(Credit: Maxwell Jayes, Unsplash)
An associate professor at Thompson Rivers University is looking into the extent hospitality workers in Kamloops deal with sexual harassment, in hopes of making changes in the industry.
TRU Environment Culture and Society associate professor Rochelle Stevenson says they want to understand the situations restaurant workers are faced with – in a bid to get them more support in these cases.
A survey, in partnership with the Kamloops Sexual Assault Counselling Centre, has been launched and while it’s still early in the process, Stevenson says 100 per cent of respondents in Kamloops– so far — have experienced sexual harassment at work.
“What we do know from other studies in the USA, 90 per cent of women and 70 per cent of men, have experienced sexual harassment in hospitality. Our numbers are shocking, but they are not entirely out of the norm for what we know folks are experiencing in hospitality.”
Stevenson explains they also want to make workers more aware of what sexual harassment looks like in a real-life situation.
“I think one of the things we have seen – and I worked in the restaurant industry for years – is a general culture of permissibility around some of the sexual comments, sexualized jokes, and those kinds of things – where it almost creates a culture where that behaviour almost becomes more acceptable.”
On top of that, Stevenson says many restaurants in the city also don’t have resources to support employees in these cases.
“25 per cent, almost 30 per cent of restaurants we talked to, did not have a sexual harassment policy. Only 60 per cent had a specific sexual harassment policy whereas the remainder were covered under a general harassment policy. It means, there are folks out there that do not have a sexual harassment policy.”
Stevenson says the plan is to create a template policy with sexual harassment resources that restaurant employers in Kamloops can use in the policy handbook.
She says she also wants to create an online training platform for employees to help identify sexual harassment cases and deal with cases in the workplace.
