North Carolina sexual harassment attorney, Kathryn Abernethy, discusses what happens if HR does nothing after reporting sexual harassment. With more than 20 years of experience in North Carolina, attorney Abernethy has seen this happen a countless number of times. She helps explain the steps that an employee needs to take before their situation gets much worse. This is another installment in a series of North Carolina law from attorney Abernethy. For even more, click here. We have also transcribed the interview below, if you’d prefer to read it.
https://youtu.be/sziW7Av2PFM
Transcript: What Happens If HR Does Nothing After Reporting Sexual Harassment?
If the harasser is your supervisor or somebody in the immediate chain of command, then the company is liable for that harassment regardless of whether you’ve reported it and regardless of what happens after the harassment has occurred. On the other hand, if let’s say it’s your coworker or subordinate who’s harassing you, then that’s going to be a different analysis.
What is required to happen is before you have a harassment claim, first, you have to report the harassment to your company, to HR, to somebody within the company who is authorized to take those sexual harassment complaints. And then the company has to have failed to effectively prevent further harassment. In other words, just because you haven’t heard anything from the company when you’re dealing with coworker harassment may not mean you have a claim yet.
The question then becomes, is your coworker still harassing you? If they are, then the company’s response clearly hasn’t been effective and so they’ve they have then violated the law as to your right to have a workplace free from sexual harassment.
Whatever they did, even though you haven’t heard about it, if suddenly your coworker stops, whatever that conduct is that’s going to be a clue that you’re going to be looking at what’s called a Faragher-Ellerth defense. They got a report, they investigated the report, and they took some disciplinary action. They may not have terminated the offender, but chances are they probably wrote them up or they gave them a warning, or they might have suspended them for a couple of days, might have docked their pay.
You don’t know and unfortunately HR is not required to tell you as the victim. In fact, there are laws that there are employee privacy laws and concerns that may dissuade them from telling you what they did with the harasser.
But the question isn’t really have you heard anything back from HR? Is harassment still happening when you’re talking about a coworker or subordinate?
