Workplace sexual harassment, assault: The dire warning that still echoes in Marcia van Zeller’s ears years after the fact

It’s been almost 50 years but Marcia van Zeller can still recall her colleague’s dire warning as clear as day.

She had just started work as a junior production assistant at a broadcaster in Canada when a more senior male colleague invited her to lunch, just the two of them.

Floored that her experienced co-worker wanted to go for a meal with a “little greenhorn” like her, Van Zeller realised something more sinister was going on when she sat down.

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“He was grooming me over lunch,” she tells 9honey, decades later.

Still new to the industry, Van Zeller didn’t know what to make of the incident until she returned to the office and an older female colleague took her aside.

“Don’t go to lunch with that man again,” she warned Van Zeller.

Have you got a story? Contact reporter Maddison Leach at mleach@nine.com.au

That warning was just about the only thing women could do to protect one another from workplace sexual harassment and abuse at a time when there were no anti-harassment laws or company policies to protect them.

Sexual comments and innuendo, unwanted touching and predatory behaviour from male colleagues, especially towards younger women, were simply considered part of the job.

”We didn’t even know that there was anything wrong. We expected that this is just how it is. This is what men are like,” Van Zeller says.

She eventually left broadcasting and moved to Australia to pursue writing but not before hearing harrowing stories from women who were subjected to much worse than an uncomfortable lunch.

Those stories stayed with her for decades until the #MeToo movement exploded onto the world stage in 2017, revealing that the harassment and abuse was still happening in workplaces all over the globe.

“The incidents that the various accusers were describing sounded eerily like what I had either experienced or observed 50 years ago,” Van Zeller says.

“I was thinking, nothing has changed. These things in theory, on paper, should be better … and yet it still has continued to happen on a spectacular scale.”

In Australia, more than 40 per cent of women and 26 per cent of men in have experienced workplace sexual harassment in the past five years, according to the Australian Human Rights Commission. 

One in two Australians have been exposed to sexual harassment at work, either as a victim or bystander, and many leaders are failing to protect them.

Research from Our Watch found that 40 per cent of workplace leaders are not aware of current legal obligations to prevent workplace sexual harassment, and almost one in four don’t know workplace sexual harassment is illegal in Australia.

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In the face of these statistics and #MeToo, all Van Zeller could think was “why didn’t we do something about it sooner?”

She couldn’t bring predatory men from her past to justice, so she devised a plan to “get back at some of those blokes” with her new book Be A Good Girl, Valerie.

The titular character is sexually assaulted by a male boss in the ’70s and suppresses the trauma until decades later, when a young colleague named Anna is fired for rejecting her older boss’ advances.

In championing Anna, 68-year-old Valerie finds her own voice and can finally demand justice for what she went through all those years ago.

Van Zeller created Valerie based on the women she met and stories she heard in the ’70s, just as she moulded a predatory male character around the men she crossed paths with back then.

“He might may come across in the book as sounding like an absolute ogre, but nothing that he says or does was outside of my realm of experience,” she reveals.

“Right down to the totally disrespectful, crude and crass way that he spoke.”

Van Zeller was also intentional in depicting a woman in her 60s supporting a much younger colleague through workplace sexual harassment in the hopes of inspiring greater solidarity between women of different generations in tackling this issue.

After all, it was an older colleague who warned her all those years ago.

“I want the book, ultimately, to be positive. Valerie, I think, is a bit of an emblem of hope, that it’s never too late to deal with some of these things,” she adds.

It’s been eight years since the #MeToo movement exploded into the spotlight and though workplace sexual harassment and abuse remains a serious issue in Australia and abroad, Van Zeller hopes that media like Be A Good Girl, Valerie will help tip the scales.

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Because if there’s one thing she’s learned in the decades since she started working, it’s that perpetrators are the only ones who benefit from women staying silent.

“The thing is that sexual assault and sexual harassment thrives in silence, so using our voices is the most powerful thing we have.”

Be A Good Girl, Valerie by Marcia van Zeller will be available from July 2. Pre-order here.

Help is available. Contact the National Sexual Assault, Domestic Family Violence Counselling Service on 1800RESPECT (1800 737 732).

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