Walking the Talk: A New Chapter in the Prevention of Workplace Sexual Harassment
The law has changed. Now comes the really interesting part.
Today, a significant change to UK employment law has come into effect. Under the Employment Rights Act 2025, employers must now take all reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment in their workplaces.
As a psychologist who has spent over 20 years working in the field of sexual harm, I'm excited about this moment. It's an important step in a very long journey. What happens next is going to be something of an adventure, because we're about to embark on quite an experiment.
Remembering where we came from
It's always worth understanding how we arrived at a particular moment. Context helps us appreciate what we're looking at, orientate ourselves and understand the road ahead.
When I look back from this moment, I see grandmothers, mothers and (if you're a lot younger than me) great-grandmothers. I see the women who helped bring workplace sexual harassment into public conversation for the first time. The women who gathered around kitchen tables. The women who organised. They weren't the first women to experience sexual harassment in a workplace (sadly, that's a MUCH longer story), but they were the first to challenge it publicly and demand change.
What followed has been decades of activism, research, campaigning, lobbying, policy writing and legal reform. Behind every piece of legislation like today’s are countless people who have dedicated their skills, energy and sometimes their entire careers to making change possible.
This new law reflects that long journey. It's an expression of how our expectations of workplaces, relationships and behaviour have evolved.
I have enormous admiration for the people who have done that work that led us to this moment. I also know... I would have been terrible at much of it! Protesting, lobbying, diligent drafting - these are not in my skillset.
But I have other skills.
And for this particular challenge, their time has come.
Using behavioural science to prevent sexual harassment
I'm a psychologist. My fascination has always been with the human side of this problem.
Why do people sexually harass others? What allows that behaviour to flourish? Why do people who witness something troubling sometimes remain silent? What helps people change their behaviour, and how do we create cultures in which harmful behaviour becomes less likely?
These are questions that psychology can help us answer.
I'm also an activist. I didn't set out to be one. It was a word I had to grow into. But that growth happened with a fair degree of ease because when you get to know this topic area in the way I have, the need for change, the need for radically different solutions, the need for leadership, and the willingness to use whatever tools you have to help create it, soon become part of how you think and work.
It was clear to me early on that sitting back and trusting established systems to deliver the changes we need wasn't going to be enough. This work needs outsiders, challengers and creative people who want to be part of inventing solutions.
For years, many workplaces have been making the right noises - aspirational commitments to zero tolerance of sexual harassment. Lofty values written on the wall. Clear policies on how people are expected to behave. Now the task is to turn those aspirations into something real.
This is a challenge. And… it's also a giant social experiment.
Can we actually prevent sexual harassment from happening in our workplaces?
This is a hugely ambitious undertaking. Sexual harassment exists throughout society. It's shaped by power, relationships, social norms and culture. These are not easy things to change.
But it can be done.
Workplaces give us a particular opportunity to intervene. We can deliberately shape expectations, develop people's skills, influence behaviour and change the conditions that allow harm to happen.
The law is one tool for achieving that, although it's often a fairly blunt instrument when it comes to changing human behaviour. Psychology and behavioural science offer us a much richer toolkit for preventing workplace sexual harassment.
At The Consent Collective, this is the work that occupies us. How can we take what psychology teaches us about people and relationships and turn that knowledge into practical approaches to prevention?
There's so much to explore, develop, test and learn.
This is my kind of activism. Helping to make the human changes that allow the ambitions of the law (and society at large) to become reality.
Storytelling as a superpower
How can a specialist, mission-led, micro-business expect to play any kind of meaningful part in this epic journey? There are millions of workplaces in the UK, and there are much bigger organisations than us swimming in these waters.
Well, we may be small but we are mighty. Over time we've had the wisdom to identify our superpowers. Being small is one of them (that's probably a blog post for another day). Another, is to understand the power of storytelling.
Stories are powerful. They have been the bedrock of our cultures for millenia. They galvanise us. They spread. They help us understand complicated things, allow ideas to travel and encourage us to imagine possibilities we haven't experienced ourselves.
Our mission at The Consent Collective isn't to work with everyone to make a difference. Our mission is to find the organisations that genuinely want to prevent sexual harassment, work closely with them to develop better and better practice, and then tell the stories of what we're learning.
If we can make excellent practice visible, we can raise expectations about what's possible. We can help other leaders and organisations imagine doing things differently. We can show what prevention looks like in practice and articulate all the reasons why workplaces might want to invest in this work that have nothing to do with legal compliance. Reasons connected to things organisations already care deeply about: their people, their culture, their productivity and their success.
We know that the work we do with organisations has the potential to influence many more.
Walking the Talk is a place to collect those stories. The successes, the experiments, the discoveries, the unexpected challenges and the ideas that deserve to travel further.
Yes, there's hope. But there's also this...
There is a subtext to this blog. A shadow side. Yes, I'm approaching this moment with enormous hope. But, I also have a nagging concern:
I don't want to sit here in four or five years' time, looking back at the impact of this legislation and discovering that it hasn't made the difference we hoped it would. I don’t want some terrible post mortem on this legislation and to be invited to panel events that question whether ‘the all reasonable steps legislation had any positive impact at all’.
What a missed opportunity that would be.
Changing human behaviour and workplace cultures is difficult. Some organisations will approach this as a compliance exercise. Some of the things we try won't work. There will be setbacks, frustrations and moments when the scale of the challenge feels overwhelming.
That's why I want to tell the story as it unfolds.
Sometimes stories help us keep the faith when the work is difficult. Sometimes they help us understand how we ended up in a terrible mess and what we might learn from it. Sometimes they're a way of celebrating something extraordinary.
My hope is that this blog gets to be all of those things (ahem. But mostly the last one!).
In five years' time, I'd love us to have a collection of stories that show what's possible. Stories of workplaces that found better ways to prevent harm, of ideas that spread, and of the unexpected benefits that came from taking prevention seriously.
If you’re familiar with my work you’ll know that I believe there's an opportunity here that goes beyond preventing sexual harassment, extraordinary as that achievement would be. We might also discover how the skills, relationships and cultures that make prevention possible can help us create better workplaces more broadly.
That's a story I'd very much like to be part of.
Welcome to Walking the Talk. The Workplace Sexual Harassment Prevention Blog
So here we are, at the beginning of a new journey.
The law has changed. The ambition is enormous. The psychology is fascinating. There are people and organisations doing important work, and a great deal for all of us to learn.
This blog is my invitation to come along for the ride.
I'll be sharing the psychology, the practical discoveries, the questions we're wrestling with and, most importantly, the stories of trying to make change happen.
Let's see where this takes us.
Be part of the journey
Get the book
For more on the psychology of prevention, my book All Reasonable Steps: How Psychology Transforms Workplace Sexual Harassment Prevention explores the thinking behind this work.
Dr Nina Burrowes
Nina is a psychologist, author and founder of The Consent Collective, a UK organisation specialising in the prevention of sexual harassment. She is the author of All Reasonable Steps: How Psychology Transforms Workplace Sexual Harassment Prevention.
On the road
If you enjoy a good journey, this isn't my first blog. There's also our On the road blog from a rather different work and life adventure.