Sexual harassment needs to be reported, not quietly tolerated.
He cornered me at the back of the shop, stood over me and ripped open my vest, swearing when he saw I was wearing a bra. This was the 1970s, I was 18 and he was my boss.
A year or two later in another workplace, a senior sergeant flung a notebook in my face after I refused an invitation to after-work drinks. On yet another occasion, I accepted a lift home from a respected male colleague and sat mortified beside him as he relayed to me in graphic detail his wife's sexual failings.
I might have thought I was just plain unlucky, had female friends and colleagues not regularly shared similar stories. More amazing is that not once did any one of us consider reporting the perpetrator.
More than 30 years on, I still hear stories from women who think they have no choice but to tolerate men touching them up or making crude asides in the workplace: men of every age and from every walk of life, men who go home at night to wives and children and men who are pillars of the community.
But Kristy Fraser-Kirk, the woman sexually harassed by then David Jones chief executive Mark McInnes, and a handful of women like her are signalling the death of an era in which women put up and shut up.
While I acknowledge that men who prey on women in the workplace are in the minority, a 2008 Australian Human Rights Commission report found that 22 per cent of women were sexually harassed at work, and that last year those figures increased by 25 per cent, and continue to rise.
Yet, unlike Fraser-Kirk, most women do not seek justice or lodge an official complaint. This is reflected in figures showing that while the commission received 1139 inquiries about sexual harassment in 2008-09, a mere 209 complaints were made.
It is unlikely a little more than 200 complaints go anywhere near demonstrating the true extent of sexual harassment in the workplace. Many women will not know they can lodge a complaint and others will shrug their shoulders and deal with the behaviour as best they can. Women who eke out existences in poorly paid casual positions are never going to complain. And some women won't even know that a reference to the size of their tits is sexual harassment.
Sex Discrimination Commissioner Elizabeth Broderick has been quoted as saying there is continuing confusion about what constitutes sexual harassment. Some of this confusion may well rest in the language we use: McInnes's behaviour has been described in various accounts as ''flirtatious'', ''unbecoming'' and ''inappropriate''.
It just sounds like good, clean, harmless fun. McInnes himself claims to know what women want and his friends and colleagues are reported as saying he is a good bloke, ''naturally charming with young women'' and that ''girls threw themselves at him''. In a half-hearted effort at an apology, McInnes said he totally misread Fraser-Kirk's signals. That old furphy again.
While 65 per cent of sexual harassment is experienced in the workplace, sexually predatory behaviour is part of a much wider social malaise that considers women fair game. In 2005, the Australian Bureau of Statistics personal safety survey found that from the age of 15, 32.5 per cent of women had experienced inappropriate comments about their body or sex life, and 25.1 per cent of women had experienced unwanted sexual touching.
The McInnes episode, the latest in a conga-line of reports about men behaving badly, puts workplaces on notice to do much more than just pay lip-service to policies on sexual harassment. For too long, workplaces, and the community more broadly, have smiled benignly at naughty boy antics and blamed women for muddying the sexual waters by sending out wrong messages.
Advertising that presents women as always up for it must be partly to blame for these attitudes - think of how many women you have seen staring at you from billboards, in newspapers and magazines, scantily clad with moist, pouting lips.
We see business pages and commentators worrying their heads off about share prices and branding when what should be commanding their attention is the right of women to go about their work and their lives free from the predatory behaviour of men who give all the good blokes out there a bad name.
But until women are accorded this basic human right, let's take heart from those who are literally doing it for themselves.
Trish Bolton is a researcher and an advocate for women's health.
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