Harassment Complaints Research Articles

Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Challenges in Enacting Procedural Justice in Resolving Sexual Harassment Complaints

This paper aims to examine what impedes Human Resource Professionals’ (HRPs) ability to enact procedural justice in resolving complaints of sexual harassment by identifying the challenges and difficulties HRPs encounter in practice. We conducted semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 35 HRPs from 30 companies in Sri Lanka, employing a qualitative research approach. We found that HRPs face numerous challenges in enacting procedural justice. They struggle with competing demands to legally safeguard the company while also being fair to the parties concerned. We also found that complainants, other parties connected to the complaint, or observers can perceive HRPs as unfair even when they adhere to procedural justice principles. Understanding these challenges will help address some of the loopholes in complaint handling processes and highlight the need for interventions such as training to mitigate or eliminate the challenges HRPs face in taking fairer actions.

OCR: University response to harassment complaint was satisfactory

Case name: Letter to: Northern Vermont University, No. 01‐16‐2037 (OCR 06/02/21).

OCR: University response to harassment complaint was satisfactory

Case name: Letter to: Northern Vermont University, No. 01‐16‐2037 (OCR 06/02/21).

Representative Bureaucracy and Organizational Justice in Mediation.

Studies of representative bureaucracy (RB) argue public organizations reflective of the public they serve exhibit better outcomes, especially when serving underrepresented groups. RB theory attributes improved outcomes either to the actions representative bureaucrats take (active representation), or a greater perception of trust and legitimacy toward them by service recipients (symbolic representation), largely treating active and symbolic representation as separate phenomena. We explore the intricate relationship between bureaucracies and the populations they serve by observing the cross-influence between active and symbolic representation, as revealed by self-reported outcomes in discrimination complaints (N = 1,372) referred for voluntary mediation in the United States Postal Service, the REDRESS© program, a context in which mediators are highly limited in representing a claimant's interests given the requirement of impartiality. In exit surveys measuring employee perceptions of organizational justice, we observed the impact of race and gender representation by gauging changes in reported satisfaction when a mediator's race or gender matched the nature of the complaint in cases of race or sex discrimination and sexual harassment, via multivariate regression estimation. These analyses support RB theory regarding sexual harassment complaints, where complainants rated outcomes significantly more favorably for female mediators. We found a negative correlation between female mediators and sex discrimination complaints, as well as African American mediators and race discrimination complainants. To explain this discrepancy, we argue that interactions between symbolic and active representation determine the expectations and perceptions placed on bureaucrats. When a bureaucrat does not meet those expectations, service recipients tend to have a more negative view of organizational justice outcomes.

Analysis of Harassment Complaints to Detect Witness Intervention by Machine Learning and Soft Computing Techniques

This research is aimed to analyze textual descriptions of harassment situations collected anonymously by the Hollaback! project. Hollaback! is an international movement created to end harassment in all of its forms. Its goal is to collect stories of harassment through the web and a free app all around the world to elevate victims’ individual voices to find a societal solution. Hollaback! pretends to analyze the impact of a bystander during a harassment in order to launch a public awareness-raising campaign to equip everyday people with tools to undo harassment. Thus, the analysis presented in this paper is a first step in Hollaback!’s purpose: the automatic detection of a witness intervention inferred from the victim’s own report. In a first step, natural language processing techniques were used to analyze the victim’s free-text descriptions. For this part, we used the whole dataset with all its countries and locations. In addition, classification models, based on machine learning and soft computing techniques, were developed in the second part of this study to classify the descriptions into those that have bystander presence and those that do not. For this machine learning part, we selected the city of Madrid as an example, in order to establish a criterion of the witness behavior procedure.

Conocimiento de las acciones de prevención y denuncia del acoso sexual entre estudiantes de trabajo social de una institución de educación superior en México

Este estudio presenta una descripción de los diferentes mecanismos que se han empleado en las universidades públicas estatales en México para intervenir en casos de violencia de género. Su objetivo es analizar el conocimiento que las estudiantes de una escuela de educación superior tienen acerca de las acciones que su institución ha diseñado para prevenir, atender y erradicar el hostigamiento sexual en la comunidad universitaria. Se realizó un estudio descriptivo a través de la aplicación de una escala Likert a estudiantes mujeres de una escuela de educación superior en México. Entre los hallazgos más sobresalientes se encontraron que las estudiantes desconocen los mecanismos de denuncia de hostigamiento y destacan la importancia de la difusión de las políticas institucionales para la presentación de la queja, así como la trascendencia del papel que desempeña el docente tutor en el empoderamiento de las estudiantes para la presentación de la denuncia de hostigamiento.

