Is your sexual harassment training effective?

This April, during Sexual Assault Awareness Month (SAAM), we invite you to be critical of the systems and practices in place that claim to “keep us safe” and “prevent harm and violence”. Most commonly, in our workspaces, this practice might look like a less than lack luster yearly sexual harassment prevention training.  At SHIFT, SAAM reminds us why we take those practices and policies and transform them to actually address the root cause of that harm and violence. We invite you to ask your company, organization, and campuses: What efforts are you institutionally putting forward during the month of SAAM and beyond? Who does it serve? What does it prevent?

Currently most sexual harassment prevention trainings… 

• Are stuffy, boring, incredibly corporate, and outdated 

• Focus on basic, non-nuanced incidents, or “how to not get in trouble” 

• Overemphasize legal jargon

• Center cis-hetero experiences only

• Make your staff eye-roll, zone out, and not take the sessions seriously

• Are often led by people removed from the real-world impact of this work

 Does this sound familiar? 

If your sexual harassment prevention trainings do not… 

• Connect the urgency to a system of gender-based violence 

• Explicitly name the harmful practices within our culture

• Define consent and offer tools on how to build a culture of consent

• Explore the impact of the gender binary, and how it impacts our understanding of sexual harassment

• Define survivor-centered and trauma-informed core principles

• Examine how we are all complicit in gender-based violence in and out of the workplace… 

Then your current workshops are just lip service, and not preventing anything. We ask people to reconsider how they’ve traditionally approached their sexual harassment protocols, policies, workplace practices, and training - to go deeper and build an environment of safety, reflection, and accountability for all. 

Since the impact of the #MeToo movement, federal, state, and local laws have either required or strongly encouraged sexual harassment prevention training in the workplace.  Currently, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, and New York have statutes requiring sexual harassment training, as do Chicago and New York City - with some as frequent as every two years. While these states and cities have statutes requiring sexual harassment training, other federal, state, local laws, regulations, and court decisions have made clear that employers should provide anti-harassment training to all employees in all states. Though these trainings are mandated in certain states, companies resort to the status quo of non-effective training. 

There is immense power in education, that's why trainings are important. Education is imperative for real transformation. SHIFT's Sexual Harassment Prevention training is transformative education that empowers people to take ownership of their actions and the culture they create in and out of the workplace. 

We invite you to look at the list and ask yourself what might be missing from your trainings. Share it in the comments below!