pattinson, Sexual Harassment, 111.
48. See, for example, Smart ed., Regulating Womanhood and Smart, Law; Lees, Carnal Knowledge.
49. Pattinson, Sexual Harassment.
50. EOC data, quoted in Mirror, 20 April 1989, W1, and Guardian, 25 June 1992, 1.
51. EOC, Legal Committee, Briefing.
52. The events have been extensively covered in, for example, Hill, Believing; Morrison (ed.), Race-ing Justice.
53. Zippel, Politics, 100. This may also relate to a European policy context in which the significance of race has been generally denied and ‘othered’ to the USA; see, for example, Emejulu and Bassel.
54. Crenshaw, ‘Whose story,’ 403.
55. Ibid, 404.
56. Bingham, Family Newspapers, 27.
57. Southall Black Sisters, Against the Grain; Thomlinson, Race and Ethnicity. SBS was predominantly Asian, although it had participated in the wider Black infrastructure (for example the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent) in prior periods.
58. European Commission Recommendation 92/131/EEC of 27 Nov 1981 on the Protection of the Dignity of Women and Men at Work [Official Journal L 49 of 24.02.1992].
59. Zippel Politics, p. 85.
60. Faludi, Backlash, had discussed the earlier Fatal Attraction (1987), which had also starred Michael Douglas but alongside Glenn Close as a homicidal women pursuing the man who had rejected her. For Faludi ‘backlash’ was the attempt to devalue feminism through a series of myths that suggested that feminism had achieved its ends and that women who had benefitted from it were psychotic and unhappy.
61. Marshall v. Southampton and South-West Area Health Authority No. 2, 1993, IRLR 445; Sex Discrimination and Equal Pay (Remedies) Regulations 1993. Statutory Instrument 1993 No 2798.
62. The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry. Report of an Inquiry by Sir William Macpherson of Cluny (1999) Cm 4262-I.
63. Burton v De Vere Hotels [1996] IRLR 596).
64. Barmes, ‘Silencing.’
65. Young, ‘Moral panic,’ 14. Our intention is not to read the Locker case through the lens of ‘Moral panic’ but to make the point that some of the literature of ‘Moral panic’ is useful in understanding why Locker became a focal point of concern.
66. Ibid., 4.
67. The EOC used formal investigation three times in relation to sexual harassment: into the Royal Mail in 2003, the Ministry of Defence (armed services) in 2005, and HM Prison Service in 2006. It is notable that these were all male-dominated occupations.
68. Directive 2002/73/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 23 September 2002 (amending Council Directive 76/207/EEC).
69. Barmes, ‘Silencing.’
70. Bingham, Family Newspapers, 26; and Chambers et al, Women and Journalism, 93.
71. Lees, Carnal Knowledge; Smith, Rape Trials
72. Barmes, ‘Silencing,’ 23.
73. Boyle, #MeToo.
74. Ibid., 43.