Reporting Sexual Harassment: Your Options

There is no single right way to respond to workplace sexual harassment — there is only the way that is right for you, chosen with the map in hand. This page is the map: the routes, their honest trade-offs, and the clocks — offered on this site’s standing terms: every option stays your choice, at your pace.

The Routes

• The internal complaint: never mandatory before other routes — tactically valuable where the employer functions (it tests the response and builds the record), harmful where the process is captured. Its handling becomes evidence in every direction, so document it as it happens;
• The WRC claim: the statutory route, no internal complaint required first, remedies to the two-year ceiling — on clocks of months, which no grievance procedure pauses: the time limits;
• The parallel worlds where conduct was assault: Garda and civil routes alongside the employment ones, none required, none exclusive — mapped with care;
• The exit, if staying becomes impossible: assessed before any resignation — constructive dismissal is won by sequence;
• Nothing, for now: a legitimate choice — strongest when made with the clocks mapped and the record quietly building rather than by default.

The Two Disciplines That Serve Every Route

The record: contemporaneous notes with dates, messages preserved somewhere personal, names of anyone who saw or was told — it serves the internal complaint, the WRC claim, the settlement negotiation and the do-nothing-yet option equally, and it commits you to none of them. The signature discipline: nothing signed without advice — and since November 2024, the law stands behind you there: harassment NDAs are void outside strict conditions that include independent legal advice at the employer’s reasonable cost and your genuine choice about confidentiality (the new rules).

Choosing With the Map

Which route fits turns on your priorities — accountability, compensation, your job, your privacy — and they are allowed to differ from anyone else’s. The Options Navigator maps them privately in two minutes; a confidential conversation maps them properly, with the clocks against your actual dates, and commits you to nothing. The full practice, written at your pace: harassment claims.