What’s Changed Since Anita Hill? Not Very Much

It’s stuck right there on my bulletin board, the little pink lapel pin. No bigger than a silver dollar, its terse declaration is a reminder of a confusing, upsetting time in America. Most days, I look right past it. In five years, quite simply, the pin has become part of the backdrop of my life:

I believe Anita Hill.

Yes, five years have passed.

Five years since the men of the Senate Judiciary Committee took testimony from an Oklahoma law professor and from the Supreme Court nominee she accused of sexually harassing her.

Five years have passed since an unscripted outpouring of anger by American women brought the U.S. Senate to a temporary halt as senators waffled on whether to investigate Hill’s allegations against Clarence Thomas or go forward with a confirmation vote.

Five years since the riveting and degrading spectacle of accuser facing her accused on national television. Five years since the rules of social engagement in the workplace were suddenly subject to anguished and overdue debate. Five years since the hearings created in their polluted wake a small wave of opportunity for women who aspired to hold public office.

And what, you might wonder, has changed?

My answer, given in full knowledge that many will guffaw as they point to the foolhardy suspension of a 6-year-old for pecking the cheek of a fellow student is this:

Some. But not much.

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There have been new laws.

There have been new lawsuits.

There have been sexual harassment seminars and lip service galore paid to the idea that people deserve to work and live in harassment-free environments.

A senator from Oregon resigned in disgrace. A debacle called Tailhook came to light.

But what has evolved in the larger culture, it seems, is not the true conviction that sexual harassment is such a terrible thing, but that the issue has been blown out of proportion, that no one knows what the rules are anymore, that freedom of expression--not to mention entire careers--have been irrevocably damaged by this unnatural obsession with squashing the healthy urge to flirt.

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court let stand a Texas ruling that insulates school districts from lawsuits filed by students who alleged their schools failed to protect them from sexual harassment by their peers.

One day earlier, I listened as a young woman, all of 14, spoke about the weeks of harassment she endured at the hands of two boys at her private middle school, one of this city’s “finest.”

The boys lay in wait for her every day, she said. They followed her and taunted her and she told no one but eventually came to feel that if they called her a slut and a whore, then she must in fact be one. And when she was finally able to disclose the trauma, a school administrator remarked how odd the complaint was, since the boys in question were good kids, not the usual troublemakers.

This is what she told a crowd of 700 people--nearly all of them strangers to her--who had come to support the work of the Santa Monica-UCLA Rape Treatment Center, where she receives counseling.

It was the rape treatment center, too, that successfully steered a bill through the state legislature that accords students who are victims of sexual assaults and / or harassment at school the same protections and rights as victims whose cases are heard in criminal courts, such as the right to be accompanied by a parent during disciplinary hearings and the right to have evidence of irrelevant sexual history excluded. In August, during a hastily called meeting of an Assembly committee, the measure, which also mandates expulsion for students found guilty of sexual assault, was debated. No recording was made, no transcript was kept. But four people, including two Republican Assembly staffers, one Democratic staffer and an expert witness who testified for the legislation, told me that something very much like the following was uttered by an assemblyman:

You mean to tell me if I am a 13-year-old boy and my hormones are raging and a 12-year-old girl walks by and I want to cop a feel and I want to grab a breast, is that really so bad, should we discipline boys for that?

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This evening, Anita Hill is scheduled to appear at the Wilshire Ebell Theater, the featured guest at a fund-raiser organized by opponents of Proposition 209, the ballot initiative that is intended to annihilate affirmative action in California.

As it happens, Hill’s courage spawned what two decades of affirmative action had not been able to accomplish in our statehouses and in Congress. So many women were outraged by the way senators treated her, so many identified with her emotionally complex response to sexual harassment, that women ran for office in record numbers. And yet, in the just-ended 104th Congress, a single woman--Sen. Dianne Feinstein--sat on the 18-member Judiciary Committee, down from a high of two women in the 103rd.

What do the goals of affirmative action have to do with sexual harassment? Only this: Can anyone conceive of a Judiciary Committee comprising equal numbers of men and women doing to Anita Hill what was done to her in 1991?

Hard to believe that five years have passed.

But I believed her then.

I believe her still.

* Robin Abcarian’s column appears on Sundays and Wednesdays. Readers may write to her at the Los Angeles Times, Life & Style, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles, CA 90053.