Recently media has been abuzz with several scandals involving sexual harassment in South Africa’s civil society and non-governmental space.
Sexual harassment involves non-consensual and coerced sexual approaches or actions within the workplace.
While the typical sexual harassment case involves a superior abusing their power towards a subordinate, in some cases people who hold power can also be harassed.
Sexual harassment then, is most often a display of power and dominance over work colleagues.However, there exists a grey area in the workplace relating to consensual sexual activities between colleagues and the impact that these can have on the daily life of an organisation.
In any workplace, once it is suspected or known that two people are in a sexual relationship, even if they are adults, it always creates a question mark about the way in which their special relationship affects what happens at work.
As such, many organisations have developed codes that require that office romances, especially between people who report to each other, have to be disclosed so that there is no suspicion of sex being parlayed for influence and favour within the organisation. Disclosing office romance is an attempt to separate the personal from the professional.
In spaces like NGOs, however, the distinction between the personal and the professional is often a bit harder to define. This is because many people in NGOs define their work as “activism”, thus people’s work is usually also, their personal political cause. For many people working in NGOs, there is thus very little separation between their social lives, their politics, and their professional work.
This means that people form very intimate bonds of friendship and “comradeship” within their political work which happens around the clock.
Activists often depend closely on their networks of friends and partners who share their ideologies to achieve their common objectives and survive the mental and psychological strain that comes with a sector which demands that you care about the work.
Having many networks within the NGO sector, it was no surprise to me that as the sexual harassment scandals played out in the media, many of my colleagues were holding quieter discussions about the complications of consensual sex in the sector.
Well, look, we are all adults here. What is the complication if people are consenting to sex in NGOs? The trouble seems to be that there are so many overlapping networks of power and influence within the sector where personal relationships are important currency for advancing the work of one’s organisation.
Although my NGO colleagues are not saying this in public, it is not uncommon for powerful and influential activists to openly and deliberately use their NGO networks as spaces of unbridled sexual conquest and pursuit. You can find that activists will manoeuvre campaign decisions in a way that really may be purely for the benefit of a sexual engagement they wish to pursue. It gets really messy. Once other activists begin to suspect that they are devoting countless hours of their lives to serve someone else’s sexual fantasy, it leads to resentment and a breakdown of relationships within organisations.
It also becomes complicated if people express sexual liberatedness as an alibi to have many concurrent relationships within the NGO space where it becomes quite hard to tell if part of the political outlook of the space is that everyone must just be OK with having sex with everyone.
This becomes all the more complicated when many young and politically passionate volunteers come into spaces and are starstruck by famous activists, enter into relationships with them, and only discover later down the line that this is just what the famous activist does – they sleep with every new person that joins the space.
Again, what is wrong if there is consent? Technically, nothing is wrong. But ethically, there are questions.
The intimate integration of the professional and personal in NGOs demands that we be careful to treat them differently from a pick-up bar...