Category: Sexual Harassment

Recent cases and reform on the use of defamation to silence victims – Law Society Journal

In 2022, Siobhan Lamb was bankrupted after reporting the concerning behaviour of her former partner, Sheldon Sherman, to police. After she ended their relationship, his excessive texts, threats to her university education and unsolicited contact with her family caused her distress. Ms Lamb did what she thought was right by reporting this conduct. She could not have been prepared for what unfolded. In Sherman v Lamb [2022] QDC 215, Sherman sued Lamb for defaming him with imputations contained in the police report and by disclosing the contents of that report to his ex-wife’s lawyers.

In the first instance, Sherman won. Jarro DCJ found Ms Lamb injured his reputation with no defences available. This bankrupted Ms Lamb, who was forced to pay not only the $10,000 in damages awarded, but also—as the losing party—Sherman’s enormous legal costs.

Lamb overturned the decision on appeal by way of a trustee in bankruptcy on a point of law related to qualified legal privilege. In Bill Karageozis as trustee for the bankrupt estate of Siobhan Lamb v Sherman [2023] QCA 258, the full Queensland Court of Appeal found the defence of qualified privilege in defamation law can attach to police reports even if the conduct reported does not amount to a crime (at [21]). It also found Lamb did not act with malice (at [34]).

While vindicated, Lamb is not a winner. She endured the trauma of protracted legal proceedings and bankruptcy, all because she was a woman who reported escalating coercive control behaviours of an ex-partner to police. Her ex-partner weaponised the law to try and silence her.

Solutions are needed to make it safe for women to report harm at work or at home. Urgent defamation reform is one solution, as is the creation of laws which look to ‘throw out’ abusive lawsuits known as ‘strategic lawsuits against public participation’ (‘SLAPPs’). Anti-SLAPP laws recognise the law can be misused to shut down public participation, providing a tool for those trying to silence others. Everyone needs to feel safe when reporting harm, and the legal profession and our systems have a vital role in making that possible.

This problem exists all over the world. The UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women called the act of threatening survivors with
legal proceedings ‘a form of gender-based violence in and of itself’ in a
2018 report.

As Lamb’s case and research illustrate, communicating with just one person can constitute the publishing of defamatory material. The reality is that accusing a person of sexual harassment or violence will inherently meet the threshold of harming a person’s reputation, because that person may be perceived as a perpetrator of harm.

Should a victim-survivor refuse to apologise and withdraw their imputations they must rely on a defamation defence. If they rely on the truth defence, their case may come down to credibility and evidence. An obvious issue is that sexual harassment or abuse often occurs without witnesses, so many victim-survivors’ claims cannot be corroborated.

The defence of qualified privilege is most relevant to reports of misconduct to human resources or an employer. As was shown in Lamb’s case, this defence is made out if a defendant can prove they had a legal, social or moral duty to communicate the information and the recipient had a reciprocal interest in receiving the information. However, as with Lamb, it is not straightforward and, importantly, relies on a full trial to be successful. Further, this defence can be defeated if a court determines the defendant acted with malice.

On 22 September 2023, the Standing Council of Attorneys-General approved the Part B amendments of the model defamation laws, to extend absolute privilege to police reports, reasoning that ‘feedback from stakeholders suggests the defence of qualified privilege does not provide a sufficient safeguard against this deterrent effect’. But they stopped short of extending that to all circumstances where a person may report, curtailing the potential benefit for victim-survivors.

Magar v Khan [2025] FCA 874 (‘Magar v Khan’), the landmark sexual harassment case run by Redfern Legal Centre with Dilan Mahendra as counsel, contained a defamation concerns notice. Biplavi Jarga Magar, a migrant worker, was sexual harassed while working at a Mad Mex chain restaurant. When she reported the conduct, she was met with a concerns notice from Sher Khan alleging she had defamed him. Instead of backing down, Magar, with her legal team, sought to classify this concerns notice as ‘victimisation’ (at [62]).

Pursuant to section 47A of the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 (Cth) (‘SDA’), it is unlawful for a person to cause detriment to another because they have made a sexual harassment complaint. Magar v Khan tested these provisions and the Court confirmed a concerns notice sent in response to Magar’s sexual harassment complaint constituted acts done in contravention of the victimisation provisions of the SDA (at [158]). Not only did this case see a groundbreaking $305,000 in damages, but it also set a precedent, encouraging alleged perpetrators and their lawyers to consider how they use legal processes when responding to sexual harassment victim-survivors.

