"Why don't you just punch the dickhead?" - violence as a response to sexual harassment

This article was sent to a group I'm involved with last week with a request that it be published anonymously. When I approach the topic of sexual harassment I am aware that almost every woman I talk to has already had a lifetime of experiencing this problem, and that they have a lot of feelings that come along with that. I'm aware that it is a shared problem, not an individual experience. I'm aware that most women that I talk to are angry – furious – about this problem. I’m aware that many people, of multiple genders, are drawn to the idea of violence as a response. That due to being offered a range of solutions that don't seem to help – from not leaving their house at night, to dressing differently, to engaging with an unsympathetic legal system – violence starts to look attractive.

I have been harassed by a man in a fairly large left-wing community organisation for a number of years. No-one has ever really doubted that this man was harassing me, at least not to my face, and I now have evidence that it's true. I have tried a number of strategies to deal with his behaviour. Over this time many people, who represent a broad cross-section of left-wing political ideology, have asked me why I don't just punch him.

I am so sympathetic to this suggestion, and the urge that underlies it. It is born out of frustration. It would be extremely satisfying to pummel every single man who has made women feel unsafe. This article will explore why I haven't gone down this path.

I'm no stranger to violence. I grew up in a world where violence was completely normal. People were violent to me, and I was violent to the other children. None of this seemed unusual to anyone or a cause for concern. Only once in my primary school years did I get a detention for kicking someone, when I was hurting other children all the time. I thought the boy who "told on me" was "soft" for doing so. I now reflect that he was new to the school and didn't really understand the culture of the place. This wasn't just my experience. I remember standing in line and the boy whose last name alphabetically came next to mine would tell these glorious stories about the latest outrageous thing he had done. His stories always ended with a belting from his Dad, which got a good laugh out of all the kids.  I remember having a laugh at Homer Simpson on the TV throttling his son week after week and thinking that he was like my Dad. "Why you little...!"

At the beginning of high school, I left that world. My parents sent me to a posh all-girls high school in the big city that they could barely afford. A one-hour train journey took me to a place where people had other (not better) ways of resolving their disputes. The violence I displayed in my early years of high school didn't go down well with my peers and that had a real effect on me. I distinctly remember the last time I violently attacked anyone. I was fourteen years old. We were playing netball at school in a bright, airy hall. I can still hear the shoes squeaking against the shiny gym floor and see the beams of sunshine lighting up the dust in the air. My good friend hit me in the head, probably intentionally. That action flipped a switch inside me. I gave out an animalistic scream of rage, then ran at her intending to take a leap that would see me take her down by the neck. In the milliseconds after I had started running at her I had an epiphany. I could seriously hurt her. She was my friend. I managed to trip myself and ended up on the floor. People teased me for it because it must have looked a bit silly, but I was secretly very glad that I had changed my mind. Even though I didn't really fit into that high school I am glad that I had the opportunity to be exposed to a different world and new ideas.

In the present day, the road I have taken to deal with the ongoing sexual harassment at this organisation is much harder than punching the perpetrator would have been. I have lost time and energy, I have left the organisation, and it has affected many of my personal and professional relationships. I definitely wouldn't condemn somebody who decided on violence in this situation. But, I think my choice of a non-violent route is worth explaining, as it brings in factors other than simple retaliation.

Sexual violence can take many forms and it can be complicated by many factors.

Oftentimes it's the perpetrator themselves bringing in as many factors as they can so that the person they're targeting feels confused, or like there's no clear course of action ahead. This is basic stuff.

In my case, the perpetrator is a good mate of a well-known activist who is very important to the organisation and to social justice causes. This was probably my main motivation for a long time for not taking more decisive action. Another motivation was my personal experience of people on the left being unwilling and unable to deal with this kind of situation in a good way. It seemed easier to put up with it. Another reason was that due to previous life experiences I didn't have a particularly strong expectation that I would feel safe. Another reason was the sympathy that I felt for this person as someone who has led a particularly hard life. I hope this gives you some insight into the complexity of the problem.

