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From Hollywood to workplaces in every town and city, sexual predators pose a problem for countless young women.It would be all too easy to see Harvey Weinstein’s spectacular and overdue fall from grace as a uniquely Hollywood tale. The accounts of alleged sexual harassment and assault at the hands of the producer are growing in number every day. They paint an alarming picture of the global film industry: power concentrated in the hands of a small group of men, some of whom were all too willing to abuse their capacity to make or break the careers and reputations of vulnerable young women competing for a tiny number of roles.
Weinstein’s behaviour has been described as an “open secret” in Hollywood. By all accounts, he created an intensely toxic culture for women working in his industry. It affected not just those who tried to speak out about what they experienced, and subsequently saw their careers curtailed, but also provoked rumours about those who achieved success in the films he produced. “Congratulations,” joked the comedian Seth MacFarlane at the 2013 Oscar nominations announcement for the best supporting actress category, “you five ladies no longer have to pretend to be attracted to Harvey Weinstein.”
But the huge traction this story has achieved in the past week is not just a product of our obsession with the glitz and glamour of Hollywood. On the contrary: it is because the dynamics between powerful men on the one hand and vulnerable women and children on the other are far from a Hollywood idiosyncrasy. Most women will have either experienced sexual harassment in the workplace or domestic violence at home or know someone who has. In one Trades Union Congress survey in 2016, more than half of women said they had experienced sexual harassment at work. For these women, the accounts of those bravely coming forward to identify Weinstein are not tales from some exotic, unimaginable world – they chime with far too many women’s everyday experience.
Yes, there are unique aspects to this particular story. But the power imbalance at its heart has been recreated countless times across geography and history: from the BBC to the Catholic church to the towns and cities where the authorities looked the other way when gangs of men abused young girls, many in the care of the state.
The differences between these cases cannot be allowed to obscure what they have in common. The accounts of Weinstein’s victims bear hallmarks that repeat themselves over and over again in cases of sexual assault, rape and domestic violence. Women and children being made to feel complicit by their abuser. The entirely rational fear of not being believed. The humiliation of coming forwards with an account of what happened. The knowledge that reporting an abuser – given the power he wields not just over the victim but those around them – may only make things worse.
The allegations against Weinstein are so seismic it is difficult to imagine how they could fail to alter permanently Hollywood’s endemic culture of misogyny. But complacency would be foolish and misplaced. One note of caution is that the narcissistic men who perpetrate this sort of behaviour are quite likely to carry on thinking they are beyond reach. It is no coincidence that women have felt able to go on the record in greater numbers now Weinstein’s grip on Hollywood is starting to loosen.
And we must face head on the reality that Hollywood is a product of wider society. It’s not just the prevalence of sexual harassment at work. The charity SafeLives reveals that almost one in 10 women has suffered domestic violence. And evidence suggests that patterns of gendered violence are setting in earlier and earlier. Reporting of incidents of children sexually assaulting other children has increased by more than 70% in the last four years. A recent survey for Girlguiding UK suggests 64% of girls aged 13-21 have experienced sexual harassment at school, up from 59% in 2014. The accounts of girls who have reported it show just how young they are when they first learn that speaking out is often futile. And yet the government has only just reluctantly made sex and relationships education compulsory in all schools. There remains a dearth of training for teachers and schools on how to prevent and deal with sexual assault in the playground. These are the signs of a society that is far off understanding how to prevent gendered assault and violence.
The uncomfortable truth is that Weinstein’s behaviour sits at the extreme end of a spectrum that starts with low-level verbal abuse on the street and inappropriately sexual office “banter”. Fail to challenge the catcalls and the lewd jokes and we enable a chain of behaviours that somewhere, at some point, leads to a Harvey Weinstein.
Hollywood isn’t a world apart – it holds up a mirror to who we are. “This has been part of women’s worlds since time immemorial,” Emma Thompson told Newsnight last Thursday. She’s right. Condemning Weinstein now he’s been outed as a sexual predator is the easy bit. The much more difficult question is what are we going to do about it?