March 4, 2022

By Ramona du Houx

Washington – The US president, Joe Biden , signed a law on Thursday that will make it difficult to silence cases of sexual harassment in companies and that gives victims more tools to be able to report them in court.

Some 60 million American workers have included in their contracts the obligation to resolve disputes about sexual harassment through arbitration processes, “and many do not even know it,” said President Biden said during the State of the Union.

The fine print in many contracts refers to the arbitration processes which the majority of people tend to overlook.

Journalist Gretchen Carlson, whose sexual abuse lawsuit against Roger Ailes led to the resignation of that powerful former president of Fox News in 2016, attended the signing ceremony at the White House.

“I’m here on behalf of the millions of working Americans who until today have been voiceless, silenced for having the courage to say something bad happened to them at work ,” said Carlson. “I think this law is going to stop bad behavior, because now the whole world will know that women’s voices are going to be heard.”

Previously on January 26, 2022  President Biden signed an executive order decree so that sexual harassment within the Armed Forces is treated as a crime in military justice, a reform spurred by the case of soldier Vanessa Guillén, murdered in 2020 after reporting abuse at a Texas base.

The executive order also strengthens the response of military justice in cases of sexist violence, and implements changes to “criminalize the negligent emission or dissemination of intimate visual images”