Diana Mahabir-Wyatt
Sexual harassment is defined internationally as an aspect of gender discrimination which by its very nature is abusive.
It is a form of gender-based violence which is against the common law, the basis of all Commonwealth legal architecture. And/or because it affects humans, in most courts, it is seen as a violation of the right to equality, life, liberty and security of the person.
This can apply to any hierarchical status, from president to messenger, and to both women and men.
It is cruel and demeaning in the same way that slavery demeans both slave and slave owner.
Governments worldwide, including Barbados, have enacted legislation to prohibit it.
But in TT, we haven't done so.
The role of the press in exposing sexual abuse in TT mainly brings it to light before elections. Any elections. The ones we have just gone through are no exception.
Political parties everywhere, not just in the Caribbean or against Trump, regularly use it as a method to repel voters once loyal to opposing parties. It seems to have little effect. It certainly has not against Trump, nor has it in TT.
In TT it has occasionally even taken us way back to charges against a young Keith Rowley and, for goodness' sake, his father!
But going back a generation or two, similar accusations were made against Johnny O'Halloran, Eric Williams, George Chambers, and come to think of it, almost any man in a political hierarchy who was capable of sex in any form, as most of them were.
In a society that does not refuse to turn against influence-peddling; political candidates who have served time in jail; a culture not disgusted by corruption in contracts for government buildings that stand empty for years; by questionable procurement deals; by drug trafficking; money laundering; and child pornography, mere sexual harassment at work is soon forgotten.
Why it is dragged up again for elections, I do not know. Is it because male employees have only now begun to experience what women at work have endured for years?
When it comes to equality in respect to evidence of harassment at work, however, there is still a bias naming women as victims and men as perpetrators, when it can also be vice versa, where women - encouraged by the American publicity about the 'Me Too' movement - have been exposed as manufacturing abuse and harassment allegations, shamefully prevaricated and career-destroying, against men.
They are often supported by a lawyer looking for a brief who may offer to share the expected multi-thousand-dollar penalties imposed by a sympathetic civil court against the perpetrators (expressed or implied).
Few such allegations have been passed through our Industrial Court by trade unions, whose shop stewards are hesitant to believe or support such allegations.
We also see this in recruitment, where, in our still-patriarchal society, male managers responsible for recruitment have been known to guarantee jobs to attractive and desperate young single mothers in return for sex. In a culture of high unem
