How bystander training can help eliminate workplace sexual harassment

Are you running bystander training?

According to the Australian Human Rights Commission’s Guidelines for Complying with the Positive Duty under the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 (Cth), you should be running bystander training to help eliminate sexual harassment in your business.

Despite this, according to the Workplace Gender Equality Agency Data, only 62% of Australian businesses with over 100 employees are running bystander training.

Do you fall into the 38% that have let bystander training fall through the cracks?

What is wrong with conventional sexual harassment training?

The idea behind conventional sexual harassment training is that it helps people identify sexual harassment and encourages your people to follow your policy when it occurs.

In theory, it’s a great idea.

Sadly, however, the evidence shows that the effects of conventional sexual harassment training are mixed.

It can lead to participants blaming targets and decrease the intention to report sexual harassment. It can even threaten gender-based group dynamics.

In some cases, it can result in backlash effects such as resistance to policies and an increased intention to engage in sexual behaviours at work.

The failure of conventional training may partly explain why levels of sexual harassment remain high in Australian workplaces despite the Sex Discrimination Act being passed more 40 years ago.

According to the most recent data from the Australian Human Rights Commission, 33% of people experienced sexual harassment in the last 5 years:

• 41% of women
• 26% of men
• 67% of non-binary Australian
• 46% of people who identified as gay, lesbian, pansexual, queer, asexual, aromantic, undecided, not sure, questioning or other
• 56% of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders
• 48% of people with a disability.

In 77% cases, the perpetrator was a man.

Alarmingly, despite all the publicity and efforts to eradicate it, the levels of workplace sexual harassment seem to be getting worse.

In addition, according to Deloitte, sexual harassment costs the Australian economy $3.7 billion per year.

For these reasons, the Australian Government is keen for businesses to use a holistic approach to eradicate sexual harassment. While it wants businesses to modernise conventional sexual harassment training and make it more sophisticated, it also wants businesses to run bystander training.

What is a bystander?

Traditionally, sexual harassment involves two people – the perpetrator and the target.

However, a third person can play a role in in a sexual harassment incident – an observer who witnesses the incident but is not directly involved or is told about the incident after the event.

Sexual harassment is about power. Perpetrators harass victims as a display of dominance. As a result, targets can be reluctant to act against it because they fear retaliation.

In contrast, an observer is in a unique position of being first-hand witnesses to the situation but not directly related to the conflict.

This gives them the chance to intervene.

An active bystander is someone who takes action after witnessing or hearing about an incident. This could include:

• giving a disapproving look
• speaking out
• reporting the behaviour.

Active bystanding also includes taking action to challenge a culture that supports sexist and sexually harassing behaviours.

What is the purpose bystander training?

Bystander training focuses on the role of observers because it can be hard for the targets of sexist and sexually harassing behaviour to confront perpetrators.

Research shows that when a third party intervenes it can:

• support the target emotionally
• discourage the perpetrator from behaving in this way again
• create a culture that condemns sexual harassment.

The purpose of bystander training is to teach your people about sexual harassment so they can correctly identify it and encourage them to intervene when they witness instances of sexual harassment.

How bystander training tackles sexual harassment

Bystander training aims to eliminate sexual harassment from organisations and businesses in four ways.

First, it helps your people understand what sexual harassment is so they can identify it when they see it. 

Second, it helps create an understanding that sexual harassment is not socially acceptable and that everyone is responsible for taking action. This is important because, when a person is sexually harassed, they are likely to have a passive reaction and often refuse to report incidents.

Third, it can help communicate the message that there is a low organisational tolerance for sexual harassment in your business. This can have a cascading effect on employees to perceive that an organisation takes sexual harassment as a serious issue.

Finally, bystander training may discourage potential perpetrators from harassing victims because it increases the perceived risk of engaging in sexual harassment.

Unlike conventional approaches to sexual harassment that rely on individuals to make complaints, bystander training encourages collective responsibility by giving employees the skills and confidence to address inappropriate behaviour when it happens.

What should your bystander training look like?

Your bystander training should be part of a holistic strategy to eliminate sexual harassment.

The reality is that it doesn’t work well if it is offered as an isolated session.

How to design effective bystander training in 4 steps

Step 1: Prepare your business for active bystanders

To prepare your business to enable active bystanders, you need to:

• train your leaders to be role models and set the tone from the top
• draft a policy that doesn’t cause your people to lapse into a coma but inspires them and operates as an educational tool
• track your data
• set up an effective reporting and resolution process
• evaluate your sexual harassment prevention efforts so you can make improvements.

Step 2: Prepare your people to become active bystanders

To prepare your people to become active bystanders, you need to:

• ensure they understand and can identify sexual harassment
• make it easy for you people to become active bystanders
• make bystander action socially acceptable.
• persuade them that there is a need for intervention
• let your people know that active bystanders will be supported
• don’t only rely only on bystander training but combine it with other activities that drive cultural and behavioural change.

Step 3: Design your bystander training

To design bystander training for your people, you should:

• ensure they understand and can identify sexual harassment
• explain how you want your people to behave at work
• outline why bystander action is necessary (especially in terms of the harm it does to targets) and how it will benefit your business
• give them the confidence to take action
• make bystander training trauma informed
• overlay bystander training with intersectionality
• select an experienced and respected person to run the training so your people take it seriously.

Step 4: Evaluate and improve your bystander training

To evaluate and improve your bystander training, you should:

• get feedback from your people about how satisfied they were with the training
• ask your people whether they changed their behaviour as a result of the training
• use a control group so you can compare people who participated in training to those that did not participate
• review your data to see if it has had an impact on sexual harassment.

Use bystander training to build stronger teams and a more profitable business 

If it is done well and integrated into a holistic strategy, bystander training can play an important role in helping you eliminate sexual harassment from your workplace.

It can also help you build stronger teams because your people will start to look out for each other. In other words, bystander training can help build a sense of camaraderie and community in your workplace.

The reality is that you can’t run bystander in isolation and expect it to make a difference. It needs to be part of a genuine commitment to transform your culture and build a workplace where everyone feels safe, accepted and included.

You’ll also find that this will help your build a more profitable business because your teams will operate both more cohesively and efficiently.

Do you need help with bystander training? 

Dr Genevieve Burnett specialises in helping businesses and organisations run bystander training. If you want expert advice on how to run bystander training that drives cultural change in your business, get in touch now.