“You need the work,” one woman said, “so you shut your mouth.” #MeToo may have helped change the landscape for women in Hollywood and in the boardroom, but cleaners, secretaries and supermarket workers who have suffered sexual violence at work say it has yet to do much for them.
Yasmina Tellal, 42, spent six years picking and packing fruit and vegetables in the south of France.
“From the start” her bosses “established a system of fear”, she told AFP. “They would come to kiss us during breaks, touch us and try to make us take 300 euros ($350) to sleep with them.
“One day while I was in the car with my supervisor, he stopped at a rest area, grabbed my hand and placed it on his thing,” she said, struggling to get the words out, even a decade on.
Tellal arrived in France from Spain in 2011 with a promise of work through a Spanish temp agency. She thought she was getting a one-year contract at the French minimum wage — around 1,800 euros per month — with accommodation and meals provided.
But that is not how it turned out. “I was paid around 400 euros, sometimes less. I had to figure out the rent on my own, and working conditions were inhumane,” she said.
“When you don’t have money, you’re trapped, forced to stay and keep quiet,” she said. Then her body began to give.
The dizziness and paralysis started in 2015. Doctors diagnosed multiple sclerosis, which she puts down to the stress and trauma.
“They ruined my life,” Moroccan-born Tellal told AFP. But she used her anger to drive her fight for justice — “I had nothing left to lose.”
The Spanish couple who ran the agency were eventually jailed for five years in 2021 — three of them suspended — for breaching labour laws. But they were not charged with human trafficking, as Tellal’s lawyer, Yann Prevost, had demanded.
Nor did the labour court address the sexual violence she suffered.
After a long and protracted fight, the former farm worker finally won 32,000 euros in damages in 2023, a sum upheld on appeal in June.
While Prevost hailed her as a standard-bearer and “whistleblower”, hers is a rare story of a low-paid victim standing up against the odds.
Six out of 10 women questioned in the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain said they experienced sexism or harassment at work in a major 2019 study by the Foundation for European Progressive Studies (FEPS).
More than one in 10 said they were victims of “forced” or “non-consensual” sexual relations.
– From sexist jokes to rape –
Marie, a medical secretary, was raped and harassed by one of the doctors she worked for in a Paris suburb. But for months the 42-year-old mother could not quite believe what was happening to her.
She had moved to the area after a difficult break-up, and the doctor had assured her that “there was a great atmosphere in the office, that they often went out together after work. As a small-town girl, I was delighted,” she said.
But soon came “the sexist jokes, wandering hands and then my bra being opened through my clothes.
“I knew it wasn’t normal but I said to myself, ‘It’s no big deal’. I was in denial.” Until the day of the rape, which she is still unable to talk about five years later.
The breaking point came when a much younger colleague began to be the target. “I realised that if I didn’t speak up, I was effectively complicit in everything happening at the clinic,” she said.
Marie finally went to the police last year. “It took me a long time because I was afraid of not being believed. How could I be taken seriously when I myself had not been able to recognise what happened to me?”
– ‘So normalised’ –
Women like Marie — whose name we have changed at her request — and Yasmina “are not the kind of people who usually turn to lawyers”, said Jessica Sanchez, who specialises in social law in Bordeaux, in southern France. Taking a case to court “requires a crazy amount of courage… and you have to have the means to be able to risk losing your job,” she said.
“The first question they ask themselves is, ‘How can I pay the rent or feed my kids?'” said Tiffany Coisnard, a legal expert with the AVFT, a European campaign group against workplace violence.
“Sexual harassment at work is so normalised as a risk of the job that many women struggle to even label it,” she added.
They are often in precarious financial positions, with single parents or those whose immigration status depends on their job particularly vulnerable.
Foreigners working without papers run even higher risks of “having to reveal themselves” to the authorities and risk being deported, said Pauline Delage, a gender violence specialist at French research centre CNRS.
Only “a very small minority of workplace harassment victims break the wall of silence that paralyses older women in particular,” the FEPS study found.
Even when women in lower-paid jobs speak out, they are “much less heard in the media” than actors, writers or journalists, said the AVFT.
“Very few” cases make it to the police, never mind court, a French police source told AFP, even if he insisted the way officers deal with victims has “evolved”.
“Now we take care to reassure them… There is a guide with things not to say and not to do.”
But even he admitted that some police officers, both men and women, are “boorish”, with “no compassion”.
– Even unions affected –
In theory, victims should be able to report abuse to their employers or their union.
But sometimes union representatives are conflicted about supporting victims when it means getting a “colleague fired, even if they’ve been accused of sexual harassment”, said Coisnard.
But French unions FO and CGT, which have themselves been hit with abuse and harassment cases within their branches, insist things have changed.
“A few years ago there was probably the idea that union advocacy outweighed individual cases,” said Beatrice Clicq, a sexual violence officer for FO.
The union was fined nearly a quarter of a million euros in February over sexual harassment in one of its branches in Brittany, in western France.
“What could have been tolerated 15 years ago is no longer acceptable,” insisted Myriam Lebkiri, who holds the same position at the CGT.
– Hotel cleaners revolt –
A marathon strike by cleaners at an Ibis hotel in Paris made headlines around the world when one of the housekeepers, Rachel Keke, was elected to parliament in 2022.
But the cases of sexual violence raised during the 22-month dispute got little traction, even though Keke herself revealed that a guest had touched her breasts.
“We talk openly about it between ourselves,” Keke told AFP — “a guest opened the door naked, another exposed his buttocks, or offered money to sleep with him… But quickly we were made to understand that it was pointless” to make a complaint, she said.
“The client is always protected.” As far as management was concerned, “what happened to us was not a big deal”, the 51-year-old added.
“These kinds of situations end the same way, with a mere apology from the management and that’s it,” sighed Sylvie Kimissa, one of Keke’s former colleagues, after a long day of making beds, cleaning bathrooms and vacuuming.
A Congolese single mother, she said she has witnessed several sexual assaults. “We have no choice but to keep working.”
The hotel’s owner, Accor, said the management had recently been changed and “no case of harassment or assault has been reported in recent months.”
– DSK scandal –
Very little has changed in the 14 years since the Dominique Strauss-Kahn scandal, experts say, when the head of the International Monetary Fund and favourite to be the next French president, nicknamed “DSK”, was accused of sexually assaulting housekeeper Nafissatou Diallo in the Sofitel hotel in New York.
“All levels of the hotel trade are affected,” said Maud Descamps, a trainer in sexual harassment prevention in the industry, but it is particularly problematic at the luxury end.
“The more upmarket, the more ‘touchy’ it gets to handle cases involving customers with extremely high purchasing power,” she said.
“It continues to be minimised because it’s a massive thorn in the side.”
“A hotel room is a place of risk,” Descamps said, “and what fuels that is very precarious working conditions, and the contracting out of staff which further waters down responsibility.”
The DSK case was closed at the end of 2012 with a confidential financial agreement between him and the Guinean-born housekeeper.
While the #MeToo movement has since happened, “the social pressure on victims is still very hard to bear and the mechanism of shame and guilt remains pervasive,” said lawyer Giuseppina Marras.
She represented a supermarket worker from Flixecourt in northern France who tried to kill herself in 2016, despairing at her colleagues defending the boss who had raped and sexually assaulted her on numerous occasions.
The manager was finally jailed for 10 years in March.
But there has been some progress, Marras insisted, with a “clear difference in the judicial handling of these cases compared to a decade ago”.
When she defended a boss accused of raping employees back then, he “walked away with a suspended sentence”.
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