The Herald Sun is reporting today that a senior officer is not having his contract renewed because of a number of serious accusations of sexual abuse made against him.
Victoria Police has moved swiftly behind the scenes to force out a senior officer because of fears he figures prominently in a looming police sexual harassment scandal.
Sources say that the officer has been notorious among workmates for more than 20 years for his persistent sexual advances, mostly aimed at younger women he outranked.
The accusations have been taken up by Taskforce Salas, an internal investigation set up when Ken Lay asked the Human Rights Commission to conduct an independent probe into harassment and bullying in Victoria Police, what he described as
A small percentage of our members target, and then relentlessly take advantage of women by using their power and influence.
At times the intent is sexual. At times the intent is to humiliate. But whatever the intent — it is always based on skewed ideas of what it is to be a man. It is based on a sense of entitlement that he holds the power and has a right to use it to take advantage.
This behaviour is simply unacceptable.
Lay, like David Morrison, was a shining example of how men in positions of power can use that power to recognize a damaging culture for women in traditionally male workforces, and take firm action against it.
However, if the Herald Sun’s report is true, shuffling someone out of the organization is not sticking to either the principle or the letter of Ken Lay’s statements.
Again, if it’s true, why hasn’t the officer been charged or disciplined before he’s allowed to simply serve out the remainder of his contract? It gives the impression that Victoria Police are more concerned about protecting their reputation than protecting the junior members of their organization.
I very much hope the report is wrong, that VicPol are going to take uncompromising action against any member, no matter how senior, who abuses their position and their staff. I very much hope that no one sitting in the chair that used to belong to Ken Lay is seriously considering attempting to cover up incidents of serious, possibly criminal, incidents of sexual harassment by senior police. I very much hope they are making sure that all their junior officers know they will be taken seriously if they make complaints about such things, and that the perpetrators will not be protected by seniority.
Because if those things are not true, Victoria Police would become part of a problem they exist to redress.
That is not the organization Ken Lay or Christine Nixon worked so hard to turn into a workplace of integrity and respect.
As the Herald Sun reports:
Efforts by Mr Lay and Chief Commissioner Ashton to root out harassment and bullying from police culture began with former chief commissioner Christine Nixon more than a decade ago.
“We started to work through this issue of harassment — and not just of women,” Ms Nixon said this week.
“We wanted to broaden the culture of support for ‘the other’. It started with treating gay and lesbian people with respect … and then there was family violence.
“We had a couple of quite prominent cases after people started coming forward. One woman complained of a serious sex case — and that same (predator) also harassed young male officers.”
The full report is due out next month, and time will tell whether Victoria Police are going to respond to it with the full weight of the law and the intentions of its previous commissioners to render this behaviour something all police force members understand is completely unacceptable.
I hope they know that the entire community will be watching, and will want to see the leadership we’ve come to expect from our senior police has not fallen down in the face of difficult calls.
And, by the way, Herald Sun, this is not how you headline a story about sexual harassment at work:
Update: We had tried to contact Victoria Police for their response to the Herald Sun story. They asked us to wait before publishing the story so they could send us an official statement. Which we did.
Here it is in full:
Please refer to the comments made by the Chief Commissioner on the John Faine program.
Our site was experiencing technical problems (fixed now) so we had time to go through the two and a half hours recording of Jon Faine this morning and find this interview with Chief Commissioner Graham Ashton (at 42:20 minute mark)
Faine: (reading from the Herald Sun) Victoria Police rocked by sex scandal as senior cop targeted. Victoria Police has moved swiftly behind the scenes to force out a senior officer because of fears he figures prominently in a looming police sexual harassment scandal.– what’s going on?
Ashton: Ah, I’m not too sure, I look after all the senior contracts for the assistant commissioners and above which is all the members that are on contract with Victoria police, there’s no one in that group that I’m looking at ending any contracts.
…
I’m the one who handles all the contracts so if I was going to be considering terminating someone’s contract or forcing someone out I would know about it and I don’t know about it
Faine: We’ll take that as being that the article has got some problems with it
Ashton: One can only speculate that perhaps it’s referring to a more junior member of the police force.
Ashton confirmed that there are investigations going on, but said nothing about how Victoria police are going to handle the outcome of such investigations.
Unless they revisited the issue later in the program, where I couldn’t find it, the Chief Commissioner had nothing to say about the allegations of serious sexual harassment, made against an officer the Herald Sun alleges has a career spanning 20 years and included long term ongoing issues with harassing young female officers.
Victoria Police media unit had nothing further to add.