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The calls for Governor Andrew Cuomo to resign amid a host of allegations of sexual misconduct are reaching a fever pitch. The accusations of seven women have now accumulated, and they include Governor Cuomo asking inappropriate questions, making sexual comments, paying obsessive attention to employees' looks, planting unwanted kisses on their cheeks and lips, and even groping a woman.
These allegations follow an ugly, albeit familiar pattern, in which a powerful man is accused of taking advantage of a vulnerable woman, often in his employ. But the man and the woman are often not the only people in the story, and that is true in some of these cases, too: There were bystanders.
In her medium essay, Lindsey Boylan, the first of Cuomo's accusers, alleges she was asked by the governor to play strip poker on a government plane, but she and Cuomo were not alone; a press aide and a state trooper were within earshot. Boylan also provided screen shots of inappropriate emails sent to her by top aides.
Anna Ruch describes meeting Cuomo at a wedding reception, where he grabbed her face and asked if he could kiss her; he later kissed her cheek. This happened in front of a number of people, one of whom snapped a photo of the episode.
And Charlotte Bennet, yet another accuser, reported being transferred to another job after complaining to Cuomo's chief of staff about his intrusive questions about her love life.
What were these bystanders thinking? Why didn't they intervene?
As we continue to hear public statements from survivors and their alleged abusers, it is also crucial that we hear from the bystanders. I want to hear from the state trooper, the press aide, the chief of staff, and the wedding guests.
These people aren't responsible for the abuse. But having a clear and specific understanding of the pressures they faced and the calculations they made will help us prevent future abuse.
New research shows that social environments impact people's choices about whether to harass or assault, and whether to intervene if someone else is at risk. Speaking up is hard, even when your boss is not a powerful politician, media executive, or religious leader. I am a veteran sexual assault and domestic violence advocate, and even I have my own experience of staying silent.
I was working at a social service organization, leading a brand new abuse prevention program that had equal numbers of champions and detractors. Someone I supervised came to me after she observed a popular manager offering a client money to scratch his back. It was the kind of incident that we often see in news stories about abuse in organizations—lines were crossed, boundaries were breached. The back scratching didn't meet strict definitions of abuse, but they fit a common pattern. I had every reason to suspect that the problem would get worse if nobody addressed it.
Still, I didn't feel like I could. And I did not.
But my decision haunted me. It forced me to think carefully about what kept me— an outspoken, passionate person—from taking a risk to do what was right.
I stayed silent because I didn't trust that other people would see the back scratching as a problem. The organization's policies focused only on the most egregious abuses. I also feared that challenging a popular manager would ruin my credibility, and the credibility of my supervisee who was only in her third week of work.
Most importantly, there was no policy that protected me from retaliation. The whistleblower protections only covered financial irregularities.
This analysis of my own failure, and the research around bystander complicity, has informed my work over the last decade, helping schools, social service agencies, and theater companies create safe and healthy work cultures.
Over the past decade, I've worked to change the conditions that kept me from speaking up, sometimes through months-long processes to create strong policies and the political will to enforce them. Other times, it's giving people the skills to initiate challenging conversations.
In schools, I give teachers a scenario in which they see a coworker they respect alone in a classroom with a student, his hand on her knee. They push through awkwardness to practice talking to that teacher, asking hard questions, staying focused if he downplays the problem or gets defensive.
In theater organizations, the scenario is a director who wants to rehearse a sex scene without warning.
In my years of working to prevent abuse in organizations, many of my most passionate collaborators also have experiences of staying silent. Most of us don't talk about them. We feel responsible, or complicit, ashamed or afraid. But I hope more of us will speak up so that more people can learn what it takes to prevent abuse.
The more we can understand what keeps us silent, the more we can count on each other to step up when the moment arrives.
Survivors need us to.
Meg Stone is the Executive Director of IMPACT Boston
The views in this article are the writer's own.
