by Helen Garner
Can a young woman really expect to go through life without ever having to take this responsibility? Has a girl like Elizabeth Rosen even the faintest idea what a powerful anima figure she is to the men she encounters in her life? She told the court that Dr Shepherd had got down on his knees before her. Which of them does the word humiliated apply to, here?
‘Sexual harassment’s always going to happen,’ said a young university graduate, ‘but it has to be more acceptable for women to get angry. There needs to be some protection against being made to feel uncomfortable. I take uncomfortable feelings due to sexual harassment seriously.
‘Once, when I was about twelve, I was asleep on an overnight train to Sydney. I woke up and found a man stroking my face. It was the bloke sitting next to me. I got out of my seat and ran away. I spent the rest of the night standing up, near the toilets, where people go to smoke. Next morning he came out and apologised. He was about thirty, I suppose, looking back. I was’ – she made a shrinking gesture with her whole body, rounding her shoulders inwards, dropping her face right down as if to hide it – ‘I was ashamed, I think.’
‘Why should you have been ashamed?’ I said.
We looked at each other in silence. I can’t count the number of times the discussions I had with women reached this point, and got jammed.
Uncomfortable, though – this lily-livered, half-arsed word looms very large in sexual harassment discourse. Uncomfortable is made to do duty for proper, accurate words about feelings. A child who wakes up on a train and finds a strange man stroking her cheek is not uncomfortable. She is shocked, panicky, defenceless.
The only woman member of the Group of Three told me on the phone that she could not speak to me. ‘I’m bound by confidentiality,’ she said, in a slightly trembling voice, ‘because I’m still on the council. It’s still red raw as subject matter, at this proximity. It’s roused enormous passion and bitterness. Perhaps if my court results had been clearer . . . There are people on both sides with barrows to push.’
Peter M—, the Vice-Master of Ormond, is a pleasantly spoken, smiling man of fifty or so, who on the day I visited him was dressed in grey trousers, a striped shirt and tie, and the good-quality brown brogues with a sheen that are favoured by men in this college milieu. He has the sprightly manner of the very experienced private school master he was before he came up from a provincial city to take the Ormond job; and how often must he have looked back with longing to the genial racket of the classroom, once he became aware that he was occupying one of the hottest seats in this drama.
Having been named as one of four sexual harassment officers for all the residential colleges, he was approached on the morning after the Smoko by Fiona P—, a member of the Student Club General Committee – later to become the emissary to the High Court judge – who reported to him ‘a sexual harassment incident involving the Master’. She told him nothing specific, not even the name of the student who had made the complaint. All she wanted from him was advice on how to proceed.
‘I was prepared,’ he told me, ‘to speak to Colin Shepherd on the spot. I told the student I’d be prepared to do so that afternoon – that if she wanted me to do this she should let me know.’
Fiona P— returned later that morning with news of another incident from the Smoko, and asked him not to speak to the Master yet. ‘Often the perpetrator of sexual harassment,’ said the Vice-Master, ‘is unaware that harassment has taken place. We were hoping that conciliation would let everyone concerned come out of it with dignity. I think the complainants wanted to hold it’ – he made a passionate cradling gesture against his chest – ‘to contain it, at that point.
‘So I didn’t speak to Colin.’
Now this is one of the hinges of the story. Dr Shepherd must have been sitting virtually on the other side of the wall while Peter M—, the Vice-Master, discussed the complaints with Fiona P—. What if he had gone straight in there and laid the whole thing on Shepherd’s desk, before dinner on the day after the Smoko? Could it have been sorted out to everybody’s satisfaction within twenty-four hours? If the students had been cool enough to repeat their statements to Colin Shepherd’s face, to ask for an acknowledgement and an apology, might Shepherd, even if he felt utterly certain that he had not done the things they accused him of, have found in himself the sang-froid to do the gentlemanly thing? – to say, ‘I certainly don’t remember doing what you say I did, and I can’t believe I ever would have done such a thing – but we’d all had a bit to drink – I was over the moon because the dinner had gone so well – if I seem to you to have behaved inappropriately, I’m terribly sorry – I hope that you’ll accept my sincere apology – and that none of us will ever need to speak of it again’?
This is the pragmatist’s fantasy of a way out. It rests on a presumption of worldliness in all the protagonists. It assumes fundamental generosity, flexibility, good will, an absence of fear, a willingness to go the extra mile. It assumes that though the things the students alleged might well have happened (this being an imperfect world), and might have given offence, they were not, ultimately, earth-shattering; that a man might not necessarily feel himself backed into a tight corner by such allegations, since foolish things done at parties are not after all so rare: if they were all to be punished, which of us should ’scape whipping?
But it fails to take into account a certain kind of modern feminism: priggish, disingenuous, unforgiving. And it ignores one important fact: that in order to seize the nettle, the Vice-Master would have had to betray the trust of Fiona P—, almost before she was out of earshot. His position, at this juncture, must have been ethically excruciating. But some of the older Ormond men have spoken irritably to me about Peter M—’s silence at this stage. One of them, whose own behaviour in the matter conspicuously lacked grace, used a term of such high-handed condemnation that I thought I had misheard him, and said, ‘Pardon?’ He looked me right in the eye and repeated the phrase, enunciating with such force that he showed his teeth. This was one of many moments, in conversation with Ormond men, when my blood ran cold.
