Sexual Harassment At The Workplace

The term of sexual harassment defined by the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) as

”unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favor, and other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature constitute sexual harassment when submission to or rejection of this conduct explicitly or implicitly affects an individual’s employment, unreasonably interferes with an individual’s work performance, or creates an intimidating, hostile or offensive work environment”.

Basically, sexual harassment is a forced sexual favor by ones without the permission of the other. This disgusting phenomenon was usually done by high-profile individuals abusing their power to satisfy their sexual needs without any consent from the victims. The victims who usually low-rank employee afraid to do anything as it may cost their position at their workplace. According to an article published by ReachOut entitle “What is sexual harassment?”, nobody deserved to be sexually harassed by anyone. I will state my agreement with the article because sexual harassment will only become a traumatic event to the victims, causing depression, suicide, low productivity at work, and causing high employee turnover. No positive outcome will comes from it.

Connection is important for one’s to survive in the business world. Connection with others whether especially those who in the same field can be used as a jumping stone to become successful. The better a business relationship people have with others, the greater the possibility for one’s to become success. But this system often mis-used by people to abuse other people who try to build the connection that they needed. This is the main reason why sexual harassment occur in the workplace. Sexual harassment can cause several mental problems to the victims. One of them are post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) which create a repetitive nightmare about the traumatic event and causing them to constantly avoid people or things that make them remember about the harassment. Most likely the individual will also have feelings isolation and loneliness. She’ll suffer from trauma. There are also victims who feel humbled and guilty and who are no longer as perfect as before sexual harassment and disgust. They are also marginalized by society (MyHealth, 2019). This is unfair for the victims as they suffer PTSD due to forced sexual activities, but the doer left with their pleasure fulfilled.

The victims will also suffer to depression due to sexual harassment. Depression is very common to find but it is a severe mental issue that gives bad effects on how peoples act and make their decision in their daily life. When people are sexually harassed especially by their boss, the employee will feel betrayed and they surely scared to tell anybody and keep silence about it. This is because, it may cost their position in the company. The boss will do anything in their power to keep their image clean. If the victim would not stay silence, the boss may consider firing the victim or change he or she to another department as a warning. This would leave the victims with loneliness and worries as they have no one to share their problems and feel scared losing their jobs or the worst-case scenario that could happen is it may happen again. When this occur, depression started to fill their life. Depression can cause anxiety, fatigue, conflict, panic, and helplessness to them anytime, anywhere.

If the victim is not treated well, all the mental health problems that caused by sexual harassment could lead to suicide. The repetitive nightmare due to PTSD and depression is more than enough to make a person to consider attempt of suicide. The stress that they received become heavier as time flies. One half of the suicide that occur worldwide is depression related case (Jerry, 2019). Negative feeling such as despair, scared all the time, feeling lonely, no dignity and stressfulness will always accompany the victim days and night. A normal person could not handle all the stress that produced by the situation on their own. It will become bad to worse as time flies, Thus, they could take the easiest way to solve their problems which is by taking their own life.

Just like the victims, the company will also take a negative impact when their employees are involved in sexual harassment. One of the negative impacts is it will damage the company’s public image. This is very crucial as the image of a company is one of the most important assets for them compete in the business world. when a company possess a good public image, more customers will buy the goods or services that they provide. This is because it plays an important role to make the customers feels guaranteed that the goods and services that they purchase is form the best. In additions, image of a company is not for the view for the customers alone, it is also affecting the media, shareholders, and investors decision whether to do business with them or not (Harsh, 2016). It is hard to construct a good corporate image, but it is easy to destroy it. Imagine if a male boss sexually harassed a female employee and it spread to the whole internet community, it may lead to the downfall of the company. The worst case that can happen is the investors will stop investing, the company’s stock price decreased drastically forcing the shareholders to pull back and customers will start to boycott the company’s product.

Last but not least, sexual harassment at the workplace can cause high employee turnover. Research conducted and shows that when sexual harassment occurs in workplace, the employee turnover increases (Chan et al. 2008). This is because sexual harassment creates a negative workplace and a negative workplace like that is not suitable for worker to stay. The target or those who involved to the sexual harassment most likely the one who will change their jobs to another company. They would prefer to start anew compare to receiving constant shame every day. The company received loss every time an employee resigned. The company lost its worker and the cost of replacing an employee is not cheap. It is hard for a company to find a new worker as toxic environment is not preferable for them. This can cause a lot of damage to the company.

In brief, sexual harassment in the workplace brings nothing but deadly blow to the person involved and those who around them including the company itself. It will become a traumatic event to the victims which making them to feel depressed which can lead to suicide. The company will face a big loss due to productivity became low and high employee turnover due to sexual harassment. The process of rehabilitation to both individual and the company is hard to accomplish. It will only bring loss to both company and the person in terms of money and time. The aftermath is dangerous especially to the sexual harassment is a growing social problem in our society. Thus, appropriate action should be taken to prevent this from happening. Society must defend their rights and speak up.