Tagged by d_s_t_e

~*~

This tag challenge was created to talk about something very important and very sensitive. Reading it might make you uncomfortable, and, if you are sensitive to certain triggers, it might make you more than just uncomfortable, but it is also crucially important for you to read this if you are uninformed about what sexual harassment is or what to do when it happens, and it is also crucially important for you to pass this on if any of your Wattpad followers are uninformed.

If you are one of the people who are sensitive to this trigger and you are still reading, I understand if you would like to stop. If you choose to continue anyway, I would like to deeply thank you for helping us to spread awareness to others.

For everyone else: I sincerely hope you don't stop reading this chapter just because it's unpleasant to think about. It's because it's a difficult topic that it is so important for us to be taking this effort. By reading this and passing it on, you might end up making a world of difference in your life and in the lives of others.

I'm sure you've all heard of sexual harassment, but there can be a lot of confusion and misinformation about what actually "counts" as sexual harassment. A person who is sexually harassing others might swear up and down that he or she was only joking, that she or he thought that the other person really wanted what was being done, or that what he or she did was perfectly normal and acceptable. 

A person who is sexually harassing someone will tend to do everything in her or his power to continue controlling the victim, including persuading him or her that what is being done to her or him isn't sexual harassment at all. Such a person will also tend to do everything in his or her power to convince other people that there is nothing wrong with what is being done. And sometimes these people can be so good at manipulation that witnesses, bystanders, and even the victims will believe these lies.

That's why it's important to know exactly what sexual harassment is and to know it so well that you will never allow yourself to be manipulated into thinking otherwise. Harassment is any kind of behavior that disturbs or upsets another person. It's characteristically repetitive, meaning that the behavior happens over and over again. Sexual harassment is any behavior of a sexual or romantic nature that disturbs or upsets another person.

Now, the most important part of that explanation is this: "disturbs or upsets another person". Sexual harassment is not defined according to what the behavior is. You can't look up some list that will tell you what specific actions count and what do not. Nor can you look up a list of what words or gestures count and what do not. It counts if it disturbs or upsets a victim. The person who gets to decide when it counts as sexual harassment isn't the person who did it. It isn't any person who witnessed it or heard about it and wants to give an opinion. The only person who gets to say whether it counts as sexual harassment is the person who suffered because of it. If it is making the victim uncomfortable, it counts.

That being said, we can give some general examples of what sexual harassment might look like on a site like Wattpad. First of all, sexual harassment can occur without any actual sex being involved. It might be the case that a person is sending messages that repeatedly ask the victim to give up his or her address so that they can meet there and have sex. It might be the case that all of the interactions are online and the person is pressuring the victim to send nude photos or to engage in sexual roleplaying.

It might not even be as closely linked to sex as that. The word "sexual" can also refer to things that most of us would commonly refer to as "romantic". It can be sexual harassment if the victim is being pressured into simply going on a date or returning feelings of affection. Sexual harassment might start out looking just like an innocent confession of romantic interest where the person being confessed to does not return the interest. 

It might not become a problem until the victim begins to feel uncomfortable or upset because he or she has already told the other person that she or he is not interested and still that person continues to send messages asking the victim to reconsider or trying to pressure the victim into saying something romantic in return or agreeing to start dating. It can even count if the person doesn't seem to be asking for anything but is still sending romantic messages after the victim has asked for it to stop. If the person is saying or doing anything after the victim has said that it upsets him or her, it is definitely harassment.

What do you do if you find that you're being harassed online? If a person has done something that she or he might not realize made you upset or uncomfortable (especially if it only happened once), start by speaking up. You need to clearly tell the person how it made you feel and ask for it to never happen again. If this is enough to make the person apologize and he or she really doesn't do anything like what happened ever again, then you can feel good about maybe having put a stop to things before they even turned into harassment.

If, on the other hand, the person continues even after you've spoken up, it's time to start protecting yourself. If the person is sending you messages on Wattpad, you can block him or her by going to her or his profile, clicking or tapping on the three dots next to "message", and selecting "Mute". For more information on what this means, see the inline comments.

You should also think about protecting other people so that they don't become victims of the same behavior. You can find the option to report someone right underneath the mute option. More details can be found in the inline comments.