The Human Rights Law Centre, in its 2024 report, Stop the SLAPP, defines a SLAPP as an exploitative use of the law ‘not to resolve genuine legal disputes but rather to silence or discourage participation, advocacy or activism. These strategies create financial and emotional strain on those they target’ (at 4).

Defamation reform in Australia would assist to counter the use of abusive defamation claims. The reluctance of decision-makers to extend absolute privilege to all recipients receiving reports of sexual misconduct sits uncomfortably against the broader epidemic of gendered violence, which our systems are failing to address. However, there is opportunity for reform.

The misuse of law to silence women is not inevitable.

Source: Recent cases and reform on the use of defamation to silence victims – Law Society Journal

ICC prosecutor suspended pending wider vote on misconduct allegations – ABC News

The International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, has been suspended pending a vote by member states on his fate, following a probe into accusations of sexual harassment made against him.

A diplomatic source briefed on the decision told Reuters that following an 18-month-long probe into accusations Mr Khan had non-consensual sexual interactions with a lawyer in his office, the court’s governing body’s executive bureau ruled he had committed serious misconduct.

Mr Khan has always denied the charges.

The 55-year-old Briton hit the headlines when he successfully applied for arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant over the Gaza war. 

He was among the first to be sanctioned by Israel’s ally, the United States, which expressed outrage over the arrest warrants.

Source: ICC prosecutor suspended pending wider vote on misconduct allegations – ABC News

Rebel Girls Uplifting Stories About Courageous Young Women — Spinifex Press

Rebel Girls is a powerful international collection of stories and essays about teenage girls confronting sexism, bullying, body image pressures, autism, ADHD and discrimination.

Fifty contributors from various countries including The Netherlands, USA, Taiwan, Denmark, China, Afghanistan and Spain pose important questions that you don’t often hear discussed about what it means to be a girl in the modern world. We hear from experts such as Finnish psychiatrist Riittakerttu Kaltiala and Holly Moreau from Fanfiction USA who share their work with girls and dissect the cultural forces at play. There are also the stories from girls and women themselves who explain how they are navigating the complex challenges faced by girls in the 21st century.

The future for girls is crucial for the future of everyone. This uplifting collection demonstrates how the next generation is continuing the radical feminist fight to expose misogyny and find autonomy, confidence, enjoyment and independence in their lives.

Source: Rebel Girls Uplifting Stories About Courageous Young Women — Spinifex Press

Community survey to inform the development of the Second Action Plan under the National Strategy to Prevent and Respond to Child Sexual Abuse 2021-2030 – Attorney-General’s Department – Citizen Space

In 2026, the Australian Government is consulting on five new action plans that sit under four national frameworks. This includes the Second Action Plan for the National Strategy to Prevent and Respond to Child Sexual Abuse 2021-2030 (National Strategy), as well as:

-The Second Action Plan for the National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children 2022–2032

-The Second Action Plan and Second Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Action Plan for Safe and Supported: The National Framework for Protecting Australia’s Children 2021–2031

-The First Action Plan for Our Ways – Strong Ways – Our Voices: National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Plan to End Family, Domestic and Sexual Violence 2026–2036.

We are designing these action plans to work together. This is crucial, as people affected by violence often deal with many overlapping services at the same time – such as health, justice, housing and community services. They may have experienced multiple forms of abuse or be living with the lasting impacts of past abuse.

As part of this work, the National Office for Child Safety (National Office) within the Attorney-General’s Department wants to better understand your views on preventing and responding to child sexual abuse in Australia. Your input will help us develop a Second Action Plan aimed at keeping children and young people safe from sexual abuse and supporting victims and survivors.

If you are interested in participating in consultations related to family, domestic and sexual violence action plans, please visit engage.dss.gov.au.

We value your responses and recognise that you may have your own lived experience of child sexual abuse. The purpose of this survey is to identify actions governments should take to prevent and respond to child sexual abuse.

Source: Community survey to inform the development of the Second Action Plan under the National Strategy to Prevent and Respond to Child Sexual Abuse 2021-2030 – Attorney-General’s Department – Citizen Space

Inside the Gay Tech Mafia | WIRED

All entries on Feminist Legal Clinic’s News Digest Blog are extracts from news articles and other publications, with the source available at the link at the bottom. The content is not originally generated by Feminist Legal Clinic and does not necessarily reflect our views.

