Chair of the National Union of Public Workers (NUPW) Gender Affairs Committee, Joy-Ann Inniss, delivering her address on the topic, ‘The Rights of the Caribbean Working Class Woman and the Way Forward for Labour’, during the Caribbean Movement for Peace and Integration’s International Women’s Day lecture.
Though the Employment Sexual Harassment (Prevention) Act was proclaimed in 2017, the implementation of this law in some workplaces still has not occurred.
Chair of the National Union of Public Workers (NUPW) Gender Affairs Committee, Joy-Ann Inniss, made this disclosure while speaking to The Barbados Advocate at Hotel PomMarine recently. She was the featured speaker at the Caribbean Movement for Peace and Integration’s International Women’s Day lecture.
“The Employment Sexual Harassment (Prevention) Act has been proclaimed, however, we are still seeing levels of sexual harassment because the implementation still has not occurred. So you will find that yes, in a lot of departments the workplace policy is still not in place even though it is being worked on. For some reason, it is still not in place and our culture itself seems to condone sexual harassment because for them, they don’t see it as sexual harassment. They see it as why shouldn’t I be able to tell a woman how she looks and vice versa, a woman tells a man, why should that be an issue? But they do not understand that sexual harassment is an unwanted sexual advance.”
Inniss stated that “government has done its part to some extent”, so employers must do their part as well when it comes to having policies in place on sexual harassment.
The trade unionist said, “Employers have to ensure that their workplace policy is in place and that they are punitive measures put in place as well to curb the behaviour if persons are not voluntarily doing it.”
She further stated that employees also have a role to play. This would involve understanding “what sexual is and also to respect the persons that work with them. At the end of the day, if you know what sexual harassment is – if it is a touch, if it is just sending across a text, if it is looking at them in certain ways, if it is your language that you are using, including your body language, if those things are an offence to an individual then you need to stop them. If not, you can be charged; there is a fine for it.”