A new legal duty for employers to anticipate sexual harassment came into effect on 26 October 2024.
The amendment to the Equality Act requires bosses to both identify the risk and take “reasonable steps” to prevent it.
Going into 2025, the Trade Union Congress (TUC) discussed why this is so important and what still needs to be done to ensure employee safety in the workplace.
The TUC is a confederation of unions with 48 affiliates and accounts for about 5.5 million trade union members across England and Wales.
The confederation have published many reports detailing their findings on the issue of sexual harassment in the workplace, including the susceptibility of certain groups of people to harassment and how it can be combatted.
Their 2016 report, Still Just a Bit of Banter, found that one in two women had experienced sexual harassment while at work, prompting further research.
The most recent report looked more specifically at the experience of black women and found that 65% of respondents to a survey reported experiencing sexual harassment of some form at work.
Meanwhile, 35% had experienced negative, gender-based attitudes that diminish women in general or black women specifically.
The October legislation is therefore welcomed and recognised as necessary by the TUC.
But what is it exactly?
The full name of the new legislation is The Worker Protection (Amendment of Equality Act 2010) Act 2023.
This new update introduces a legal duty on employers to take a preventative measures against sexual harassment for the first time.
This could take the form of ensuring there is an adequate framework for reporting harassment or implementing a risk assessment scheme, if not present already.
Claims cannot be brought against the employer for the preventative duty but if a claim for sexual harassment is successful, it will be examined.
If the preventative duty has not been met, the employer could be forced to raise compensation by up to 25%.
The TUC’s women’s officer Nikki Pound said: “We really welcome the Worker’s Protection Act.
“I think the key thing about the act is how it should reshape the conversation that we can have around sexual harassment because it’s about prevention and it’s about taking proactive steps.”
Pound maintained the proactive nature of the legislation now means it should be harder for employers to turn a blind eye to issues in their workplace as they are bound to implement safety measures regardless of whether anything has been reported.
It marks a change in the way sexual harassment at work is tackled.
She said: “Sexual harassment doesn’t happen in a vacuum, it happens as part of that spectrum of behaviours that starts with these sort of things that people consider to be everyday sexism and jokes.
“[These things] create an environment where sexual harassment can happen. So [the new legislation] is really important and it’s a really powerful tool.”
NEW 🚨 | From 26th October, employers will have a legal obligation to take steps to protect their workers from sexual harassment.
— Trades Union Congress (@The_TUC) September 26, 2024
Including:
✅ Anti harassment policy
✅ Regular risk assessments
The TUC believes that the October amendment is a positive and progressive change, but that more should be done to improve working conditions.
Pound said: “One of the things that we’ve called for in this report, and it’s a longstanding call for us, is that within the existing Equality Act, there is a provision to enact dual discrimination.”
The Black Women’s Experience of Sexual Harassment in the Workplace report presented the issue of dual discrimination by detailing how black women are targeted.
When surveyed, 36% said they felt less confident at work, 27% felt isolated at work and 22% said that their experience had had a negative impact on their performance at work.
Pound emphasised how it is important black women are not forced to choose between the racial or misogynistic aspect of workplace aggression when they take their employer to court.
She said: “A lot of the experiences that they have [are] so intertwined with racism and sexism, and so you can’t kind of just distinguish between the two. The two actually compound each other.
“One of the biggest barriers to understanding people’s experiences is that people do not feel safe to come forward.
“They either think it won’t be taken seriously, they’ll be victimised further.”
In the report it was found that 58% of black women who experienced sexual harassment did not report it to their employer, with 38% of respondents saying they did not think it would be taken seriously if they did report it.
Pound said: “[It was so important to] actually just create a stage where women who shared similar life experiences could come together and talk about those [knowing] that they’re in a room with a lot of people who just get it.”
Mitigating for prevalent abuse before it becomes officially reported is a big step as the TUC’s reports show that it may exist even if the boss does not know about it.
Preventative measures could therefore be effective at protecting those at risk, although it is too soon to collect evidence with regards to the impact of this legislation.
Even if effective, action plans could be more ambitious in anticipating the multiplicity of harassment and understanding the experience of different groups of people.
The TUC hopes more progress will be made in 2025.
Picture credit: Free to use from Freepik
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