Sexual Misconduct at the Workplace and a Culture of Impunity

Pallavi Gogoi described in the Washington Post how she was raped by M J Akbar when she was a young journalist in India. Reading it, and thinking about what friends, colleagues and acquaintances in Dhaka had told me over the years, one pattern kept surfacing.

The abuser is typically senior, older, of standing and well regarded. The victim’s professional future runs through him or through people who owe him something. And the surrounding culture supplies no realistic apprehension that anything will follow a complaint. The asymmetry is not incidental to the misconduct; it is what makes the conduct survivable for the person who commits it and unreportable for the person who suffers it.

Written in 2018, this is the earliest published trace of what later became a professional specialism. The questions it raises are the ones that recur inside international organisations: complaint mechanisms that rest on the complainant’s courage rather than on institutional design, and impunity produced by culture rather than by any absence of rules.