Sexual Harassment Stories and Experiences

Anonymous, Indiana  

     My sexual harassment started my junior year of college when I started a new job working at the Student Center on campus.  A man that worked for the food service on campus started to harass me after I had only worked there for a month.  He was so gross about it too.  He wanted me to sleep with him, and he was always staring at me in ways that made me feel uncomfortable. 

     After three month of the harassment, I had enough and reported his behavior to my supervisor.  He found out, and from that moment on he started to watch my every move at work.  He would walk by my office and just watch me, or stand in the doorways of rooms I was in, just so I would have to walk past him to get out.  It got so bad that my friends and a co-worker of mine came up with their own schedule, they made sure that someone was there with me at all times when I was working because my friends were scared for my personal safety. 

     My supervisors and Human Resources didn’t seem to mind.  They told me I could not tell anyone what was going on, and that I just needed to sit down and talk out my problems with him so that we could put this past us and move on and be able to work together again.  They had no intention of doing anything to make sure that I would be safe at school or work.  This all happened on a college campus, so I saw him at work, but I also saw him on campus when I was there for classes and other activities.  He was finally fired, but only because my mom called the school and complained.  She had to threaten the school that if they did not do something to make sure I was safe, that I was going to get a restraining order and they would have to do something.

     After he got fired, one of my supervisor’s would not even acknowledge that I was there.  She would not look at me or talk to me.  She would purposely talk to the other workers in front of me and not even look at me.  One of my other supervisor’s would only talk to me when she had to.  They did not want to do anything about this, they just wanted me to be quiet about it and pretend that it wasn’t going on.  My co-worker who was there helping me the whole time, listening to me when no one else would, also got fired because of this.  She filed a law suit for retaliation, and I quit my job.  After that, my supervisor’s tried everything to be nice to me, but I knew it had to do with the law suit, they didn’t want me to help my former co-worker. 

    Nothing about this was handled correctly, and two years later I am still trying to get over post traumatic stress and the nightmares from what has happened.  

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 14th, 2006 at 10:11 pm and is filed under Sexual Harassment in the Workplace, Sexual Harassment in Education, Retaliation, Backlash, and Victim-blaming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.