Dealing with harassment

One thing that I have learnt about being harassed is that you teach people how to treat you.
This does not mean if you are being harassed it's your fault or that you did anything wrong, it does mean that some people have different standards than others and what I now tell people on this site is how did the behaviour make you feel? That is all that counts.

[quote]Harassment is all about your emotions, experience and your expectations as an individual. Everyone is different, and everyone has different standards for how they would like to be treated. It's about what you deem to be acceptable and not acceptable. If the behaviour, words, or actions, make you feel like you are being harassed then that is all the validation that you need. Do not let anyone belittle or undervalue the experience that you are going through. [/quote]

This advice is for any situation however, if someone is doing something that you deem to be inappropriate, don't just sit there and take it, make sure that they first understand that you object to the behaviour, there are a maryid of different ways that you can do this, you can mirror back the behaviour, see how they like it. You can go with the direct approach and tell them straight to their face. Write them a note, tell them through a third party, but stop it at the start not at the end.

If you see the person continues with the same type of behaviour that you find to be offensive then you need to find a way if possible to distance yourself from that person. Harassment does not get better or improve with time, if anything it's been shown to escalate and that is something that you do not want to let happen. Some people just have a natural way of being offensive without realising it, and if that's the case they need to be made to realise this, however some people actively go out of their way to be offensive and if this is the case then you also need to address this sort of person appropriately.

I have learnt a lot over the last six or seven years of my harassment, and one of the main things that I have learnt is to nip things in the bud. I think if I had gone to HR when the whole harassment thing started, then I could maybe have gotten it stopped. Instead I tried to ignore it, or tried to just brush it off, or I was just rude back to the people that were initiating the activities. This might work for a while, but then they will just use this, to show that you are the trouble maker or the one with the problem, the same things they are doing to you, when used against them, they will try to use to show you as the aggressor.

The best things to do is to try to be as straight forward as you can with the person and if the behaviour continues then discontinue association if at all possible, if that fails, try to move away from the person, but deal with it immediately and deal with it directly.

My sexual harassment at work turned eventually into workplace mobbing, which after awhile made it impossible to stay within that environment, that problem however was that these people found their behaviour to be acceptable because it was never appropriately challenged, and thus things escalated, and from mobbing it turned into what I would years later discover to be gang stalking. I honestly feel that if I had taken an aggressive stance at the start, no matter what that aggressive stance might have been, it truly would have saved me years of aggravation.

Anyways hind sight as they say is 20/20. I don't have the benefit of that for now, all I can do now is take away the knowledge that I have, and use it for future situations when they arrive, but what I have learnt is that you have control for a limited time, and you have to use that time to get things back in check as quickly as you can, because once you let things get out of check, things become unbound.