Which would you choose? Your physical, mental, and emotional safety or your sole means of supporting your family?
That’s a choice some women face as they work in the fields in and around Santa Maria, picking the produce that literally feeds the nation.
You’ve seen these women. They stand and stoop among vines and rows, carefully gathering fruits and vegetables as quickly as they can. They work under the glaring sun and in the cold. They work demanding hours to the point of exhaustion for not a lot of pay. They work because they have to.
And as they work, the men around them—fellow laborers or even supervisors—sometimes make advances. It could a word here or a hand there. It could be confident and charming, even if unwelcome. It could be menacing. But it happens.
We don’t know, as a culture, as a nation, how often it happens, however, because it seems that a lot of the women who are groped or propositioned or even threatened choose to suffer in silence instead of making waves and risking their jobs.
Because speaking up is a risk.
Experts armed with data will tell you that such incidents are on the decline, that sexual harassment in the agriculture industry—or at least this slice of it—is not common.
But the people who hear directly, if informally, from these threatened women (the women who do choose to say something to someone) say that such reports far outweigh actual charges or official complaints.
That’s because of fear. Women who have felt wandering fingers on the smalls of their backs or heard explicit offers whispered in their ears amid the plants face a terrifying conundrum: Do nothing and risk further, perhaps escalating, harassment? Or speak up and risk a loss of income or even—in some cases—potential deportation?
Sen. Bill Monning sought to answer that fear with SB 1087, new legislation that, among other things, ups the penalties for contractors or supervisors found to have committed sexual harassment.
That’s a great step. But note that for perpetrators to be found, the victims will have to speak up. And for victims to speak up, they need to know that they will be heard, they will be believed, and they won’t be retaliated against. Women from all walks of life already fail to report harassment and rape because of a belief that they will bear the brunt of the blame, will be discounted, will be made to suffer further by a culture that doesn’t want to admit or believe that such attacks happen at the rate they do.
Add to that ever-present reluctance a language barrier, an already notable fear of losing livelihood, a mistrust of authority.
Women in the fields can’t be reporting everything that happens in the fields. I hope that more will.
The Canary believes no one should be afraid to report a crime. Send comments to canary@santamariasun.com
This article appears in Sep 4-11, 2014.
