Sexual Harassment Prevention Training AAR: Day One

May 19, 2009

By Ken.

I’ve now completed the first day of training the employees of a local city to avoid sexual harassment, having made roughly 2 hour presentations to two groups of about 20 each.

Impressions:

1. Never try to explain the confluence of federal and state law to government employees before noon.

2. Apparently everyone in this city likes to go “GIRL, you’re looking FINE, SHOW me!”, and then the other employee turns around in place, and the first one goes “WOOOOOO!” It is probably impossible to break them of this, at least with the amount of time and the tools and use-of-force limits I am presented with.

3. After I prepared this presentation and reviewed the available summaries and caselaw for interesting examples and cautionary tales, I thought I would be impossible to shock. Boy, was I wrong. Midway through the morning an employee described an incident so completely cringingly inappropriate that Andrew Dice Clay would be going “hey man, not cool, not cool,” and then described how supervisors laughed it off. I have my work cut out for me.

4. I train supervisors in the morning tomorrow, and police in the afternoon. I am going to drop the hammer on the supervisors. Hard. Then we’ll see how it goes with the cops. I may be stereotyping, but I suspect I’m going to get some push-back from them.

5. So far, in response to my leading questions designed to create the illusion of audience participation, only one person has suggested that yeah, it would be cool to have team-building in a strip club.

6. Audiences will start participating by asking more questions if you threaten to make them role-play scenarios.

Edited to add:

7. When you’ve scripted vignettes for your staff to record on video and then play to make the whole sexual-harassment-presentation more audio-visual intense and attention-grabbing, have someone read through your scripts and make sure than the inappropriate conduct depicted isn’t too funny. Inappropriate laughter is death to the right tone at a training session. (The problematical line in question: “She has a name?”)

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6 Comments

5 Comments

Scott Jacobs • May 19, 2009 @6:57 pm

Midway through the morning an employee described an incident so completely cringingly inappropriate that Andrew Dice Clay would be going “hey man, not cool, not cool,” and then described how supervisors laughed it off. I have my work cut out for me.

You seriously think we’re going to let you get away without actually relating this tale?
matt • May 19, 2009 @8:05 pm

you know Scott does have a good point change the names if you must but do tell!
Windypundit • May 20, 2009 @6:19 am

And what’s with the videos? Aren’t you going to post the videos?
Chris • May 20, 2009 @6:42 am

“You will be a dwarven fighter with inappropriate workplace attire. You will be a 8th level cleric of Baldur who is a member of an ethnic minority.”

“Aww.. I don’t want to be the cleric”

“Then ask more questions.”
Linus • May 20, 2009 @8:29 pm

I read these posts with chagrin for the following reason: I am a plaintiff’s attorney who gets a fair number of calls each month from people who claim that they have been sexually harassed at work. In the last, say, two years, I have heard exactly one story that was worth following up on, and unfortunately, it was from a client who was telling me what he had done (I do some defense work too). An unnerving number of the stories involve an claim that the alleged perpetrator “looked at me funny”. *Sigh*
Sounds like I need to move to your city.