No one can say exactly when, or if, gay men started running Silicon Valley.

[W]hen I call up a well-connected hedge fund manager to ask his thoughts about what is sometimes referred to in industry circles as the “gay tech mafia,” he audibly yawns. “Of course,” he says. “This has always been the case.”

And it is absolutely the case now, he adds, when gay men are running influential companies in Silicon Valley and maintain entire social calendars with scarcely a straight man, much less a woman, in sight. “Of course the gay tech mafia exists,” he continues. “This is not some Illuminati conspiracy theory. And you do not have to be gay to join. They like straight guys who sleep with them even more.”

Sure, there were gay men in high places: Peter Thiel, Tim Cook, Sam Altman, Keith Rabois, the list went on. But the idea that they were operating some kind of shadowy cabal seemed born entirely of homophobia.

At an AI conference in Los Angeles, an engineer casually referred to a top AI firm’s offices, more than once, as “twink town.”

One San Francisco investor tells me that he believes the Thiel Fellowship is a training ground for gay industry leaders.

[O]ne afternoon in late November, spend nearly an hour texting one . . . account owner over Signal who agrees to speak to me only if I keep his handle secret.

This person describes the Valley as a place known for “ecstasy, psychedelic fueled gay sex stuff.” Has he experienced any of it himself? No. But he knows people who have—people who are “pretty afraid” and “young af.” He won’t name names, won’t connect me to anyone, but he swears that any negative rumor I’ve heard about gay men in Silicon Valley is true. He suggests a conspiracy so sprawling it rivals QAnon and implicates the entire US government.

Finally, frustrated by his evasiveness, I ask what he thinks will happen if he tells me what he knows. “I truly believe,” he says, “killed.”

The problem with conspiracy theories, even offensive ones, is that they are rarely wholly invented.

Most of the people who speak to me for this story do so on the condition that their names be kept confidential.

In 2022, a popular anonymous tech insider X account, Roon, tweeted that it was “crazy how venture capitalists have reinvented the Roman system of pederasty.”

I’m told to connect with Joel, a gay man who works in tech and who spent a lot of time among the older in-group of powerful gay men in Silicon Valley, more than a decade ago.

When I ask Joel to explain how the gay tech mafia works, he tells me that it’s similar to people who “went to the same college or came from a similar background or a similar town.”

Joel tells me about the parties at the time—the exact specifics of which remain off the record. But they were, in summary, what you might expect.

I tell Joel that I’ve heard from some young men in the tech industry who feel pressured to sleep around to get ahead. Was that true in his experience? “Mmmmm,” he says, and pauses. Then he bursts out laughing. “I mean, in all of this, there are weird gray areas. It can be very sexual. It is not all professional. A lot of people have dated or slept with each other.” He had experienced a kind of coercion firsthand. “I definitely felt pressured to do—not overtly illegal things. But they walked the line.”

The exchange of sex and status may not be the reason these men rose so quickly, but it can be a factor—if only because sex, as he puts it, “makes people become closer rapidly.”

Source: Inside the Gay Tech Mafia | WIRED

Why do men sexually harass women at work? Science offers two explanations – but only one of them holds up | The Conversation

There are two ways to understand sexual harassment in the workplace, but one of them is more scientific than the other.

On one view, sexual harassment – as the name implies – is all about sexuality. According to the evolutionary psychology research program, men and women have evolved different psychological mechanisms to solve the different challenges they faced to successfully reproduce back in the Pleistocene epoch.

For men, these adaptive mechanisms include a greater interest in casual sex, and a tendency to mistakenly conclude that women are sexually interested in them. Women, in contrast, evolved to be more sensitive to potential threats to their sexual autonomy – and therefore perceive men’s advances as harassing.

But for social science scholars informed by the gender hierarchy – the idea that men hold more power and status than women – sexual harassment is “an expression of workplace sexism, not sexuality or sexual desire”. It is a mechanism for preserving work roles as masculine terrain, and pushing back against threats to men’s higher status within a workplace.

It might be tempting to think one scientific view is preferred over another for political reasons: he likes the evolutionary psychology account because he is a misogynist; or she likes the gender hierarchy account because she is blinded by her feminist ideology.

These accusations don’t get us very far. Fortunately, the philosophy of science gives us three well-established criteria for what makes for a good scientific explanation.

In our recently published research, we used these three criteria for a good scientific explanation to compare the evolutionary psychology and gender hierarchy maintenance accounts of workplace sexual harassment. So what did we find?