It is very important for you to do everything you can to protect yourself from a person who is sexually harassing you. Even if the person is or was your friend, it is never acceptable to allow sexual harassment to continue. It will only cause you more suffering while encouraging the person who is causing the suffering to continue hurting you. It might make him or her believe that what she or he is doing isn't all that bad or even that it isn't wrong at all. At the very least, it will show him or her that nothing bad will happen if she or he continues doing it (because he or she obviously doesn't care about your suffering if it's still going on after you've been clear about it), so why would she or he ever stop?

It's often extremely difficult for the victims of sexual harassment to talk about what happened, but it can often be a very good thing to do if it helps you or anyone else. If the person who was harassing you keeps popping back up with different accounts or is communicating outside of Wattpad with other people that you know, you might be able to save someone else from becoming a victim.

If you're a witness to sexual harassment online or if a person being harassed has told you about what is happening, it is very important for you to offer support to the victim in whatever way you can. If you witnessed sexual harassment happening, you should report the person. If a victim is telling you about what happened, you should encourage her or him to report it and take every other action described above. You should not spread around the story to anybody else without permission from the victim. As mentioned, it can be extremely difficult for the victim to talk about what happened, and putting the story out in the open can actually cause more pain. 

Don't speak for the victim, encourage him or her to speak for her or himself. The only exception to this is if you happen to be in a position where it is your responsibility to take action in order to protect other people. If the harasser is part of a group account on Wattpad, for example, you might have to report the problem to the leader(s) of the account so that appropriate action can be taken to protect everyone else in the group. Another example would be if you know someone who might be at risk and you want to warn her or him before anything bad happens. Even if you do this, though, you should only give as much information and proof as is absolutely needed to protect people, and you should talk to as few people as possible unless you have permission from the victim.  

~*~

I've been fortunate. I'll be the first person to admit that.

My parents are happily married and both have good jobs. I grew up in affluent areas with excellent schools. All I've had to worry about are petty teenage issues.

Yet here I am, talking about sexual harassment.

I have no story of my own to tell. Which is good, don't get me wrong. The idea that anyone has a story to tell is a reflection of how our society seems to accept sexual harassment as a norm.

Instead of telling my own personal experience, allow me to tell the story of a woman many of you reading may not know due to your age.

I'll put a warning here that I'll be using direct text from her testimony, and it's not exactly appropriate for all audiences. What she describes is rather graphic. And I mean very graphic.

Before we begin, yes, I manage to bring everything back to politics. It's like it's my identity on Wattpad at this point... for better or worse.  

The year is 1991 and Justice Thurgood Marshall is announcing his retirement.

President George H. W. Bush has picked his nominee.

Holding a seat on the United States Appeal Court of the District of Columbia Circuit, Clarence Thomas seemed to be the ideal candidate as potentially the second African American to serve the Supreme Court. His confirmation was going smoothly, and the hearings were finished. 

Until one woman's story came into the light.

For those of you too young to know, that woman was Anita Hill. 

An interview between her and the FBI leaked, causing the Senate to reopen hearings and summon Hill to testify in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

It is so disgustingly clear that the men interrogating her either didn't believe her or didn't care.

And yes, I mean men. Every single person interrogating her was a white male.

Hill testified several inappropriate encounters with Justice Thomas. Allow me to post in some of the "highlights."

"After a brief discussion of work, he would turn the conversation to a discussion of sexual matters. His conversations were very vivid. He spoke about acts that he had seen in pornographic films involving such matters as women having sex with animals and films showing group sex or rape scenes.

He talked about pornographic materials depicting individuals with large penises or large breasts involving various sex acts. On several occasions, Thomas told me graphically of his own sexual prowess.

Because I was extremely uncomfortable talking about sex with him at all, and particularly in such a graphic way, I told him that I did not want to talk about this subject. I would also try to change the subject to education matters or to non-sexual personal matters, such as his background or his beliefs.

My efforts to change the subject were rarely successful."

Oh and there's this infamous one.

"One of the oddest episodes I remember was an occasion in which Thomas was drinking a Coke in his office. He got up from the table at which we were working, went over to his desk to get the Coke, looked at the can and asked, "Who has put pubic hair on my Coke?" "

Despite the fact Hill had taken a polygraph test that supported her statement while Thomas vehemently refused to take one, the disbelief on the panel was obvious.  

Sen. Alen Specter chose to ask, "How could [Hill] allow this kind of reprehensible behavior to go on without doing something about it?"

Sen. Alan K. Simpson asked Hill, "If what you say this man said to you occurred, why in God's name, when he left his position of power or status or authority over you — and you left it in 1983 — why in God's name would you ever speak to a man like that the rest of your life?"    

