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Essay on Sexual Harassment-Prevention and Corrective Actions
Legal and policy changes regarding sexual harassment have been described as a feminist success story. The evolution of employers' policies against sexual harassment is seen as a response to the second wave of the women's movement. This model of legal and policy changes has been promoted by international women's organizations, has been endorsed by the European Union, and has been diffused by other supranational bodies like the International Labor Organization.
Although most European countries have adopted some kind of new laws in the late 1980s and 1990s, the U.S. approach to sexual harassment has been criticized and portrayed as a model for Europeans to avoid rather than to imitate. Employers in the U.S., complying with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and following case law developments on sexual harassment, have adopted policy approaches that emphasize individuals' (legal) rights and individual internal redress, defining sexual harassment as sex discrimination. This is also evident in training programs that focus on the legal (individual) dimensions of sexual harassment only. Group-based approaches of team-building and general sensitivity training programs are the exception.
Research examining what respondents consider to be sexual harassment has demonstrated that the greatest agreement is found for the explicit forms of harassment. In their study examining faculty perceptions of hypothetical instances of sexual harassment, Fitzgerald and Ormerod found that both male and female faculty were more likely to label explicit verbal/physical behavior as harassment than less explicit forms of harassment. In her study examining perceptions of actual experiences of sexual harassment, Grauerholz found that 44% of faculty women who had experienced sexist comments by students labeled this behavior as sexual harassment, whereas 96% believed that sexual bribery or sexual assault by a student constituted sexual harassment. (Adams, J. W., Kottke, I. L., & Padgitt, J. S.)Similarly, in their study of college students, Adams, Kottke, and Padgitt found that 97% of the men and 99 % of women said that sexual bribery constituted sexual harassment......
