‘Do you like this position?’: The workplace rife with shocking sexual harassment

The female prison guard hadn’t been in the job long when she received a text from her superior. It told her to leave early and drive to his place. “I’ll f--- you in uniform,” he finished the text, to her shock and disbelief. “Happy days.”

A different officer – a designated mentor – told another junior female guard he “couldn’t look at me straight as he just wanted to bend me over the table”. He told her if she wanted a picture of his genitals, she only had to ask.

The same female guard told the Herald that a different senior officer invited her to coffee at his place over text message, then “proceeded to tell me that if he had his way, I would not be able to walk afterwards”.

A Herald investigation has found sexual harassment of female staff is rife, but is often buried or ignored within NSW Corrective Services, the arm of the state government’s Department of Communities and Justice that’s responsible for running prisons.

This masthead spoke to more than a dozen current and former workers, ranging from guards and administrative assistants to senior managers from different prisons, who revealed details of extreme and humiliating harassment and assault.

Yet despite years of reports and data showing there have been significant sexual misconduct problems in at least 14 of Corrective Service’s work sites, it failed to implement key policies to stop it, forcing the workplace safety regulator to step in.

SafeWork NSW issued six improvement notices to Corrective Services between October 2023 and March this year warning that the department’s response to sexual misconduct was deficient across a host of measures and was putting workers at risk.

They ranged from inadequate policies to respond to harassment, to no proper training of staff. There was little acknowledgment that harassment could happen offsite. SafeWork found that Corrective Services’ failures “might expose workers to a risk to their health or safety,” according to a number of notices it issued.

Staff from the Herald spoke to people who told their stories on the condition of anonymity to preserve their jobs and protect themselves from retribution. They say they have been enduring harassment for years, but have been too scared to report it, or their reports have not been acted upon.

‘Wake-up call’

They are speaking up now after a Special Commission of Inquiry into a staff member, Wayne Astill, who was convicted of raping 14 female inmates over five years, found a toxic culture of cover-up within the organisation and exposed myriad procedural failures (he is appealing against his convictions).

“Astill gave Corrective Services a wake-up call,” said one female prison guard. “Us girls are coming forward now; we’ve always been too scared to say anything.”

Former prison guard Wayne Astill pictured outside court in August 2022.Credit: AAP

Corrective Services’ management knows about the problem. A professional standards summary that was accidentally leaked to the inquiry website, then retracted, details a litany of serious complaints about sexual harassment of staff since 2019.

They include one case in which three female guards alleged an officer made multiple requests for sexual intercourse and repeatedly made references to their breasts. In another, a senior officer lay on top of a woman during a training exercise, made a thrusting motion with his hips, and said, “do you like this position?”

Another incident involved a male officer exposing himself to a female officer, then putting her hand on his penis while they were driving as escorts. He then turned up drunk at her house and attempted to elicit “sexual favours” from her adult daughter, the summary said.

The summary also told of a male officer asking a female colleague what she was wearing under her shirt, and whether she was loud during sex.

In a 2022 case, corrections officer Glenn Anthony Ash was convicted in Bathurst Local Court of 11 offences against colleagues at a Central West prison, including sexually touching without consent, carrying out a sexual act on another without consent, and assault with an act of indecency.

The incidents included asking colleagues to touch his penis, rubbing their backs and necks despite being told to stop, and masturbating in one complainant’s office. He also asked a complainant to “rearrange him” while unzipping his pants.

The Ash case prompted an independent review of the centre at which he worked, which led to misconduct proceedings against three more staff members. The results of the review have not been made public.

In one of its submissions to the Astill inquiry, Corrective Services said it was considering a review into the handling of sexual misconduct in 14 jails and workplaces across the state, based on an analysis of data of centres with “reported issues of sexual harassment or assault”.

These leaked complaints led to action, such as warnings or dismissals. However, the women who spoke to the Herald said in most cases the victims do not come forward, either because they feared retribution from the “boys’ club” or because if they did, no action was taken. The male officers protected each other.

Many sexual harassment victims do not come forward because they feared retribution from the boys’ club. Credit: Han Hodgkinson

One woman, who worked in administration, had a boss who’d ask her to pick up dropped pens in his office then peer down her top and touch her backside.

She went on to do office work for another man who would ask her to his place because his wife was away, or ring her to ask her what underwear she was wearing. She’d laugh it off but was fearful of him, and would try to ensure they only interacted near a surveillance camera.

“That went on for years,” she said. When she supported another woman’s sexual harassment report, she had phone calls from senior officers threatening retribution.

In a case that’s the subject of a SafeWork investigation into “the alleged exposure of workers to psychological hazards due to sexual harassment in the workplace”, one young administration assistant’s woman’s complaint was never investigated because the alleged perpetrator was on holidays at the time it was raised.

“I know if I report anything it backfires on me,” said a different woman, who has had multiple experiences of serious harassment over her career. “We’re surrounded by toxicity. Colleagues are often more toxic than inmates. You have a false sense of security, you think if someone is wearing blue they have a strong sense of morals. But they don’t.”

SafeWork issued five improvement notices late last year and one in March, warning that Corrective Services was contravening a provision of the Work Health And Safety Act 2001 due to its inadequate handling of sexual harassment.

The notices say workers are exposed to risks due to the lack of information and training on harassment; the lack of measures to manage harassment reports; the inadequate management of complaints, the failure to acknowledge that harassment can occur outside the workplace, and the failure to help frontline workers deal with reports.

“Workers are exposed to a risk to their health and safety from sexual assault/harassment in the workplace due to the PCBU [person conducting business] not adequately managing reports of alleged incidents of sexual harassment (including sexual assault) received by the Professional Standards Investigation Unit as a work health and safety hazard,” said one of the improvement notices, issued on October 16.

Another notice issued the same day said the CSNSW system did not adequately identify the characteristics of sexual harassment. “The PCBU [person conducting business] failed to recognise that sexual harassment can occur when workers are not at the workplace from risks that arise in the workplace,” it said.

The NSW Greens’ Justice spokeswoman, Sue Higginson, said the state owed a duty of care to both employees and inmates in its prison system. “A toxic and hierarchical culture has enabled inmates and female corrections officers to be harassed, intimidated and psychologically, physically and sexually abused,” she said.

“The chilling reality is unless you are a governor or one of their mates, when you walk in the doors of a prison in NSW, you are treated as part of an underworld where your basic human rights can be abused and denied.”

The Herald approached Corrections Minister Anoulack Chanthivong for comment, but he did not provide any.

A spokesman for CSNSW said the department had introduced measures to work through the issues identified by SafeWork and other reviews. It had introduced a new workplace sexual harassment prevention policy on March 1 this year.

As recommended by the Astill inquiry, a Corrective Services reform taskforce would also implement reforms to create a safer workplace for officers.

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