The House | #MeToo is not over

4 min read23 min

It entered the wider public consciousness after brave women who survived Harvey Weinstein’s crimes came forward – resonating with countless people who had suffered similar workplace harassment.

#MeToo has brought many offenders to justice and changed how abuse at work is viewed. It has helped victims understand that they can come forward and be heard.

But it’s not over. More needs to be done to stop sexual harassment, particularly in the workplace.

Those who abuse their positions of power use tactics that have been characterised in the acronym ‘DARVO’ – a psychological manipulation technique standing for Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender. It describes a response in which someone accused of harmful behaviour denies what happened, attacks the person making the accusation, and then presents themselves as the victim while portraying the actual victim as the wrongdoer. As a lawyer, I have seen this pattern of behaviour in countless workplaces where a woman makes an allegation of sexual harassment, and a senior man subsequently portrays her as ‘mad’ or a ‘witch’ and the organisation then works collectively to defend itself and isolate and hound out the victim.

Last week I hosted a Parliamentary roundtable and heard first-hand about the damaging impact of these behaviours.

The event in Portcullis House was attended by some of my colleagues, women’s rights activists, and, importantly, brave survivors – including Zelda Perkins, the first woman to break a non-disclosure agreement (‘NDA’ in 2017 after having signed one decades earlier in relation to Harvey Weinstein, and Lindsay Mason and Jen Mills from the Survivors of Mohamed Fayed and Harrods.

Survivors should shape our policies as a Government regarding abuse, as they understand and have experienced how these events take place.

One suggestion raised during the discussion was whether workplace governance could learn from the way we approach health and safety. Could the same principles be applied to HR? We would never accept a company simply accrediting its own health and safety risk. Or even tax contributions. So why should it different when there are persistent problems with sexual harassment??

Done properly, independent scrutiny could help identify failures before they become scandals, and, crucially, before another employee has to suffer a horrific crime. It could also address one of the fundamental problems highlighted by the experiences of so many survivors: organisations do not objectively assess themselves.

We have a system to do this already, but very few people, and even fewer victims are aware of it. The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) can carry out workplace investigations, and it has significant powers to requirement improvement. In the last year both Ikea and Lidl have entered into agreements with the EHRC to reduce the prevalence of sexual harassment in their workplaces. I would like to see this work being significantly better resourced.

Some brave victims do of course bring employment tribunal claims for sexual discrimination. The median employment tribunal award for successful sexual discrimination claims in 2025 was just £16,161. There is a perception that these claims are ‘big bucks’, but that is unusual and tends to relate to a tiny minority of very high earners. The financial awards for most people are small. The risk of being sued isn’t going to scare many employers into doing the right thing, if they aren’t already.  

We could give the EHRC and/or employment tribunals, the power to prevent individuals from being company directors where they are found to have sexually harassed or systematically covered up sexual harassment of their staff. At present directors’ legal duties relate to promoting the company’s interests, and avoiding conflicts between the director’s individual interests, and those of the company. This potentially provides an impetus to hide rather than uncover sexual harassment in the workplace. There is often no meaningful penalty for sweeping it under the carpet.

#MeToo succeeded in breaking the silence. It forced conversations that many organisations had spent years avoiding. But the next stage must be about turning those conversations into lasting institutional change in this country. For all employers.

That means changing how workplaces are governed, how complaints are handled, and who holds organisations accountable when their systems fail.

The #MeToo movement is still building momentum – bringing justice, changing behaviours and giving survivors a voice. It has achieved all three. The Government’s legislation to ban non disclosure agreements and confidentiality clauses that prevent victims from speaking about what has happened to them, is an excellent start.

The next step is to go further.

Parliamentarians have a responsibility to ask difficult questions. Every survivor’s journey is different. We need to listen in Westminster and legislate appropriately to ensure workplace sexual harassment is taken as seriously as it deserves to be.

We owe that to every survivor.