Workplace Sexual Assault: The Parallel Routes

When assault happens at work, the law’s response is not one process but three — the State’s, your employer’s, and your own — and nobody hands the person at the centre the map of how they fit. This page is that map, on this site’s standing terms: every route stays your choice, at your pace, and none is required for any other.

The Three Worlds

• The criminal route: the Garda report, the State’s investigation, the DPP’s decisions — accountability in its deepest form, on the criminal standard, with the process least within your control and no limitation period for serious offences;
• The employment route: your claims against the employer — harassment (expressly including physical conduct), safety duties, victimisation if reporting brought punishment — through the WRC on clocks of months: that machinery;
• The civil route: your own claim against the person (and, where facts support it, others), on the balance of probabilities, independent of everything above: the civil instrument.

How They Fit — and Don’t Bind

Parallel means parallel: no route requires another, forecloses another, or waits for another — a prosecution that never happens blocks nothing civilly (the standards comparison), and employment claims run regardless of both. The interactions that do exist — evidence flowing between processes, sequencing strategy, consistency across forums — are reasons for one adviser seeing the whole board early, never reasons for paralysis. And one clock outruns the others: the WRC’s months, worth mapping now even while every bigger decision waits.

The Ground Held While You Decide

Before any route: separation at work (of the risk, not of you), income protected, no crisis resignation — protected exits exist if leaving becomes right — and the record quietly kept: notes with dates, messages somewhere personal, medical attendance documented (a SATU provides care whether or not you ever report). The first confidential conversation covers exactly this ground: immediate protections, the three worlds mapped onto your facts, the clocks — and every decision left where it belongs. The fuller treatment: the workplace sexual assault practice.