Listening to Survivors in Sexual Harassment Law Reform

In Australia, the #MeToo movement triggered a comprehensive inquiry into workplace sexual harassment lead by the Australian Human Rights Commission. This article explores the dynamic relationship between voice and listening in the Commission's National Inquiry into Sexual Harassment in Australian Workplaces and the resulting Respect@Work Report (2020). Drawing on a range of methodologies including thematic coding, citation analysis and discourse analysis, I explore what it means to victim-survivors to have a voice in the National Inquiry, narratives of law and justice that emerge in victim-survivor submissions and how the Commission responds in its role as institutional listener. These methodologies enable analysis of the politics and practices of listening within a law reform process, revealing hierarchies of attention that influence who is heard and how they are heard by the Commission. The Commission's listening practices, and its capacity to listen to victim-survivors with openness, attentiveness, receptivity and responsiveness, are shown to limit its engagement in transformative change to address workplace sexual harassment.