Trigger warning!

Beyond the Handshake, Into the Bedroom

Sexual harassment policies are needed across every workplace to guide the human interactions within that working environment. Having sexual harassment policies in the working sphere especially within government owned organisations, helps to regulate and guide human relations thus, fostering for a conducive and safe working environment for the staff. This is why, I am asking the African Union through the AU Women , Gender and Youth Directorate to establish and implement working sexual harassment policies in government owned organisations across Africa.

Organisations across the world need to contextualize global policies and implement them at their national level, these policies do not only need to be drafted but also communicated clearly and executed in order to create safe and enabling working environment for the survivors and staff. Having these policies, humanizes the survivors and reduces the risk of another falling victim to it. Sexual harassment policies if not properly implemented can give way to sexual violence, causing survivors to fall into depression, loss of jobs and sometimes loss of dreams.

“Violence against women is endemic in every country and culture, causing harm to millions of women and their families, and has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic”. “But unlike COVID-19, violence against women cannot be stopped with a vaccine. We can only fight it with deep-rooted and sustained efforts – by governments, communities and individuals – to change harmful attitudes, improve access to opportunities and services for women and girls, and foster healthy and mutually respectful relationships.” (Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General, Source: WHO report on sexual harassment; https://www.who.int/news/item/09-03-2021-devastatingly-pervasive-1-in-3-women-globally-experience-violence

According to the World Health Organisation report 2021, sexual violence occurs in mostly younger women and 1 out of 3 women globally experience violence. This resonates with a 2017 global study on sexual harassment in the workplace that shows that one third of the world countries do not have sexual harassment policies and those who do use non-disclosure agreement which sometimes hides the perpetrator, and with the limited time to report and work on these cases, I believe the statute of limitation for these policies in the workplace needs to be extended.

I was 14 when I shook my teacher’s hands outside on the classroom block, he tickled the middle of my palm with his fingers and I felt that was off, when I asked my classmates what that meant, they informed me that it was a sexual gesture. It was believable because this same man always made suggestive quotes in class which wasn’t the physical and sexual health education our parents would approve of us learning. I learned how to avoid him from then on. I couldn’t report him because I believed he had so much power and there was no policy put in place for that, we heard about report bullying, but I was not prepared for reporting discomfort. Now, I am grown and working with women whose stories go beyond the handshake, to losing their jobs, losing opportunities and not being able to report these acts due to lack of working sexual harassment policies in the workplace in Africa.

The notion of a woman’s body as her currency has dampened the future of those who has chosen their brains and hands as their currency, whose hard work and creative expressions will never see the light of day because a higher up would rather see their pants before their dreams can see the sunlight. And sadly, this is the current reality of our working women across Africa, whose big brains are sometimes neglected in the workplace and emphasis is placed on the curves of the waist rather than the structure of the brains.

This is a very serious issues as seen in the multiple similar stories coming out from women across various parts of Africa. And while we hear these stories everyday beyond our bar room conversations by the roadside and in the corridors of our virtual and physical offices, it is important to note that, everyone needs this safe space to be better at their jobs and produce better outputs. A safe environment drives productivity, better work culture, better work health thus driving overall organisational health.

This why, we need the AU women, Gender and Youth Directorate to drive the conversation and build a petition by the next AU summit in February 2022 for a working, African context sexual harassment policies to be implemented across all government owned offices across Africa, these policies are not to just be limited within the organisations but extended to their auxiliary bodies and institutions under each ministries.

Thank you

#Handsoffmybody