#MeToo in PR: How to Work to Prevent Sexual Violence in an Organization, and the Fallout It Has

By: Lauren Garczynski

In 2006, the ‘me too’ movement was founded to give hope and support to survivors of sexual assault. However late last year, the viral #MeToo hashtag emerged and generated both a national and global conversation about sexual violence, methods to combat assault and support survivors and how to introduce systemic change. As the world has witnessed, no profession nor person is immune to falling victim, however, as one of the sessions I attended at conference discussed, there are ways to promote measures in an organization to help combat and prevent this worldwide travesty in the workplace.
 
The session, #MeToo and Other Smoldering Crises, was led by Deborah Hileman, President and CEO of the Institute for Crisis Management, which operates to assist and guide organizations through preventing and mitigating crises. The session dove into the numbers and statistics behind #MeToo regarding organizations, as well as how #MeToo has impacted organizations from the inside and outside.
 

• An individual’s bad behavior has an enormous impact on both the victim and the organization: In the past year, sexual assault allegations have brought down CBS Chairman and CEO Les Moonves as well as former American film producer Harvey Weinstein. While allegations of deviant behavior definitely impact financial aspects and stock market value of a company, what’s more devastating in terms of company fallout is the impact on employees. Innocent employees tend to lose their jobs due to the bad behavior of their bosses and CEOs due to the loss of positions under a manager or CEO or the loss of assistants to those who let go.

 

• There were 800,000 recorded ‘smoldering’ crises in 2017: Hileman revealed unsettling statistics that told the impact of the #MeToo movement in the workplace, that being 800,000 crisis events reported in 2017 – a 25 percent increase from 2016. This enormous number is the result of a multitude of factors: the growing complexity of organizations, the increasing speed of business and increased government intervention in suspicious and scandalous company activity. Though it may not seem so at surface level, all of these factors can lead back to the #MeToo movement – with the increasing speed of business misconduct can be overlooked or ignored, government intervention can uncover assault cases not brought forth or recognized and the growing complexity of organizations can lead to again, misconduct being overlooked in favor of business.

 

• Most ‘smoldering’ crises are man-made: As Hileman reported, many smoldering crises are man-made and often even curated from the inside of a company. Hileman detailed how 60 percent of cyber-crimes that impact corporations are the work of internal employees. In addition, many crises relating to #MeToo in the workplace have been ignored because those at fault bring in significant profits for the organization. For example, Fox News was quietly paying off Bill O’Reilly’s victims while they were keeping O’Reilly himself on the air, earning significant profits and only taking action when advertisers started to leave.

 

• You can prepare, prevent and fight against sexual assault in the workplace: Hileman discussed that there are measures to take to ease the fallout of a sexual assault allegation and conviction, as well preventing the incident itself. Hileman suggests that regular media trainings, risk assessment and learning from the cases of peers and competitors are best practices for preparing and dealing with smoldering crises at an organization. She also detailed how when taking measures to prevent misconduct in the first place, it is important that denial about a situation happening is overcome, as any organization can be impacted.

 
On a personal note, while I found the session to be informative and the statistics to be alarming as well as imperative, at times I thought the points discussed by Hileman almost teetered on viewing #MeToo as a problem organizations need to fix, rather than the problem of sexual violence and sexual assault in the workplace. I think Hileman had thought provoking research and data, but the way she presented and framed her information almost made me uncomfortable, as if PR practitioners need to work against #MeToo rather than combat the and work against the individuals who have perpetrated the reasons for the necessity of #MeToo.