I work in the Houses of Parliament as an assistant to MPs,
and I’ve worked there for about five years.
And I’m here today to talk about the sexual harassment
and bullying that I’ve seen and experienced myself.
Only a few months into one of my jobs working in Westminster,
one day, at a drinks reception, a man who was working with me,
who was at least ten years my senior, leant over to me and said,
“Every man in this room here
wants to **** you.”
Who does that in a work environment?
The House of Commons is an institutionally sexist place.
I felt that I talked, walked, smelled differently to
the white, posh men that I was spending so much time with.
Being a woman in politics has been great sometimes,
but it’s also been quite difficult,
from the low-level microaggressions and sexism,
whether that’s being assumed to be the coffee girl,
to the more extreme sexual harassment and assault.
[Informer]
[Woman in Westminster]
I’d gone for drinks with another staffer.
I thought they were professional drinks,
and he really tried to get me quite drunk.
And when we said goodbye, he just lunged at me and kissed me.
It was so unexpected.
And I was also so worried about how it would affect my career
if I pushed him away.
After that, he would just text me, call me.
I never replied to him.
And then a few months later,
I heard that he was telling loads of colleagues that
I was obsessed with him.
If I’d called him out, that probably would have ended badly,
yet still, he was out here trashing my name.
That just completely reinforced to me that no matter what you do,
you lose.
One time a friend of mine was at a bar,
and someone came up to her and said,
“If I wasn’t getting married soon,
we’d be **** right now.”
Another experience I had, it was a few years into my career.
I was 23, 24 at the time.
I'd become much more active with calling out harassment and bullying,
whether that was on Twitter or in bars.
There was a situation where an MP had filibustered a bill
that would have affected women or girls’ rights.
Someone had strung loads of pairs of underwear across his door,
as a kind of campaigning activity.
And this journalist who I worked with called me,
and then he says,
“I was wondering, is it you who strung up all those pants
outside that MP’s door?
I know you don’t wear knickers very often.”
I think it’s quite hard for journalists to report on
all the cases of alleged sexual harassment, abuse, and bullying
because the nature of political journalism means that they have to
maintain these relationships.
Women often will set up their own WhatsApp groups.
You will find women saying,
“This MP was just really weird with me in a lift.”
Or someone will say,
“Oh, I’m at drinks. Does anyone want to come and join me because
so-and-so is here and I don’t want to be around him?”
That just becomes part of the WhatsApp group.
It’s not the reason it was set up,
but it becomes quite a normal topic for women.
It’s so rife in Westminster.
And we’re just taught to accept it.
And we ultimately do.
The men who I’ve had sexual harassment or been assaulted by,
they’ve always been more senior to me,
in terms of their power, their job title, their age,
going for someone who is junior because they can exploit them.
If you experience those things
in the most powerful building in the country,
you should feel that you could go to someone in HR
or via a complaint system or to your boss.
And the fact that these women don’t feel that they can
and feel that they have to bottle it up or tell friends
or a stranger like me sometimes
because they fear what will happen to their career—
they are terrified of being fired, of being blacklisted,
of being publicly named—
just shows that politics has so far to go
and that actually it doesn’t support women.
Until women feel safe and happy
and as though they have equal opportunity to what men have,
I will always see it as being institutionally sexist.