Want to stop sexual abuse in the workplace? Make sure every company has an HR department.

Victims need an established institutional means of reporting bad behavior to an ostensibly neutral, bureaucratic entity

Keeping workplaces safe.
(Image credit: Paul Jackson / Alamy Stock Photo)

If you want to expose and punish past acts of workplace sexual harassment and predation, there's nothing more effective than journalists talking to women about their experiences with an alleged abuser, verifying their claims, and publishing them. This humiliates the perpetrator, badly damaging or destroying his reputation, and in many cases scuttling his career. And the bad press (especially when combined with numerous other stories) may also serve to deter future bad behavior on the part of other powerful men.

Both considerations — retribution over the past, deterrence for the future — are playing a decisive role in driving the stories that have taken down a slew of men in recent weeks and that threaten to take down many, many more in the days, weeks, and months ahead.

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Damon Linker

Damon Linker is a senior correspondent at TheWeek.com. He is also a former contributing editor at The New Republic and the author of The Theocons and The Religious Test.