However, the whole time the option of being violent towards this man was open to me. It was suggested to me by a number of people. I even had such a conversation with a person from the organisation whose responsibility it was to take action to resolve this problem. In this case I said that I was seriously concerned that if this problem wasn't resolved then I would end up losing my temper and punching the perpetrator, but I didn't want to go down this route. They said that punching the perpetrator would be a good idea. Most other times it has been brought up without my input. The influential activist who is this man's good friend is often talking about people he doesn't like and making punching motions in the air. This doesn't mean that he necessarily would be fine with me punching his mate, but this and other factors have led me to believe that it's a tactic that he generally supports. This is an interesting point, that I will return to shortly.

The idea of hurting this man was is very appealing. It would certainly make me feel a lot better. It might also give him the message that I'm not a person he can bully anymore.

This man is smaller than me. He's frail, old and his hands are injured. It seems reasonably likely that if we were to have a physical fight then I would win.

Here are some complicating factors.

The first thing is that I'm not trained in martial arts. Maybe this is my failing. I am worried that if I released my rage and started trying to hurt this man that actually I could seriously injure him. This would not be a good outcome. Maybe in the course of the years this has been going on I could have started martial arts training and gotten to a point where I could reasonably safely injure him, but for various reasons including time and money I didn't.

If I did seriously injure this man, I would probably feel really bad. Regardless of the success of the tactic of violence in achieving my aims, there are probably people in the community who would condemn me for using violence, even if they had advised it in the first place. This is especially the case against a frail, old man. This is a man who habitually makes himself small. He shuffles, he fumbles and apologises. Among the creases and wrinkles you can see that he is marked by a long and hard life. I am imagining people's reaction as he looks up at them with a sorrowful expression and a black eye. Obviously not every perpetrator fits this description, but this is the situation that I am faced with. It's one thing to recommend violence to someone, it's quite another to look in the face of an old man with a black eye. It's a hard thing to look in the face of anyone who has been seriously injured and not feel something. This is violence. This is what people are advising me to do.

There could also be legal implications for myself. What if, for example, I punched him in such a way that killed him, or put him in hospital? I don't think that he would necessarily go to the cops if I put him in hospital, but there's probably some kind of mandatory reporting in this situation. In another situation a person might be up against a bully who's young and healthy, but you don't really know how a fist fight might go down. You can seriously hurt or kill someone without using much force. I recall the Queensland government campaign "One punch can kill". Alternatively someone might fall over and hit their head. You can also do a lot of damage to a person without using much force if you get in a wrestling match and end up strangling them. In all these examples a person might even seem fine in the short term and then die a few days or weeks later.

All of this seems like a lot of responsibility to put upon a person because they happen to be the victim of bullying.

My second major consideration was this man's unknown potential for violence in retaliation. He might have had some fighting skills I was unaware of. His demeanour and injuries suggest that he has known violence. He might come back at me at a later time with a weapon or a bunch of his angry mates. He might be as poor at fighting as I am and accidentally injure me in a serious way.

These two arguments don't get to the crux of why I didn't want to go down the road of fighting him, but they are practical things to consider.

My assumption that this man's activist friend is OK with violence in certain situations, and the fact that the person who is in a position of responsibility at the organisation said that I should fight the perpetrator, are interesting points to consider in light of their response to my requests for help.

The person from the organisation who is in a position of responsibility to deal with this situation is someone who I previously had a good relationship with. We enjoyed taking the piss, and always worked well together. She suggested once that I babysit her children. She uses a light hand to balance the formal and informal aspects of the organisation, but ultimately she has a lot of responsibility. I told her about the harassment when it had been happening for some years. I asked her to talk to the old man, and that's when she said that I should punch him. It's hard for me to know if she really thought I would punch him; whether, straight-faced, she was taking the piss; or whether she was just hoping the problem would go away. When I persisted, she said that she would talk to the old man. Ultimately that was an ineffective strategy. Not long afterwards, I lodged a formal complaint. She didn't exactly try to stop me from taking formal action, but became distant towards me. She also took actions that made me wonder whether she was trying to get in the way of the process – for example she didn't give me a copy of the organisation's sexual harassment policy when I repeatedly asked for it, even though it is in that policy that when a person lodges a formal complaint that they are given it.

