By Jeremiah Aminu
Sexual harassment stands as a prevalent issue haunting employees in many corporate institutions around the globe.
As defined by the Labour Standards Bill (2008), this vice refers to “any unwelcome sexual advance, conduct or request made by an employer, manager, supervisor or a co-employee to an employee, whether the employee is a man or woman and includes any conduct of a sexual nature which creates an intimidating, hostile, degrading or offensive environment”.
This vice manifests through several means. For instance, it is enacted through the verbal medium whereby the harasser employs innuendos while communicating with the harassee (the victim of the harassment).
It is also executed through physical means whereby the harasser indiscriminately holds or touches the harassee without his or her consent.
To proceed, it is essential to note that both men and women experience sexual harassment in corporate institutions around the world. However, women constitute a huge percentage of reported cases relating to sexual harassment. STER, in a statistical report, “found that 64% of respondents (mostly young, female, and unmarried), experienced sexual harassment in the workplace.
The majority of victims were aged 18-30, worked in large organisations, and were in formal employment for 12 months or more”.
What is more, female employees are usually controlled through two potent devices of sexual harassment which are fear and intimidation. They are employed by mostly superior executives in corporate establishments in order to force them (the women) to succumb to their sexual solicitations and advances.
Proceeding further, sexual harassment is a chameleon that takes on different forms. The most common is “quid pro quo” sexual harassment.
As explained by Duwel Law, this form of sexual harassment marks “an explicit or implied demand for sexual favors in exchange for workplace benefits…to avoid negative consequences”.
In addition, the legal firm further emphasises that there is often “a tangible employment action, such as a promotion, termination, demotion, or salary adjustment, that’s linked to the employee’s response”.
Often mentioned alongside the prior form of sexual harassment is hostile work environment harassment. This “arises when unwelcome conduct based on a protected characteristic becomes so severe or pervasive that it alters the terms and conditions of employment”, according to Duwel Law. In this scenario, the harasser can be anyone—a co-employee, a superior executive, a contractor, a recruiter, or a client.
Commonly seen in this mode of sexual harassment is a repeated and persistent sexual misconduct towards the harassee which creates an unstable and unfavourable working atmosphere, thus influencing his or her emotional and psychological conditions.
Other forms of sexual harassment cover physical harassment (whereby the harasser touches the harassee’s bodily parts in a sexually suggestive manner), verbal sexual harassment (whereby the harasser employs sexually suggestive and abusive words while communicating with the harassee), and non-verbal sexual harassment (which covers a range of sexually abusive actions that hint at sexual objectification and disrespect, e.g., ogling at a fellow employee’s breasts and sharing sexually graphic images with a co-worker).
In subsequence, among all the other sectors in Nigeria, the banking sector is said to have the highest prevalence of sexual harassment cases. Namene illustrated this in his 2019 study.
In this regard, he revealed how bank employers commodify and exploit the bodies of female employees (especially marketers) to bring in influential individuals as potential clients and meet financial targets. Failure to accomplish these assigned tasks often attract strict penalties and even dismissal:
“The banking sector of Nigeria has been identified as having a high prevalence of sexual harassment…Management encourages staff (marketers) to follow up customers by maintaining a one-on-one relationship with them. Bank staff are usually given the task of attracting certain amount of money as deposit from existing and prospective customers; this usually exposes them to sexual harassment from men. Most female staff of banks have been sexually harassed in an endeavour to meet their target as required by the banks and some have even lost their job as a result of their inability to meet their target requirements. This goes to show that the concern of bank management is for the staff to meet up their target requirements and not their welfare”.
Thus, it is in response to this that legal frameworks and legislation have been established to address cases related to sexual harassment. An example is Section 34 of the 1999 Nigerian Constitution which safeguards the dignity of Nigerian citizens:
“Every individual is entitled to respect for the dignity of his person, and accordingly –
(a) no person shall be subject to torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment;
(b) no person shall he held in slavery or servitude; and
(c) no person shall be required to perform forced or compulsory labour”.
Another is Section 285 of the Penal Code which states, in clear-cut terms, the strict penalties that await sexual harassment offenders:
“Whoever commits an act of gross indecency upon the person of another without his consent or by the use of force or threats [or] compels a person to join with him in the commission of that act, shall be punished with imprisonment for a term which may extend to seven years and shall also be liable to fine”.
Considering the foregoing discussion, sexual harassment is a parasite that torments workers in corporate establishments with women making up a larger percentage. As underscored in Namene’s study, the banking sector in Nigeria stands as one that, overall, has the most numerous cases of sexual harassment reports.
It is due to this pervasive presence that legal frameworks and legislation have been established to eradicate this vice. Although they are effective to a considerable degree, stricter measures still need to be put in place to ensure the reduction and obliteration of this deadly pest within Nigerian corporate institutions.
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