Senator John Danforth from Missouri suggested Hill had erotomania, which is a condition where an individual harbors a delusion that someone more powerful is in love with her.  

The last one stands on its own for how disgusting it is, but Hill's own testimony answered the first two questions before they were asked.

Hill stated that "On, as I recall, the last day of my employment at the EEOC in the summer of 1983, I did have dinner with Clarence Thomas. We went directly from work to a restaurant near the office. We talked about the work I had done, both at Education and at the EEOC. He told me that he was pleased with all of it except for an article and speech that I had done for him while we were at the Office for Civil Rights. Finally, he made a comment that I will vividly remember. He said that if I ever told anyone of his behavior that it would ruin his career. This was not an apology, nor was it an explanation. That was his last remark about the possibility of our going out or reference to his behavior."

Furthermore, she states even earlier in her testimony that, "On other occasions, he referred to the size of his own penis as being larger than normal, and he also spoke on some occasions of the pleasures he had given to women with oral sex. At this point, late 1982, I began to feel severe stress on the job. I began to be concerned that Clarence Thomas might take out his anger with me by degrading me or not giving me important assignments. I also thought that he might find an excuse for dismissing me. In January of 1983, I began looking for another job. I was handicapped because I feared that if he found out, he might make it difficult for me to find other employment, and I might be dismissed from the job I had. Another factor that made my search more difficult was that there was a period-this was during a period-of a hiring freeze in the government."

Anita Hill's testimony ended, and the confirmation of Clarence Thomas was put to vote in the Senate.

Obviously, he was confirmed, and he is now currently serving on the United States Supreme Court as the most senior justice.

The fallout of the hearing of a young black woman being interrogated of a panel full of white men led to what became known as the "Year of the Women" in 1992 where a historic number of women ran for office.

Her testimony led the nation as a whole to begin to address workplace harassment, and she continues to be a symbol today in the wake of the #MeToo movement.

For any further reference, I'll link the full text of Hill's testimony and several other resources.

https://youtu.be/jV2bxoIIAzI

https://youtu.be/dHiAls8loz4

~*~

I was going to end it there, but I decided the need to add these facts in as well. They don't all relate to sexual harassment, but they all relate to a culture that allows sexual harassment to happen. I'm sharing this here because I've found many people don't seem to understand how bad it is for women in Asia.

In early August, it came out that Tokyo Medical University had been manipulating tests scores for over a decade to reduce the number of women admitted to the school to under 30%.

Seoul is now having all public bathrooms checked daily for spy cameras because of how bad the issue of hidden cameras has become.

It is a genuine issue that women get groped on Japanese trains, and nobody does anything to help them. The solution has been to make women-only train cars, yet some men protest that it is discrimination.

8 in 10 men from South Korean have admitted to abusing their partners in a relationship.

The Chinese government is censoring #MeToo posts directed at people in power that victims are posting.

A member of the K-Pop group Apink posted a picture of her phone case that said, "Girls Can Do Anything," only to be forced to delete the photo after being accused of supporting feminism.

Several tweets on #私達は女性差別に怒っていい (It's okay for us to be angry about sexism toward women) translate to women speaking of how they were forced to resign once they chose to have children.

This is a problem everywhere. While many of the above cases fall under the category of general sexism, that does not excuse them or any other crimes.

There's a certain level of scrutiny that comes to claims of sexual harassment whenever women choose to speak out.

A good example of this is when a female Japanese journalist came out with her story of how the finance minister acted in an inappropriate way to her, and the response was, "Why didn't her company stop her from covering him then?"

I feel like linking articles will be better than me simply writing more shallow facts. How many of you will actually read them is questionable, but I'll have a link to a resource on every single one of the above facts that will go more in detail.

~*~

I feel like I went totally off-topic, but the purpose of this tag is to spread awareness of the issue. I'll be tagging several people I know in the hope they may also choose to participate. All it requires is for you to post to text on the top portion of this chapter and write a personal reflection. It can be a personal experience, or maybe a giant mess like I just wrote. I'll post the link to the document with the text in the inline comment.

ikuyakirishima-
RedPandaWorld
irideae
crimscent
panpour
UnisonRaider
blue___22
NaivEevee
LittleTyrunt
EeveelutionBrandi
manteia
gofishstories
FallaffaTheLamaQueen

Don't think just because I may not have tagged you that I don't want you to do this tag. The goal of this tag was to spread awareness on what sexual harassment is, and I hope everyone can get behind that.