Tennessee sexual harassment policy mired in secrecy, experts say
Jill Cowan and Dave Boucher,
[email protected] 6:15 a.m. CST January 24, 2016
Tennessee legislative officials want the public to trust that they take sexual harassment seriously.
Officials have repeatedly encouraged anyone who thinks he or she has been harassed to file a complaint, with promises of confidentiality.
But the state’s broad insistence on absolute secrecy — without regard for the unique challenges that come with managing elected officials — breeds a system with little accountability for lawmakers’ behavior, a Tennessean investigation has found.
The state declined multiple public records requests from The Tennessean asking for the number of complaints against lawmakers and other related data.
The state’s head of legislative human resources, Connie Ridley, has said she doesn’t keep a log of complaints unrelated to sexual harassment. In the case of sexual harassment, Ridley has said the state’s policy forbids her from acknowledging whether complaints exist.
She and House Speaker Beth Harwell have defended the policy amid questions about a potential sexual harassment complaint against House Majority Whip Jeremy Durham.
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GOP lawmakers decided against discussing allegations involving the Franklin legislator at a Jan. 12 caucus meeting, called in the wake of concerns about his judgment.
Though Harwell told reporters that she had previously asked Ridley to speak to Durham about “appropriate behavior,” she wouldn’t say what specifically had necessitated the meeting. Ridley acknowledged speaking with Durham — a conversation Durham dismissed as insignificant.
In an email to The Tennessean, Durham wrote that there has never been a complaint filed about his behavior.
Because human resources officials denied requests for information about complaints involving lawmakers, that could not be verified.
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Ridley said the public should feel confident that the sexual harassment policy is working and that potential violations are appropriately addressed.
“The policy itself is the tool by which the public can be assured that we are complying with (federal employment discrimination law) and ensuring our workplace is free of harassment and discrimination,” she wrote in an email.
The policy also forbids any victims of sexual harassment who may know that their complaints resulted in discipline from disclosing that publicly, Ridley has said.
'More like a gag order than confidentiality'
That kind of blanket secrecy can contribute to an unhealthy working environment, said Lisa Maatz, vice president of governmental relations for the American Association of University Women.
She reviewed Tennessee’s legislative sexual harassment policy and said its emphasis on confidentiality stood out to her.
“The woman in particular is not supposed to talk about it to anybody else,” she said. “When I read it I was struck by what I felt like was more like a gag order than confidentiality.”
The AAUW, established in 1881, is a national grass-roots organization that advocates for women.
Maatz said that without clear consequences for violating a given policy, there’s no incentive to follow the rules.
Regardless of any written policy, Maatz said it’s up to leaders of institutions to set the tone for what’s accepted appropriate behavior and what’s not.
“They really set the stage,” she said.
Maatz said there are a wider range of legal remedies than there were in decades past, and social norms have become less tolerant of sexual harassment.
Still, if women are “in an environment where harassment is accepted if not condoned, it makes it harder for (women) to advance and do productive work,” Maatz said.
In politics — a male-dominated sphere where elected leaders are ultimately accountable to voters — there tends to be more pressure on women to “quote unquote ‘let it slide,’ ” Maatz said.
Women who have worked at the statehouse have said that they wouldn’t feel comfortable filing a formal complaint with Ridley’s office, nor did they believe that a complaint would resolve anything.
Attorney Thomas Clay, of the Louisville, Ky.-based law firm Clay Daniel Walton Adams, said, “It’s counterproductive for any organization to keep the results of these investigations a secret, I think. It makes it impossible for them to have an effective sexual harassment policy.”
Clay represented three legislative staff members who filed sexual harassment and retaliation claims in the Kentucky legislature. The cases were settled during mediation and the Kentucky Legislative Research Commission agreed to pay a settlement last year.
He said the Kentucky Legislative Research Commission, which handles legislative administration for the state, made it difficult to find information regarding previous complaints, who investigated the complaints and the results.
“One of the things we had to fight the most to obtain from LRC was examples of past complaints of sexual harassment, and it turns out they had several,” Clay said. “I think it takes a lot of courage for a person to make allegations against the people who basically provide their employment.”
The Kentucky legislature had a sexual harassment policy, but Clay called it a “farce” and said it didn’t do much to stop the culture in the legislature.
“Not only was there a defective policy, but the policy wasn’t followed and nobody knew what the policy said,” he said. “I think it’s despicable for public officials to be able to practice this kind of conduct — they have a different standard and their actions are supposed to be transparent.”
States grapple with policies
Transparency is especially important in legislatures, where the most powerful employees are hired by the public.
“You have more likelihood that somebody could abuse those systems because there is not a strict course of accountability to keep that in check,” Allison Duke, associate dean of Lipscomb University’s graduate business program, recently told The Tennessean.
“It becomes really a responsibility of peers to try to manage that behavior and report inappropriate behavior.”
The concerns about Tennessee’s practices come as legislatures across the country grapple with crafting effective sexual harassment policies.
According to a document compiled by the National Conference of State Legislatures, different states’ legislative chambers in 2013 had a range of sexual harassment policies.
Some, such as the policy for the Florida House of Representatives, provide for public disclosure of investigation results.
Others, like the rules for the Louisiana State Senate, are brief and establish that sexual harassment isn’t tolerated, but don’t appear to lay out any framework for complaints and investigations.
Missouri’s legislature re-examined its intern and sexual harassment policies in the aftermath of a scandal involving then-House Speaker John Diehl.
Diehl resigned after the Kansas City Star reported on inappropriate text messages he exchanged with a college freshman intern. Another Missouri lawmaker also resigned after revelations about inappropriate texting.
In November, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the legislature toughened rules.
But the deliberations raised a number of concerns about creating a safe place for interns or other young Capitol staffers to determine whether they would want to file a formal complaint, or resolve the issues in another way.
In October, an Iowa appeals court ruled a former communications director for Iowa Senate Republicans could proceed with a lawsuit arguing she was fired for reporting sexual harassment by male aides and lawmakers, reports the Des Moines Register.
In New Hampshire earlier this month, some lawmakers objected to a proposed new sexual harassment policy because they think it infringes on their rights to free speech. In severalmedia interviews, lawmakers decried a portion of the policy that says “even unintentional conduct — including conduct that is intended as a joke” can be harassment.
“If somebody is out of line and grabs or touches a woman, they should be put in jail,” GOP Rep. Al Baldasaro told Slate.
“To silence legislators, to make them be careful of what they say — I disagree with that.”
Staff writer Holly Meyer contributed to this report.
Reach Dave Boucher at 615-259-8892 and on Twitter @dave_boucher1. Reach Jill Cowan at 615-664-2150 and on Twitter @jillcowan.
