Sexual Harassment
Sexual harassment, as the name implies, is one sex or the other is receiving unwelcomed attention from the opposite or even the same sex. The EEOC has defined sexual harassment as “unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature.”
Usually, sexual harassment is referenced in the workplace, however, sexual harassment can occur wherever the unwanted conduct is persistent and extensive enough to the person being harassed. Women are not always the victims of sexual harassment, it is actually a two-way street and on the other side you have many male victims. In the workplace, sexual harassing conduct is deemed to occur when:1
Submission to such conduct is made either explicitly or implicitly a term or
condition of an individual's employment, or2
Submission to or rejection of such conduct by an individual is used as a basis
for employment decisions affecting such individual, or
Such conduct has the purpose or effect of unreasonably interfering with an
individual's work performance or creating an intimidating, hostile, or
offensive working environment.
When first implemented, sexual harassment laws were viewed primarily as a protection for women against the advances of men. As more and more women entered and attained managerial and supervisory roles in the workplace, statistics reveal that they too, indulge in sexual harassing behavior. Whenever a man reports that he is being sexually harassed, their manager or the police, most often say that the person that he feels is sexually harassing him is actually flirting with him. They forget that sexual harassment is ”unwelcomed sexual behavior by a person/people.” The definition of flirting is “ to talk or behave amorously, without being taken as serious intentions”. These two definitions are entirely different from each other in saying that they cannot be mistaken for each other.
Statistics show the vast majority of...