Dr Nina Burrowes on All Reasonable Steps: The Psychology of Sexual Harassment Prevention

What does it actually take to prevent sexual harassment at work? Policies, training, reporting mechanisms and statements of zero tolerance are one thing. Creating a workplace where sexual harassment is genuinely less likely to happen is something else entirely.

Episode Summary
In this episode, I talk to Dr Nina Burrowes, a psychologist who has spent more than 20 years working on the psychology of sexual harm and is the author of All Reasonable Steps: How Psychology Transforms Workplace Sexual Harassment Prevention.

Nina argues that organisations need to stop treating sexual harassment simply as a compliance problem and recognise it as a human one. Weexplore why conventional training can become little more than “solution theatre”; why a lack of reports doesn’t necessarily mean a lack of problems; why automatically escalating incidents to HR can have unintended consequences; and why prevention requires people to have the skills and confidence to intervene before situations escalate.

The conversation also goes much wider than sexual harassment, exploring what happens when organisations try to manage messy human behaviour through neat rules and processes — and why trust, feedback, consent, judgement and psychological safety matter across organisational life.

Ultimately, Nina offers a different way of thinking about healthy cultures: not places where nothing ever goes wrong, but places with the maturity and skills to respond intelligently when it does.

Guest Profile - Dr Nina Burrowes
Nina is a psychologist, author and founder of The Consent Collective. Her work focuses on the psychology of sexual harm and helping organisations move from compliance towards meaningful prevention.

AI-Generated Timestamped Summary
00:00 — Introduction: when organisational solutions don’t solve human problems
02:30 — Nina’s journey into the psychology of sexual harm
08:15 — All Reasonable Steps: from compliance to prevention
13:45 — Why workplaces have a role to play
17:15 — The illusion of simple solutions
21:30 — Understanding who causes harm — and why
27:00 — Moving beyond “stranger danger”
30:30 — The danger of “that doesn’t happen here”
37:00 — Creating a culture where difficult conversations can happen
42:00 — Sexual harassment as a cultural stress test
47:00 — When everything becomes an HR problem
52:00 — Why HR isn’t the culture
55:00 — AI and the future of Human Risk
56:30 — Consent as a transferable human skill
01:00:30 — Building organisations that walk the talk

Resources
Nina's website, including details of her book 'All Reasonable Steps' - https://www.ninaburrowes.com/

The Consent Collective - https://www.consentcollective.com/

The Consent Collective — Workplace Sexual Harassment Prevention
https://www.consentcollective.com/workplace