Harvey Weinsteins in too many workplaces for women to ever feel fully at ease

There is a teenager in my neighbourhood who works part time in a local pub. It is great fun and good money and there is just one problem: she gets harassed. Not every night but, well, OK, pretty much every night.

See, there is a guy who works out the back and I’ll let her take up the story: “He’ll stand in the doorway and make me sort of try to find my way around him, which is awkward because I’ll have to push past, trying to make sure I don’t touch him. Or he’ll look me all over and say, ‘I wish I was your boyfriend.’ Dumb stuff like that.”

Following all the Harvey Weinstein stories, I ask her: “Do you ever complain?”

She snorts like: what would be the point?

“He’s just a dick,” she says.

He’s also related to the owner, and she’s aware that he has had some success with other girls on staff, or so he says, which makes the terrain trickier. Also, this guy’s behaviour is well short of sexual assault.

In some workplaces, it may not even qualify as sexual harassment ­because what is harassment? What is a flirtation? What is being a dirtbag?

The line is fuzzy, so this young employee treats her sort-of boss like a cockroach on the lid of the wheelie bin. He is an occupational hazard and she is worldly enough to know that she will find such ­behaviour everywhere.

Life has been like that for her — for most women — since before she reached puberty. It started with the wolf whistles as she ­walked to the bus stop as a schoolgirl. Then came the catcalling from car windows, the world-famous “Show us your tits!” And it will probably go on forever.

Us old ducks, we all thought it would change one day. The lechers were like dinosaurs. They would die off and a new generation of men would come into the world, schooled in feminism, raised by women who had thrown off their aprons and burned their bras and helped draft the Equal Opportunity Act.

This new generation of boys — some of whom were given dolls as toys and called their mothers by their first names — would regard women as equal in rights and dignity.

And most men do. That’s why women love and marry them, and have kids with them. Because they’re good people, like most women are good people.

But the dinosaur persists. You’ll find them easily enough in media, and no doubt you can find them in law, medicine, sports, catering and government, where women whisper to each other: “Watch out for that one: he’s got roving hands.”

Now it seems like times are changing.

Women are refusing to accept a little side order of harassment as part of the workplace ­experience, and that is a good thing because while it has definitely become politically incorrect to say that you want the world to change for your daughters, if you do have daughters, you’ll know it’s true.

Who wants to send their young daughter into the workplace, knowing they’re going to get ­hassled? And what are we supposed to tell them? Look, it’s just life. Ignore it?

We could urge them to report it, and maybe that works in the big organisations, but what if the ­offender is the boss? Tell them to quit and find work elsewhere? Sure, but there will be another dinosaur there, you can count on it.

That is why we need new solutions.

Women and girls shouldn’t have to brace themselves for sexual harassment in the workplace. They shouldn’t have to leave jobs they love with people they like ­because of some dingleberry with a wandering eye.

That is why sexual harassment is illegal. Yet making it illegal clearly hasn’t stopped it. So what to do?

I know it sounds trite but it’s not like we don’t have a solution, and it starts with the fellas. Don’t be a douche. And if you have been a douche, stop now.

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Postscript

Picture Mike Batterham

Jesse Bird’s story from last week prompted a deluge of correspondence, including from veterans as far back as Vietnam. Jesse was a young private from the Gold Coast who was deployed to ­Afghanistan in 2009.

He suffered physical injuries and, after witnessing the death of a close friend, developed post-traumatic stress disorder.

He struggled to return to civilian life but ­repeated requests for assistance from the Department of Veterans’ Affairs fell on deaf ears. Jesse, known as Big Bird to his friends because of his size, had just $5 in his bank ­account when he took his own life, using army equipment and while wearing his army jumper.

Jesse’s parents, Karen and John Bird (pictured), have fought a tremendously difficult fight to get recognition for him, and on Wednesday Veterans’ Affairs Minister Dan Tehan rose in parliament to apologise formally on behalf of the Australian government for the ­department’s failings.

Jesse’s parents are grateful for the apology and for the support of readers, and they hold Tehan in high regard, but it’s still hard. They miss Jesse. They just miss him.