The influential activist who is this man's good friend refused to be a part of discussions around finding a solution to this man's behaviour. He said that it was a matter simply between this man and myself. I wonder what he meant by that. In the past when the activist has discussed disagreements with other people he's often mimed punching as a solution, but with a cheeky grin. A familiar scene at the organisation was the activist yelling in an extremely aggressive way at other people. Even me once. When he was yelling at other people I would take myself upstairs and lock myself in a room. What am I to take from this? When he tells me that I should deal with the situation myself, is he recommending a route of non-violence? This is important to me because, while he didn't have a formal position of responsibility, as this man's good friend he's a person who's in one of the best positions to help resolve this situation well. By that I mean in a way that would have met my need for safety, and the harasser's need for personal growth within his community. I think his response was coloured by the very attitude I am hoping to explore in this article.

I think that the option of me fighting this man was a solution that would have put the responsibility on me alone as an individual who was being harassed. This would have ignored the larger systemic issue. What I have been looking for is a way for the organisation and community that I am a part of to come together and take responsibility for this issue. I would like to see more community accountability for this kind of behaviour. While I won't go into too much detail in this article, what I am imagining is a serious effort to bring about change. While an individual solution might have solved my problem, I am on the left because I am an idealist.

This is why I'm glad that in the end I didn't fight him.

If, in the best case scenario, I had punched this man the right amount and he wasn't seriously injured, and he then left me alone, I don't think that he would have learnt anything. The lesson would have been that power and brute force determines social relationships. I believe that he would have just found somebody weaker to pick on. He wouldn't have learnt anything about why what he did was wrong. He wouldn't have learnt that his community takes the issue of sexual harassment seriously. He wouldn't have had the feeling that other people were watching him and were going to make him accountable. All he would have learnt is that one individual (me) was not someone he could pick on.

I think that on the left we are trying to create something bigger and better than a world where brute force determines social relationships. To me, these kinds of behaviours, from punching a fellow activist all the way up to dropping a nuclear bomb, are exactly the kind of actions we need to get away from. I would much prefer that if there was a disagreement or wrongdoing then people come together as a community and find a way through it.

In situations like mine, which is on the micro scale of one individual harassing another individual, I want the left to work on strategies for the community to support the survivor, and ideally to support behaviour change in the perpetrator. The left has a long way to go before we get to that point, but I think that is a goal worth fighting for.

Earlier in the piece I gave a range of reasons why I found it hard to take more effective action against this man. People who are witnessing such a prolonged situation as the one I experienced might feel some exasperation. I think it's important to remember that a person on the receiving end of bullying shouldn't also have to endure repeated judgement for their handling of the situation. Bullying isn't easy to deal with. Bullies aren't acting in good faith. Their actions aren't a mistake. They're probably going to do everything in their power to avoid real change. Finding help is another difficult task. The actions of a lot of people who I've asked for help have given me the impression that they just want it to go away. Actually, that they just want me to go away. In this situation, the more that it should have been a person's responsibility to help me, the more they acted like I was an imposition. There were some people who were in the thick of it who wanted to help or tried to help, and there have been many people who are less personally affected by it who have been very supportive of me. Together we have so far been unable to overcome the inertia of the culture of the organisation to reach a satisfactory solution. If there was an easy solution to bullying that didn't require a lot of people coming together to take concerted action, then it probably wouldn't be such an insidious problem throughout every part of our society. Finding a solution to bullying can't just be on the shoulders of the person who is directly experiencing the problem.

So that is why I didn't punch this man, and I am proud of my actions. I hope that this road can be a little easier for the next person who wishes to travel it.