Not a lawyer. When the female employee says she doesn't want to cause trouble, it just means that, if you are going to do something about this situation, then you better own it. Make this a problem between you and the employee who acted inappropriately. i.e. if/when he demonstrates understandable reasons for acting the way he did, you don't turn this around on her.
Once, I had a coworker report a sexual harassment to me (I was the team leader) but she said that she wanted me to deal with it personally, that she didn't want to make a fuss about it and that I shouldn't say anything to HR. We had a good working relationship and, like OP, I also didn't want to violate the "trust" she placed in me. I respected her "wishes" and acted accordingly. This was a mistake for many many reasons, among them the fact that it also ended up biting me in the ass. After a while someone else said some very inappropiate things to her and she ended up hating the job and decided to leave. At her exit interview with HR she said why she was leaving and, needless to say, HR didn't like the fact that I was told of the harrassment and didn't report it to them. "she told me not to get you involved and I didn't want to break her trust" doesn't cut it as an excuse (and it's also very unprofessional). HR then had a meeting with me where they let me have it. After the meeting the coworker and I talked about it and she essentially said that yeah, I should've disregarded her wishes and gotten HR involved early on. The lesson is to do what you have to do and don't pay much attention to the whole "I don't want to make a fuss" thing. My guess is that women say stuff like that because of the "likability" tax imposed on them. The whole experience was very eye opening to me, I was very young and relatively inexperienced as a team leader. Being male I was also blind at the myriad of stupid shit women get thrown at them by professional men that really should know better. Well, not blind, I knew sexual harassment happened but I never expected it to happen so close to me. I guess that being young I always thought like it was something that other people (working at other places) did. I'm still stupefied at some of the things that she experienced while she worked there and amazed that stuff like that still happens in this day and age.
Consider that when a woman reports harassment and says "I don't want to cause trouble," it's coming from a lifetime of not having her experiences taken seriously and situations like this backfiring. <i>Boys will be boys, you shouldn't be dressing like that, maybe you shouldn't have lead him on..</i> and then the woman reporting the harassment gets labeled as the troublemaker instead of the real perpetrator.
Demonstrate that you are taking her experiences seriously and behavior like that exhibited by your new employee is not acceptable. Get him out of there.
At one of my previous employers, we had a woman quite high up in the hierarchy (boss's boss, or maybe one more level) who regularly called on young male interns to "fix" her computer, which invariably involved them crawling underneath her desk...or asking pretty much all the inappropriate job interview questions etc. etc.
That's the thing. This IS a problem that the employer has now.
Let me paint a hypothetical: Idiot salesmonkey learns that hitting on a colleague doesn't get him in trouble. So he hits on someone else. They have an immediate bad reaction (as you'd expect) and the shite hits the fan. During the ensuing nastiness it comes out that the salesmonkey hit on the employee, who reported it, and that nothing happened. Immediate escalation of nastiness ensues.
Not a lawyer, but I went through an MBA where our legal lecturer had a lot of these sorts of stories to tell.
OP HAS to do something. Do NOT ignore, even if the offended-against employee can handle it and doesn't want to cause a scene.
This. If she didn't think it was an issue, she wouldn't have brought it to the OP's attention.
What she's really saying is: "I don't want to be embarrassed and it would make me feel guilty if he was punished because of me, so I don't want to advocate for a course of action"
But she is right to have brought it to the OP. Now he is obligated to take care of it discreetly and professionally.
While it's good to respect her wishes, the outcome of downplaying the problem could affect many more people. There's the cultural impact of leading people believing that sexual harassment isn't taken seriously, and the very real problem that leaving it alone could lead to it happening again which might result in a key employee leaving (or suing, or initiating criminal proceedings). At the very least there needs to be some sort of written warning to act as evidence that the business took it seriously.
it means that once it's been reported, it is extremely unwise to just "let it go". Now that the employer known that sexual harrasment took place, if they do nothing about it then they will be HUGELY liable if something worse happens later on (which seems likely, seeing as this guy did this as a relatively new hire).
Additionally, you generally don't want ass-hats that do this kind of shit working for your company, when the other party has made if obvious the advances are unwanted (we can only go off what OP has said though) working for your company. Especially if its small.
Many people go "lawyer lawyer lawyer", making your first sentence ambiguous: I first read it as "don't get a lawyer" but reading it again a minute later (after different context) you could mean "I am not a lawyer". Which do you mean?
