Sexual Harassment: Legal Perspectives

Abstract

After a remarkably swift development in law and popular consciousness, the concept of sexual harassment has become the subject of controversy and debate. Sexual harassment is a legal concept that originated in the United States in the 1970s, when feminists succeeded in establishing it as a form of sex discrimination prohibited by national employment discrimination laws. The law defines harassment in sexual terms: Harassment consists of powerful men directing unwanted sexual advances toward less powerful women. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, this sexual view of harassment had been consolidated in law, media representation, social science research, organizational practice, and everyday thought. Recently, however, this view has come under challenge in the US among civil libertarians, feminists, and gay/lesbian theorists, many of whom have voiced concerns that the emphasis on curbing sexual conduct may penalize less mainstream workers who are viewed as sexually deviant such as sexual minorities, people of color, and working class men and women. Some feminists have also warned that the focus on sexuality neglects equally pernicious, non-sexual forms of gender-based harassment and discrimination designed to exclude and marginalize women (and many men) from the work they want to pursue. At the same time, as feminists and policymakers around the globe have begun to regulate harassment, many have imported into their own legal traditions a version of the US model now being reexamined. It is to be hoped that such new international efforts will pay heed to recent debates about workplace harassment in the US, and that US reformers will seek to learn from broader traditions of worker empowerment upon which other nations draw.