The Sex Scandal Engulfing Westminster2 min read

Last week, conservative party’s aides circulated a dossier, which listed names of 40 MPs who were accused of sexual harassment, in Westminster.

After this, some of the politicians, who are alleged, have announced their acknowledgements or resignations one after another.

Lots of media reports made a fuss about the Defence Secretary Sir Michael Fallon’s apologies for touching a journalist Julia Hartley-Brewer’s knee in the past.

It ended up making Brewer file a complaint against media reports dealing with sexual topics.

She emphasised that both Fallon and Brewer now consider it ‘closed’. She detailed how she asked him to stop doing that, and Fallon showed his apologies to her.

She tweeted her opinion that media should rightly deal with the distinction between sexual harassment and workplace banter. Eventually, Fallon announced his resignation November 2nd.

This revelation is considered to have come as the parliament authorities’ plan to allow victims of MPs’ sexual harassment to report their experiences if they don’t feel fear.

According to The Commons Speaker, John Bercow, the members of the House of Commons Commission are now quite seriously facing to the recent allegations relating to the harassment of staff. As he said, the authorities all consider this Westminster’s situation as an urgent problem.

Indeed, the Leader of the Commons, Andrea Leadsom himself earlier told MPs that in terms of the consequences of these abuses, he clearly thought that the perpetrators could have the whip withdrawn/could be been fired from ministerial office.

Of course, none of the sexual harassment should be allowed in our society.

However, I personally feel weird to see that politicians are shown as characters of sexual-scandal stories in every day’s news.

This might be because the articles/coverages look too different with general political news to recognize what is going on in our society.

Of course, Politicians’ role is not to make people afraid of the turbulence in the political world.

They are leaders of our society, who are expected to have strong responsibility for democratic construction, peace, moral, etc., Simply, I am worried about whether or not the politicians can keep their mind on their discussion dealing with versatile social problems in terms of law and order, especially now that we are looking at them suspiciously with the recent sexual scandal.

In fact, Tory MP Michael Fabricant revealed his finding of similarity between the current situation of Westminster whose members are engulfed in series of allegations of sexual abuse and ‘witch hunt’ in BBC Newsnight.

However, because we are living in an information society today, many more complicated concerns might commit to this whole story of ‘sexual-harassment-hunt’ in the political world, compared to the case of ‘witch-hunt’.

No one knows how to wrap up this confusion.

However, in my opinion, if we commit to a discussion platform around this issue, it might be a good opportunity to re-think deeply about a role of media, politics and our morality, for us.