(Newswire.net — November 23, 2015) — Sexual harassment has been considered a hot issue for years, but historically, there is nothing hot about it. We can go back as far through history as we want and not find when it actually began, warrior tribes, Greece, Rome, take your pick. Since most of us were not around back then, we can’t even imagine what kinds of violence exisisted and what people had to go through. The problem is that it wasn’t considered violence nor harassment.
In modern age, when everybody is talking about human rights and all kinds of freedom, it is pretty unimaginable that things like domestic violence and sexual harassment even exist. Not only they exist, but still in so many countries all over the world, including the most developed ones, they aren’t being tackled.
In recent years, the global crisis and shortage of jobs has caused an increassed pressure on workers to tolerate sexual harrasment that would previously be reported, largely due to their fear of losing their jobs. There are both men and women in supervisory positions who take advantage of it and put their employees under a type of pressure that is very different from ordinary work pressure. They are qiute aware that there are very few people who would be brave enough to report them, and even if somebody dared, company lawyers usually offer some kind of settlement and that is how most of these cases go unnoticed.
Another problem is the level of social awareness, which is so low when it comes to these two problems, it is practically non-existant. Even if something unethical, immoral or even illegal is going on in full view of everyone present, people tend not to do anything about it.
Several studies have been done on this quirk of human nature, and when asked why they did not intervene, participants usually responded by saying they were not sure of what they actually saw, they didn’t want to interfere or just didn’t care.
But Kathleen Wynne, is taking action – this October this Ontario Premier proposed a legislation to strengthen laws against sexual harasment and get more support for the survivors, with her new initiative to educate the public. Her new campaign called It’s Never Okay produced a number of video ads calling the public to educate themselves on what to do when they spot it in their surroundings, and a number of these ads are now going viral: