How to address sexual harassment

To eliminate sexual harassment, duty holders need ongoing, organisation-wide effort. This includes prevention, early intervention, employee support and strong leadership accountability.

Research shows that good responses must address not just individual behaviour, but the systems and culture that allow it to happen. Creating a safe and respectful workplace culture is also crucial to ensure your compliance with the new positive duty under the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 for organisations to actively prevent workplace sexual harassment.

This section shows evidence-based actions organisations can take to understand, address and prevent sexual harassment.

Step 1: Collect and analyse your data

Many organisations don’t have the data they need to fully understand how much and what type of sexual harassment is occurring. This is especially true for informal reports, complaint outcomes, and how employees experience the system.

What data to collect

Your goal should be to collect data that shows:

• what is being reported, and where, including if incidents are more common in certain teams or locations
• how employees experience your systems and policies
• whether staff trust processes and feel safe using them
• what stops people from coming forward.

Data separated by gender, team, role, or other factors can help you spot trends that are otherwise easy to miss.¹ Survey results(opens in a new window) can give valuable insights into trust, confidence and psychological safety.

Under the Gender Equality Act 2020, your workplace gender audit must include gender-disaggregated data. To understand the full picture of workplace sexual harassment, you should disaggregate data by additional factors. These might include visa status, disability, First Nations status, cultural background and LGBTIQA+ status. Collective qualitative insights to gain a more complete picture. This is crucial to revealing patterns of harm and barriers to reporting (AHRC 2025a). You can find recommendations for improving your intersectional data collection, analysis and interpretation in our Intersectionality at Work (opens in a new window)report (CGEPS 2023: 96-100).

How to analyse your data

Sexual harassment isn’t just individual bad behaviour – it’s a form of violence against women.

The Respect@Work report (AHRC 2020) and the Change the Story framework (Our Watch 2021) highlight that sexual harassment has the same causes as other forms of violence against women. These include:

• power imbalances
• rigid gender roles
• disrespect
• inequality in decision-making.

To understand how sexual harassment shows up in your workplace, use data from both your workplace gender audit and employee experience survey. Key areas to look at include:

• where incidents occur
• what types of sexual harassment
• why incidents may not be reported
• whether staff feel safe to raise concerns
• how confident people are in your reporting processes.

When looking at your data, separate sexual harassment by co-workers from sexual harassment perpetrated by members of the public, clients or patients. You may need different strategies to address these different types, especially for prevention.

Understanding the reporting gap

Progress doesn’t always mean fewer complaints. Formal complaint numbers rarely tell the full story. More reporting may mean greater trust in your systems. Fewer reports could mean either better prevention or less confidence in reporting.

People may choose not to report because they fear negative consequences, don’t trust the system, or feel unsure about what counts as sexual harassment.

Research shows this gap between policy and real experience. For example, the South Australia Police Review (2016) found that even with formal systems in place, many staff felt reporting was unsafe or pointless. The Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission’s (2015:12) review of sexual harassment in Victoria Police also showed how women felt blamed when they spoke up. Formal reporting was sometimes seen as being disloyal to ‘the team’. The Respect@Work (AHRC 2020) report found similar concerns across Australian workplaces.

This is why you must use both your workforce data (number of formal reports), and your employee experience data (anonymous accounts from people who experienced workplace sexual harassment and why they didn’t make a formal complaint) to understand what’s really happening. Employees may report sexual harassment to their manager, but when it’s handled at the team level, senior leadership may not know. This can create big data gaps that stop you from understanding the full picture of sexual harassment in your workplace.

To find gaps in your organisation, consider:

• If employees are reporting experiences of sexual harassment to their direct manager, are these reports being formally documented, and do you know how these complaints are being managed?
• Do employees understand how to report and what happens next?
• Are responses consistent, confidential and person-centred?
• Is culturally safe and trauma-informed support available?
• What do informal feedback, survey results or focus groups show about trust in your systems?

Understanding these gaps helps you build systems that staff are more likely to use – and that are more likely to give safe, fair outcomes.

Step 2: Use a risk-based approach to prevention

The Workplace Gender Equality Agency (2023) recommends using a risk-based approach to find and reduce sexual harassment risk factors early.

Key risk areas include:

• physical spaces – such as isolated work areas or poor visibility (Safe Work Australia 2023:25–26)
• work systems – including informal cultures, rigid power structures or unclear reporting pathways (Safe Work Australia 2023:24–25)
• workplace characteristics – such as male-heavy teams or lack of diversity in leadership (WGEA 2023).

Using a risk-based approach involves the following three key steps:

Find and assess the risk of sexual harassment

Use different information sources to understand the when, where and how of sexual harassment in your organisation. This includes:

• talking with employees and employee representatives
• looking at internal reports, complaints data and audit results
• considering sector-wide trends and findings from national reports, such as Time for Respect: Fifth National Survey on Sexual Harassment in Australian Workplaces (AHRC, 2023b). These insights will help you find high-risk areas and do an industry-specific risk analysis.

Finding these risks lets you put in place targeted, preventive measures to avoid harm.

Put in place good control measures to address the risks found

Once risks are found, take practical steps to reduce them. Control measures may include:

• environmental changes – better lighting, more visibility in shared spaces, or security cameras
• process changes – updating or reinforcing behaviour expectations before work-related events and improving rostering practices, team structures and reporting pathways

All actions should be clearly recorded and reported to relevant staff.

Monitor, review and adapt control measures

Control measures should be regularly reviewed to make sure they still work. Ask questions like:

• Are the control measures working as intended?
• Have they been updated after an incident or near miss?
• Do they reflect any changes in workplace dynamics, structures or staffing?

This step is critical to making sure you keep improving and take a forward-thinking approach to prevention.

Step 3: Set up regular reporting and monitoring

Leaders (including boards, heads of organisations and executive teams) need regular updates on both the extent of sexual harassment and how well current systems to respond to it are working. This should be a key part of any organisation’s management of workplace health and safety.

Clear reporting helps keep leaders accountable, guides decision-making, and supports cultural change.

Internal reporting should cover:

• trends in formal and informal complaints
• risk areas needing targeted action
• progress on prevention and education programs
• outcomes and how long complaints take to resolve
• types of perpetrators, i.e., whether the harassment comes from a colleague, patients or clients, or another category.

When tracking complaint outcomes, it is important to monitor:

• whether the complaint was upheld or not
• if the complaint was moved to the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission or the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal
• what happened to the person who harassed someone if the complaint was upheld
• how satisfied the complainant was with the complaint handling process.

Include reporting in regular board meetings and other governance processes to make sure it is visible and actionable. Consistent monitoring and communication keep your organisation informed, engaged and committed to ongoing improvement.

Step 4: Build trust in your reporting systems

Build employee confidence that complaints will be handled fairly and respectfully. This means making sure your approach is:

• person-centred – support all people affected, both during and after the reporting process
• trauma-informed – provide specialised support, listen without judging and give people choice and control over how the organisation responds
• culturally safe – processes are responsive to the barriers faced by people affected by overlapping forms of inequality
• inclusive and fair – everyone involved in a report should get clear information about the process and outcomes as well as assurance of fair processes.

Employees should feel safe to report sexual harassment, knowing the process will support them and lead to meaningful outcomes. Victim survivors often say they just want the sexual harassment to stop and don’t want the person who harassed them to lose their job or be demoted (Equal Opportunity Commission of South Australia 2016). They may be reluctant to make a formal complaint if they don’t feel they’ll have a say in how the process develops and what outcomes are sought. For example, contributors to the Speaking from Experience report (AHRC 2025a) described systems that require rigid reporting formats or rely heavily on NDAs as silencing. Instead, organisations should ensure workers are given control, support, and respect throughout the reporting process.

Employees should have:

• multiple ways to report sexual harassment
• regular updates on the progress of their report
• clear resolution options tailored to the situation
• post-incident support, including a post-resolution plan to support individual and team recovery after an incident.

Communicate improvements clearly

Organisations should also clearly communicate with their workforce when they improve their formal reporting systems. Transparency helps build trust and accountability. When employees experience poor complaint-handling, they’ll likely tell colleagues. Telling your entire workforce about any changes you make is key to increasing their confidence in your ability to carefully and properly manage future complaints.

Your organisation should clearly communicate with employees about:

• how common and what type of workplace sexual harassment exists
• trends over time, including new risks or recurring patterns
• lessons learned through prevention efforts and risk reduction.

Offer alternative reporting options and resolution pathways

Not everyone will feel comfortable using formal reporting channels. Consider providing informal or anonymous options to lower barriers and encourage early reporting.

Flexible reporting options include:

• a digital and/or physical mailbox, or a hotline for anonymous complaints
• informal pathways that don't pressure employees to make a formal report.

Be clear about who may be told when an anonymous report is made and clearly describe any potential follow-up actions.

It’s also important to monitor trends in informal complaints to find emerging issues. While not perfect, these systems can help you find problems earlier and build trust in your organisation’s response (WGEA 2023: 16).

As well as formal investigations, consider alternative resolution pathways such as:

• local resolution helped by an immediate manager
• a guided discussion with a trained mediator or expert
• a formal investigation led by an independent investigator.

Offering flexible, person-centred reporting options increases accessibility and helps build trust in your organisation's response process.

Step 5: Educate your workforce

Education is key to preventing sexual harassment. The new positive duty under the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 requires employers to communicate what behaviour is unacceptable, how to recognise sexual harassment, and how to respond.

All your resources on sexual harassment should be accessible and written in plain language (AHRC 2025a: 44). The Australian Human RIghts Commission has recently produced a series of fact sheets and posters aimed at both employees and employers (see AHRC 2025b). These resources simplify key sexual harassment concepts and provide examples of how to communicate clearly with your workforce.

Develop a clear sexual harassment policy

Your policy should:

• communicate a zero-tolerance approach. State that sexual harassment is against the law and your organisation is committed to eliminating it
• give definitions, practical examples and case studies, including those involving technology
• explain where and to whom the policy applies – including off-site and work-related events
• set out the expected standard of behaviour across the organisation
• describe available supports for those who experience or witness harassment
• describe the reporting process, possible outcomes, and your organisation’s commitment to a person-centred, trauma-informed response
• reference your organisation’s risk management framework
• say who is responsible for the policy and when it will be reviewed.

Provide ongoing training

Training also plays a key role in reinforcing your sexual harassment policy and supporting cultural change. Workplace education should:

• explain the options for reporting and potential outcomes
• communicate a zero-tolerance approach to sexual harassment
• use a mix of formal and informal learning methods, tailored to your organisation
• be ongoing, with a focus on quality, accessibility and effectiveness – not just frequency
• include interactive bystander intervention training
• use realistic case studies and examples relevant to your workplace.

Step 6: Create a respectful culture

Workplaces that are diverse, respectful and inclusive are less likely to tolerate sexual harassment.

Promote a culture that:

• reinforces zero tolerance for inappropriate or disrespectful behaviour
• champions respectful leadership and peer behaviour at all levels.

A strong culture sets clear expectations and helps make sure that inappropriate conduct is addressed early and consistently. Your organisation can take forward-thinking steps to strengthen culture by:

• increasing representation of underrepresented groups through recruitment, training and development
• making sure leaders and managers model respectful behaviour, use inclusive language, and reinforce the organisation’s commitment to diversity and inclusion
• calling out inappropriate conduct, including in digital communications such as online chats and messages
• providing training that encourages employees to see and challenge inappropriate behaviour, including everyday sexism.

Leadership accountability

Leaders play a key role in preventing and addressing sexual harassment. Their actions shape organisation culture and directly influence outcomes.

Leaders should be responsible for:

• setting the tone on respectful behaviour and workplace norms
• supporting forward-thinking policies and procedures
• championing diversity, inclusion and belonging (Hart et al. 2018; Perry et al. 2020)
• providing resources to build organisation skills and capability.

Your organisation’s governance framework should clearly describe leaders’ responsibilities for preventing and responding to sexual harassment. This includes linking these responsibilities to performance assessment and saying what consequences happen when people do not meet expectations.

Senior leaders should play an active role in developing, putting in place and regularly reviewing control measures. They should also lead cultural change by communicating the importance of a respectful, diverse and inclusive workplace, and by sharing the organisation’s progress in eliminating sexual harassment.

Sexual harassment data should be regularly reported to your governing body and to those responsible for developing and overseeing control measures.

Step 7: Address technology-facilitated sexual harassment

Workplace technology-facilitated sexual harassment is a growing workplace risk. As digital tools change, so must your prevention strategies. Tailor your approach to reflect how technology is used in your organisation and focus on safety at every level (Flynn et al. 2024).

Choose technology that focuses on safety

Workplace tools – such as chat platforms and email systems – should be designed with safety in mind. Look for platforms that include:

• built-in safety features that detect and flag inappropriate content
• AI-powered prompts that notify senders of potentially inappropriate language
• alerts for recipients, providing immediate access to reporting tools and support pathways.

These safety-by-design features help shift the burden away from employees and create a forward-thinking, prevention-focused environment (Flynn et al. 2024).

Update polices and training

Review and update policies and training to:

• define what technology-facilitated sexual harassment looks like in your context
• clarify potential outcomes for those who engage in it
• make sure your reporting processes can handle digital incidents
• deliver education that reflects current risks – including tailored training on bystander action, digital conduct and respectful communication.

Take an ongoing approach

Preventing sexual harassment – including digital forms – requires ongoing commitment. There’s no single ‘set-and-forget’ solution. Organisations should:

• stay up to date with best practices in their sector
• learn from others through communities of practice
• monitor and review internal processes regularly
• foster a culture of continuous learning and change.

Long-term progress means being open to feedback, adjusting your approach, and understanding that lasting change takes time and persistence.