First, we found that the gender hierarchy maintenance explanation was clearly superior when it came to identifying causes that make sense of a broad range of workplace sexual harassment phenomena.

Evolutionary psychology makes sense of sexual coercion and some forms of unwanted sexual attention, to be sure. But research shows these kinds of behaviours almost invariably go hand-in-hand with sexist jokes, crude sexual remarks and sexually degrading imagery, such as porn.

None of these behaviours are plausibly about trying to gain sexual favours, even though some are sexual in nature. These behaviours are called “gender harassment” –which is the most common form of sexual harassment.

Unlike evolutionary psychology, gender hierarchy maintenance can explain all three forms of harassment. Demands for sexual favours, sexist remarks and requests for note-taking can all be understood as behaviours that reinforce traditional gender roles and confer greater status and authority to men.

Our research points to the value of understanding workplace sexual harassment through the lens of gender hierarchy maintenance. This offers hope for the future of workplace culture: it suggests men are not essentially predisposed to be sexual harassers, with little that can be done to alter their evolved natures.

Instead, sexual harassment is best understood as a consequence of our current social and cultural environment. And this is something we can shape to facilitate a better and safer future at work.

Source: Why do men sexually harass women at work? Science offers two explanations – but only one of them holds up

Former NSW prison officers say system protects abusers and silences women – ABC News

The ABC has obtained internal documents showing Corrective Services NSW (CSNSW) received multiple reports of former prison officer Scott Hawken making unwanted sexual advances towards female staff, three years before he raped a colleague in 2022. 

Hawken’s case was one of more than 64 matters of sexual assault or harassment involving CSNSW staff reported to the Professional Standards branch between January 2020 and April 2023, according to records obtained by the ABC.

The ABC has spoken to nine current and former correctional officers. 

Most declined to be identified for fear of retribution, but all described a toxic workplace culture that discouraged reporting and shielded senior officers.

One who did speak publicly is Kirsty Prince, a junior officer who medically retired in December.

Ms Prince said that, after she reported a senior correctional officer, she was labelled by her colleagues as a “career destroyer” and “a dog”.

“You’re a blue family now — you stick together,” she said new recruits were often told, blue being a reference to the corrections uniform.

In late 2022, Ms Prince reported a senior officer, Adrian Willis, for sending a photograph of his genitals to her, her 12-year-old son and three other minors.

As a survivor of sexual abuse as a teenager, she said she immediately recognised the seriousness of the image.

“It was the start of a grooming process,” she said.

Within days of reporting the matter, she said her confidentiality was breached by a senior manager she had confided in, and “everyone knew”.

“When it comes time to negotiate my payout, I will refuse to sign an NDA and I’m willing to walk away with nothing. This matters to me because women sign NDAs and those responsible never face consequences.”

In recent years, New South Wales prisons have been in a deepening crisis following a series of sexual misconduct scandals involving senior correctional officers, including former senior officer Wayne Astill, who was convicted of sexually assaulting more than a dozen inmates.

The crisis resulted in a major inquiry in 2023 that examined and found the culture, practices, and procedures within the jail, and the performance of several correctional officers and their managers, were inadequate and inappropriate.

Source: Former NSW prison officers say system protects abusers and silences women – ABC News

NSW government’s challenge to landmark strip-search case could threaten justice for ‘thousands’ – Lawyers Weekly

All entries on Feminist Legal Clinic’s News Digest Blog are extracts from news articles and other publications, with the source available at the link at the bottom. The content is not originally generated by Feminist Legal Clinic and does not necessarily reflect our views.

The NSW government has signalled its intention to appeal the landmark strip-search class action ruling, which examined the lawfulness of police strip searches at music festivals.

Last month, the Supreme Court of NSW heard Raya Meredith’s account of being subjected to an invasive strip search at Splendour in the Grass in 2018, during which she was ordered to remove her tampon, lift and expose parts of her body, and bend over.

Ultimately, no drugs were found on her.

Justice Dina Yehia awarded Meredith $93,000 in damages, finding that the officer’s actions went “far beyond” what was objectively necessary and describing her experience as “humiliating treatment while at a total loss of liberty”.

Slater & Gordon, which led the class action lawsuit that expanded to include hundreds of others alleging they were unlawfully strip-searched by police between 2016 and 2022, had been negotiating a settlement between the state and these claimants.