Soon after this crucial decision not to take the complaints straight to Dr Shepherd, Peter M— was disturbed to find that two other members of staff already knew about the complaints, including one senior woman who ‘had seen herself as often having to be an advocate for women’s position in Ormond’. Before long, said Peter M—, he was ‘side-lined’. He had been twisting in his chair as he spoke. Now he began to draw deep sighs.
When Fiona P— came back upset from her ‘legalistic situation’ with the judge and the unsigned complaints, Peter M— felt for her anxiety. ‘She was getting dragged in over her head. There’s a limit to what a fellow-student can do – and she wasn’t anxious to return in the afternoon, with or without the complainants. So I rang and told the judge she would not be reappearing that afternoon. He indicated to me that he would speak to Colin. A fortnight later, the day after the Carol Service’ (this is how Ormond people measure time) ‘I rang the judge to check – well’ – he grimaced, and corrected himself – ‘to inquire whether he’d seen Colin. He said he had.
‘In December the senior woman chair of the EO committee Colin had set up resigned. When she told him why, he had no idea what she was referring to. When I realised this, in January, I thought, this has gone far enough. I went into his office and explained that the complaints were of sexual harassment on the night of the Valedictory Dinner.
‘He was rocked by this. From this I gathered that the judge had spoken to him only in generalisations.
‘In March 1992, round about the time of the Commencement Dinner, a hurtful leaflet was distributed. The judge wrote a statement about the whole matter and it was pinned on to the Hall door. Only half of it was read out.’
He had dropped suddenly into the passive voice. I asked, taking a punt, 'Why did you read out only half of the statement?’
‘I’d discussed it,’ he said, ‘with one other council member. I read out the most relevant bits – wh
at the judge had done about the unsigned complaints. I read it out in the vestibule. Two hundred people were milling about in there, wanting to get into the dining room to eat. I didn’t want to go on and on – but I certainly didn’t attempt to conceal anything.
‘This thing had an effect on the people working here. It’s very difficult for secretaries, the office staff, who want normality in their working routines. They were undercut by a feeling of disturbance. They were certainly not helped by the coming and going of barristers and solicitors to Colin Shepherd’s office. There was a sense of something going on. It would have helped if the legal advisers had gone to Colin’s house.
‘Colin was anxious, but he’s always presented – not a brave but an optimistic front. He hasn’t wavered. But neither side has moved at all. It’s a great tragedy. It’s hard that Colin was named and the complainants weren’t. The damage is already done, though he’s been cleared by the courts. I try to’ – he wiggled his flat hand – ‘sit on the fence. Because I have to deal with both sides. It’s all right for the tutors. They’ve got the university as well, they’ve got other priorities. But if you’re here all the time you see the devastation. To a man and his family.’
I went straight from the Vice-Master’s office on to the Melbourne University campus, to speak to Christine G—, the outgoing Women’s Officer of the Student Union. She was a chic young woman in black, very composed, with clear pale skin, a severely pretty haircut, and a bright dash of Poppy lipstick. I took a breath to remark in a friendly tone that in my young days as a feminist we would have died rather than wear lipstick; but I held my tongue, sensing (correctly, as it turned out) that she would not appreciate a joke – not on that topic, anyway, and certainly not from me. The warmth of her manner on the phone had congealed into the permafrost of a feminist who’d been shown my letter to Colin Shepherd. She pointed to an armchair with its back to the door, and took her place in front of her computer terminal. In order to look at me she had to turn her whole body sideways, which gave me the awkward feeling that I was interrupting her in some more pressing task. Still, I asked her my forlorn but crucial question: how and why did the police get involved in this case? She answered me with a firm statement.
‘The procedures here didn’t lead to justice. All the different avenues were tried – but there were structures which protected Colin Shepherd and the college itself.
‘I’m not regretful at all. There are too many absolutes in the Melbourne University sexual harassment procedures. For example, women have to go through conciliation. There are too many conflicts of interest. The director of counselling, as an employee of the university, is necessarily compromised. She can be approached as a counsellor or as a sexual harassment officer – but she can’t be both.’
I asked her why conciliation was such a problem for her. She shifted in her seat; the mood in the room stiffened and became wary.
‘The procedures at the moment,’ she said, ‘are structured so that you get an apology and you get the behaviour to stop – and that’s all.’
‘Isn’t that already quite a lot?’
She looked at me narrowly. ‘I’m against people having to go through conciliation before there can be retribution.’
‘Retribution?’ The Old Testament word took my breath away.
‘If you want some form of justice,’ she went on, ‘for the harasser to be punished, you’re seen as asking too much. You’re being “nasty”.’
‘What sort of punishment would you envisage?’
‘In the industrial award for academics,’ she said, ‘there’s a clause that deals with serious misconduct. Dismissal is appropriate if the charge is found to be proven – and if it’s harassment, that constitutes an assault.’
‘Assault?’ I repeated, confused. ‘Dismissal?’
Christine G— was losing patience with me. Her seat was slightly higher than mine; she was looking down at me, and the light from a high north-facing window behind her was so strong that I had to keep blinking and turning away to rest my eyes. I felt terrifically at a disadvantage, as if I were importuning her. In fact, this sense of being out of date, irrelevant, reminded me painfully of certain days when I have visited my daughter and she has gone about her business in the house as if I weren’t there. So this is about middle-aged mothers and daughters, then, just as the old council members and I (with my sudden pity, my reluctance to condemn) are about fathers and middle-aged daughters. I realised that I was afraid of this young woman. I was her political mother, and she was busily, calmly, coldly demolishing me and my wimpy scruples, my desire to have mercy.
‘What’s going on here is fear,’ she said, bizarrely seeming to read my mind. ‘Fear of power being eroded and questioned. So they close ranks. This whole case has threatened the university’s name, and the college’s. They talk about wanting to have “excellence”, but at the same time they’re letting this kind of thing happen. Women don’t make up these stories. Sexual harassment is an abuse of power.’
I began to speak about what had happened at Ormond since the Smoko. In my outline of the way the matter had been dealt with by the young women and their supporters, I used the word ferocity. Her face chilled and hardened further.
‘I’m feeling something,’ she said, still calm and polite, but icy, ‘about the word you used – ferocity. Where you would say ferocity, I would say courage. The emphasis of the university procedures against sexual harassment is “Maybe the bloke didn’t mean it”. Women now are saying, “I don’t care if he meant it or not – he did me harm.’”
‘What do you think that harm is?’
‘It could be sexual. It could set up the teacher-student relationship on certain terms and it will always be on those terms.’
‘It will remain on those terms,’ I snapped, ‘only if the woman lets it.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but a seventeen-year-old doesn’t know how to change the terms. How can a woman who’s scared of being harassed stay back to chat with her tutor? Men students can – they’re not afraid. If a woman student does, she can easily start to feel that harassment is her fault – that she’s doing something to provoke it.’
Of course these problems are real. Every woman knows it. But this constant stress on passivity and weakness – this creation of a political position based on the virtue of helplessness – I hate it. I was having to hold on to my temper, as she was to hers.
‘As you get older,’ I said, knowing as the words left my mouth that they were the classic refrain of old to young and could only produce rebellion, ‘you begin to understand that a lot of men in these harassment situations are weak. You realise that behind what you saw as force, all those years, there’s actually a sort of terrible pathos. Blokes who come on to girls are putting themselves out on a limb – their self is at risk. You start to learn that women have got a particular power of their own, if only they knew it.’
‘A girl in her first tute,’ she said stubbornly, ‘doesn’t know that.’
‘That’s true – but our job as feminists is to teach them this, surely. To a woman of my age, blokes who behave as Colin Shepherd was accused of doing aren’t scary or powerful. They’re just poor bastards.’
She bristled. ‘They may be “just poor bastards”, but they’ve abused their power. Sexual harassment is ultimately not about sex. It’s about power.’ She threw the old chestnut at me with a flourish of defiance.
I said between clenched teeth, ‘I don’t see how you can unravel those two threads, sex and power, so neatly. They’re tightly entangled. You can’t say that – it doesn’t mean anything.’
She shrugged. There was a long silence. We parted coolly.
As I walked down the stairs of the Union building I thought in dismay, is this what feminism has mutated into – these cold-faced, punitive girls? Or – Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?
Again and again, in trying to understand the Ormond story, I came up against a disproportionate ferocity, a stubborn desire on
the part of certain feminist ideologues to paint themselves and their sisters as outraged innocents. To them there is no light end of the spectrum. They use the word violence in places where to me it simply does not belong.
‘I think it should be criminal for a man to sexually harass a woman,’ one young activist had said to me. “Women should have the right to bring the police in, right from the start. There should no longer be two branches of response to violence against women.’
There it was again, in three short sentences – the slide from harassment to violence. ‘What worries me,’ I said, ‘is that this rules out gradations of offence.’
‘There’s already a gradation,’ said the girl, looking me right in the eye, but with a smiling, courteous charm. ‘There’s indecent assault, and there’s sexual assault. That’s a gradation.’
Seeing what happened to Colin Shepherd as the result of an indecent assault charge, I did not accept this as a particularly fine distinction. I outlined the Ormond case to her, and asked if she saw any disproportion in its outcome. ‘But we want there to be consequences for men,’ she said. ‘These women took the formal legal channel to get redress for what’s essentially unjust behaviour.’
Unjust? Unjust is the word for the behaviour of men who use their position of power as a weapon in forcing women to endure their repeated sexual approaches, or who take revenge for a knockback by distorting a woman’s career or making her workplace intolerable or sacking her. Unjust does not apply to a clumsy pass at a party by a man who’s had too much to drink. The two things belong in different moral realms. But my young activist would not agree. She had a grid labelled criminal, and she was determined to lay it down on the broadest field of male behaviour she could get it to encompass. ‘As you can see,’ she said, ‘I’m passionate about this.’ Craziest of all, by criminalising hapless social blunders she actually believed she was ‘empowering’ women.
