Workplace Harassment

When I called the Moscow Center for Gender Studies and said that I was writing a story about sexual harassment in the workplace in Russia, the reaction was overwhelmingly positive: "At last!" said Dr. Anastasia Posadskaya, the Center's director. "I thought nobody would ever raise this subject, and women would just continue to suffer in silence." There are a number of topics that are common in the Western media, but which Russian journalists studiously avoid. Perhaps the most important and noticeable among them are homosexuality and sexual harassment. The usual excuse cited by Russian reporters for their lack of concern with the issue of harassment is that the jaded West only cares about these problems because "it has nothing serious to care about." Feminism and women rights activists are usually ridiculed, both by male journalists and, even more often, by their female colleagues. The subject of sexual harassment remains the exclusive terrain of the pornographic publications that you see in the metro, which limit their coverage to openly sadistic and exploitative stories.In my paper, I recently published a hotline telephone number and asked people to call with their experiences of harassment at work. Calls started flooding in next day. Some people, ironically, thought my notice was a disguised advertisement for an office providing "intimate services" and were extremely disappointed to hear the voice of a young male journalist explaining that nothing of the sort could be found here. But the vast majority of the calls were very serious and very sad, providing a bleak picture of the situation in Moscow's private firms.Valery Vikulov, the director of Moscow-based Fund for Protection from Sexual Harassment at Work, has about 300 private businesses on his "black list" of firms whose bosses regularly harass or abuse their employees. Vikulov also cited a number of outrageous cases in which women were actually raped when they come in for an interview. State firms and firms based in the provinces are generally only a little better: I received calls from a 25-year-old graduate student from Perm who had been abused by her professor and from a young doctor who was harassed by the chief doctor at her hospital in Barnaul. Foreign businesses are also caught up in this problem. According to Vikulov's estimates, the worst offenders are Arab businessmen, followed by the French. In general, American and British nationals are more aware of the problem, but their Russian managers are often guilty of abuse and harassment. In fact, powerful positions with foreign businesses in Moscow provide especially great opportunities for this practice.Article 118 of the Russian criminal code is entitled "On Forcing a Woman to Engage in Sexual Relations" and stipulates a term of three years in prison for those convicted of sexual harassment in the workplace. "This article was widely used in Communist times by party bosses in order to discredit or imprison rivals in the struggle for power. Nowadays it is hardly used at all," Vikulov says. This article also does not consider it a crime for women to force their male employees into an unwanted relationship, just as the now-repealed article 121 labeled only homosexuality between men a crime, leaving lesbianism in obscurity from the point of view of the la. During the seven days that my hotline was working, I got two calls from men complaining of being molested by their female bosses.When I discussed the subject with my colleagues at work and with other acquaintances, they brought up stories that they had heard of "office romances" in the media world, in prominent political institutions and the headquarters of some of our political parties. What struck me most was that most of the people I spoke with, especially the men, regarded the practice as "normal" or, at least, as "nothing terrible."The reasons for this sad state of affairs lie not only in Russian "male chauvinism," but also in the economic situation of many Russian women. According to official statistics, women make up 75 to 80 percent of this country's unemployed and, according to the statistics of the Moscow Center for Gender Studies, they run only 3 percent of the country's new private businesses. When enterprises shut down, women are usually the first ones to be laid off. Vladimir Shumeiko, when he was still a deputy prime minister, once announced that women receive only 40 percent of the average "male" salary for comparable work. I know that the editorial boards of several major Russian newspapers include only men. The sad fact is that, so far, women seem to be willing to reconcile themselves to this situation and even to adapt to it. According to Posadskaya's opinion polls, most parents continue to want to see their daughters as good housewives, who take care of their appearance, bring up the children and do the housework. Education and career are considered even less important than in Communist times.Women seem to be willing to reconcile themselves to secondary roles in the family and at work. And they continue to allow themselves to be dominated by men. It seems that it will be a long time before women in this country understand that they themselves must take part of the responsibility for their salvation from this horrendous situation.Dmitry Babich is a reporter for Komsomolskaya Pravda. He contributed this comment to The Moscow Times.