LECTORAAT CHANGE MANAGEMENT – De Haagse Hogeschool

Yet again, another famous white man has recently been accused of rape and sexual harassment. Four women have claimed that Russel Brand, the controversial stand-up comedian, has abused them between 2006 and 2013, while he was at the height of his career.  

Brand denies the allegations, and, à la Trump, spews out disinformation and conspiracy theories to defend himself. “Is there another agenda at play?” he asked in one of his videos, feeding on his audience’s deep skepticism of the media.

While much of the discussion is about whether Russel Brand is guilty or not, what is  particularly fascinating, is the responsibility of all the others (including ourselves) in this case. Channel 4’s boss has admitted that indeed, “terrible behavior” against women has been tolerated in the television industry. Broadcasters were “happy to show footage of Brand making misogynistic jokes about sex.” And by laughing at his jokes, and pumping his bank account, Brand’s audiences also enabled his bad behavior.

 According to sociologist Norbert Elias, no single person operates in a vacuum. It’s never a sole person who is guilty. Rather, individuals are dependent on their “relations, processes, and the interweaving of the actions of interdependent individuals, characterized by ever shifting power balances,” according to Van Krieken.

In her article Russel Brand is a familiar story, Rebecca Solnit observes that one of the reasons that yet another powerful man got away with it for so long is “because one of the forms inequality takes is inequality of voice – the voice with which you say what’s happened, the voice that’s listened to and believed and respected, the voice that determines what happens.”

The fact that such accusations can take 15-20 years to come out, illustrates how difficult it is for victims to speak out, as by doing so, they set themselves up for even more abuse. As Solnit notes: “These few rape cases that make it to court often result in exposure, danger, shaming and months to years of torment in the legal system for victims.”

Moreover, Brand’s bad behavior was no secret to his entourage. As in the case of former film producer Harvey Weinstein, the victims saw no other alternative but to gossip with each other, in order to protect themselves. While everybody knew what was going on, the organizations chose to do nothing. If victims or witnesses tried to speak up, they were labeled as ‘trouble makers’ and very often, were the ones who saw their careers go down the drain.

At a macro level, deeply rooted societal attitudes also play an important part in enabling such predators. Take the case of the unsolicited kiss during the Women’s World Cup medal ceremony in Sydney. While Luis Rubiales, the president of the Spanish football federation was eventually sacked and sued for sexual assault, he initially brushed off critics, calling them ‘idiots and stupid people.’ That he got a standing ovation by members of the federation after he complained about ‘false feminism,’ well illustrates that he felt justified, and that there certainly is a system in place to condone his bad behavior.    

 In her article, The nasty noughties: Russel Brand and the era of sadistic tabloid misogyny, Zoe Williams claims that such attitudes often go back to “the lad culture in the mid-90s”, which is characterized as a “reaction against ‘feminism gone too far’.” And things have gotten much worse in the 00’s, according to the author. “It was considered pearl-clutching, joy-killing, to object to a rape joke, just as it was thought – correctly – to be career-ending to allege sexual assault against someone more powerful, who would be openly joking about it by the next day anyway.”

And today, the fact that an influencer like Andrew Tate, who was charged with rape and human trafficking, still resonates with a wide audience (his videos on Tik Tok have reached more than 11 billion views), shows that these misogynic societal attitudes are a lot deeper and engrained than one might think. (That Andrew Tate and Elon Musk are now defending Russel Brand speaks volumes as well).

I therefore wonder: are organizations even aware of these tremendous forces (reinforced by all kinds of fake news channels), that they are up against when attempting to fight sexual harassment in the workplace? Rather than focusing only on perpetrators, should they also not consider the surroundings that shape and enable them?