What Was #MeToo Like in 1985?

How a Teenage Girl Reported Sexual Harassment to a Country Policeman in the ‘80s

I was studying engineering.

I needed a job for the summer holidays.

One day I was hitchhiking home from the local town.

I had overnighted with a classmate and there was no public transport this far out in the country.

I got a lift from a taciturn man.

We exchanged pleasantries and I told him that I was looking for a summer job.

“Can you write?,” he asked.

“Yes,” I replied.

We chatted for a few minutes and he asked again, “Can you write?”

“I certainly can,” I replied.

We chatted some more. Well, I chatted, there’s an unwritten rule that if you get a lift the entertainment is on you.

“Can you write?” he asked me a third time.

“Yes,” I replied, puzzled.

“Alright. Come to the garage on Monday at 10 am.”

I was there a week when my colleagues tried to touch me. I pushed them away and they laughed. I was a teenager and they were grown men. I was there two weeks when they pinched my bottom and my breasts. I was there a month when one of them started pushing a porn magazine with obscene photos in my face. We’re talking Hustler here, folks. REALLY obscene.

I was there six weeks when I began to weep quietly in my room every night after I got home.

I told my friend who lived a few hundred yards away from the garage.

“You mustn’t go to the police,” she said, “don’t do that. They won’t understand.”

So I went home and cried that evening too.

It just got worse and worse every day.

“I’m going to report you to the police if you don’t stop.”

They continued, clearly excited by the way I responded.

“I’m going to the police today. You need to stop this right now.”

They laughed.

So one day after work, Thursday, a half-day, I strode through the town to the police station.

“So what would you like to report?” asked the young policeman behind the counter.

“Sexual harassment in the workplace,” I replied.

The cleaning lady in the kitchen at the back dropped her mop.

I filed a report. The policeman wrote down details, details, details. I found it humiliating to relive the experiences. I felt ashamed and kept asking myself how I could have avoided the situation. Filing the report was a horrible experience but I did it.

The next day, I told my colleagues that I’d reported them. They just laughed.

At 12 noon, as the clock struck midday, I spotted a middle-aged policeman in the distance walking down the street.

“Stanley Stiff is on his way.” I told them.

They still didn’t believe me.

Stan took about an hour to walk the final 100 yards. He must have had a long chat with every single farmer he met on that stretch. Patience is not my strong suit.

I knew Stanley was getting very, very close when the nastiest colleague came into my office. He wiggled an oil can between his legs and said, “You know what I’d like to do with this?”

As luck would have it, at exactly that moment, Stanley walked through the office door behind him.

I was 19. I was lucky he was caught in the act. It was unpleasant filing the report but the police were kind and did what they had to do.

Those men didn’t stop their cruel and demeaning behavior when I told them to.

I told them I would go to the police if they didn’t stop.

I told my mom that evening.

I knew she wouldn’t have been supportive if I’d told her earlier. She was surprised and shocked.

I was studying in a male-dominated field. I knew I had to report it, for the sake of my own self-empowerment. I’m glad I did. I was also lucky that the policeman caught my colleague in the act of wiggling the oil can. I had a reliable witness.

And yet, years later, my brother-in-law intimated that I had over-reacted.

That is, until I explained the harassment to him in detail.

“I had no idea,” he said, “I thought they were just teasing you.”

Shoving pornographic images into my face, pinching my bottom & breasts, saying sexually-charged words — this I endured, day in, day out. I did what I had been unable to do as a teenager, explain it in detail. Why is it necessary for me, thirty years later, to detail my experiences to a relative to rebut local gossip and possible dismissal of my claims? Was that the take in the bar-rooms around town?

A few years later in the late ’80s, another man who gave me a lift home, a stranger, asked me “What was it like working there? Was it difficult, you know, all men and everything?”

It was patently clear from this line of questioning that he already knew, or had at least heard, a version of the story.

I chose not to press charges. The policeman asked me what I wanted to do, if I wanted to take them to court and pursue the issue.

“No,” I said, “I just want the police to have a discreet word with them and I want them to leave me in peace to do my job.”

“What about your boss?” the policeman asked.

“No,” I said, “keep him out of it.”

My boss was barely able to articulate a job offer to me. How on earth would he be able to deal with this situation that was infinitely more complicated?

I wish now that I had gone to court and the truth would have come out and like my great-grandfather’s death, the claims would be a matter of public record. I realize now, after the not-guilty verdicts in he-said/she-said cases that sometimes the goal can be to record the case, not necessarily to convict, although that’s good too.

Two of my colleagues left the country.

I achieved a certain notoriety locally.

I never lived at home again.

Fin

Thank you for reading.

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