However, the national law firm revealed that the state of NSW has “now signalled an intention to appeal the judgment”.

William Zerno, senior associate in class actions at Slater & Gordon, warned that an appeal would only delay justice for those thousands affected and subjected to these unlawful strip searches.

Source: NSW government’s challenge to landmark strip-search case could threaten justice for ‘thousands’ – Lawyers Weekly

How Epstein’s influence shaped the exclusion of women in STEM

IAll entries on Feminist Legal Clinic’s News Digest Blog are extracts from news articles and other publications, with the source available at the link at the bottom. The content is not originally generated by Feminist Legal Clinic and does not necessarily reflect our views.

In 2018, an elite group of academics and scientists planned to gather for an exclusive retreat at a luxury farm in the woods of Connecticut. The guests had been hand-picked by prominent New York literary agent John Brockman, who frequently hosted similar salons for luminaries in science, technology and media. 

The problem? Brockman had included two women on the list, and his staunch supporter and biggest funder wanted them out. 

“John, the old conferences did not care about diversity. I suggest you not either,” Jeffrey Epstein wrote in response to an email about the programming. “The women are all weak, and a distraction sorry.” 

In reply, Brockman justified the women’s inclusion, and says they’d been a part of a related book about AI, which needed to be inclusive to sell. “Today, it’s impossible to get a publisher to buy such a book with essays by 25 men and no women,” he wrote. 

Larry Summers, the former president of Harvard University, who emailed with Epstein hundreds of times, made a joke in one email about how “half the IQ In world was possessed by women without mentioning they are more than 51 percent of population.” 

In another exchange, Epstein and Jeremy Rubin, a bitcoin developer and MIT researcher, went back and forth over whether there are any games that women are actually better at than men. It would be “interesting to attempt to make an intellectually stimulating game where women outperform men,” Rubin wrote in 2016. “Unless women are inherently inferior to the maximally talented man at all tasks ;).”

For women like Lauren Aulet, a neuroscientist and assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts, the files revealed conversations that were more brash than she expected. “I think what was most shocking was simply how blatant and explicit the misogyny was.”

“We have this narrative that explicit misogyny is something from the ’50s and ’60s, and what we have now is like implicit bias and microaggressions,” she said, adding: “I think this made clear that explicit misogyny is still out there in science and in academia, it’s just perhaps behind closed doors.”

Source: How Epstein’s influence shaped the exclusion of women in STEM

Nurses win huge battle after woke NHS made them share changing room with trans woman | UK | News | Express.co.uk

All entries on Feminist Legal Clinic’s News Digest Blog are extracts from news articles and other publications, with the source available at the link at the bottom. The content is not originally generated by Feminist Legal Clinic and does not necessarily reflect our views.

EXCLUSIVE: Trailblazing NHS nurses – known as the Magnificent Seven – have won a landmark biological sex victory plunging the NHS into crisis.

In a landmark judgment, an employment tribunal ruled that County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust had unlawfully discriminated against and harassed the female medics by requiring them to share changing rooms with a biological male.

The ruling confirms the Trust’s policy allowing men into women’s spaces is unlawful and violates the rights of its female staff.

The tribunal’s judgement said: “By requiring the claimants to share a changing room with a biological male trans woman…the respondent engaged in unwanted conduct related to sex and gender reassignment which had the effect of violating the dignity of the claimants and creating for the claimants a hostile, humiliating and degrading environment.”

The landmark judgement is a major victory for those who have campaigned to protect and uphold women’s rights in the wake of last year’s Supreme Court ruling.

Nurses working on a day care ward at Darlington Memorial Hospital took their NHS bosses to a tribunal to lay bare in detail how they had been left crippled by fear after Rose Henderson, a biological male identifying as a woman, was given free access to their safe space.

Action came after Rose, a male nurse identifying as female, menacingly loitered as they changed.

The group action also included Karen Danson, 46, a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, Annice Grundy, 56, Lisa Lockey, 52, Carly Hoy, 31, Tracey Hooper, 47, and Jane Peveller, 51, and was backed by Harry Potter author and women’s rights activist J.K. Rowling.

The nurses’ evidence opened with the testimony of Ms Danson who described a disturbing encounter in which Rose, wearing revealing boxer shorts, repeatedly asked if she was going to get changed, causing her to panic and relive past abuse.

Source: Nurses win huge battle after woke NHS made them share changing room with trans woman | UK | News | Express.co.uk