Student reports of attendance at programs to reduce campus sexual assault and harassment

Objective To identify factors independently associated with program participation and knowledge of campus processes to address sexual assault and harassment complaints. Participants 1,182 undergraduates who completed the University of Michigan’s 2015 campus climate survey on topics of sexual assault and harassment (67% response rate). Methods We analyze survey responses to estimate multivariable models that identify subgroups of the student population least likely to have participated in programs or to know campus processes. Results Students living off campus, not involved in major organizations, and males are less likely to report attending programming. Students not involved in major organizations and females are less likely to report knowing campus processes. Conclusions Specific student subpopulations are more difficult to engage in programs designed to reduce sexual assault and harassment. Targeting additional effort to these groups may improve campus sexual climate. Careful analyses of campus climate survey data can help construct campus-specific priorities for these interventions.

Evidence, empathy and emotions: decision-making styles of human resource professionals and their effectiveness in resolving complaints of sexual harassment

PurposeThe decision-making styles of human resource professionals (HRPs) in resolving complaints of sexual harassment are extremely important as they form the backbone of effectiveness in the resolution of a complaint. The purpose of this paper is to explore these decision-making styles and gauge their effectiveness in resolving such complaints.Design/methodology/approachEmploying a qualitative research approach, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 35 HRPs of 30 companies in Sri Lanka.FindingsWe found eight decision-making styles used by HRPs in resolving complaints of sexual harassment: (1) analytical, (2) behavioural, (3) directive, (4) conceptual, (5) avoidant, (6) dependent, (7) intuitive and judgemental, and (8) manipulative and persuasive. HRPs were found to generally adopt combinations of these styles, with one or two styles being dominant while one or two were used as back-up styles. In resolving complaints of sexual harassment, certain combinations of these styles were found to be more effective than others because they led to procedural, distributive and interactional justice.Practical implicationsThe implications of these findings for self-reflection and in training for the HRPs are also discussed.Originality/valueThe findings of this study assist us in understanding how and why HRPs make different decisions when resolving seemingly similar complaints and the effectiveness of such decisions.

EXAMINING THE BARRIERS TO REPORTING SEXUAL HARASSMENT IN UNIVERSITIES

Purpose: Universities have responded to sexual harassment by putting in place formalized reporting processes through which victims can seek redress. Despite these processes, victims seldom invoke the grievance handling mechanisms that are enshrined in university sexual harassment policies. This study therefore sought to investigate why the vice is grossly under reported. Given the asymmetrical relationship between students and faculty as well as the gendered position of female students, this study specifically focused on why female undergraduate students seldom reported faculty perpetrated sexual harassment.
 Methodology: The study was carried out at a large public university in East Africa, was purely qualitative and involved 42 participants who included students, members of faculty and university administrators. The data was analyzed thematically
 Findings: These indicated that institutional and social cultural barriers coupled with power asymmetries and financial inadequacy play a role in the non-reporting of sexual harassment amongst female university students.
 Unique contribution to policy and practice: These findings are beneficial to universities especially as they seek to revise their existing sexual harassment policies. University managers ought to ensure that complaint handlers are well positioned to fairly handle sexual harassment complaints. This may help victims to build trust in the grievance handling mechanisms thus encouraging them to report the vice

Online and offline sexual harassment associations of anxiety and depression in an adolescent sample

Purpose The aims of this study were to study the prevalence of sexual harassment online and offline, to analyse the associations between subjection to sexual harassment and adolescents’ mental health and analyse if there are any significant differences between girls and boys. We also examine if good peer-relationships interact with the associations between sexual harassment and mental health complaints. Methods This cross-sectional study included 594 adolescents, age 12–20. Participants responded to a web survey including the self-assessment scales Revised Children´s Anxiety and Depression Scale and Beck Youth Inventories as well as subjection to online and offline sexual harassment and peer-relational quality. Linear regression analysis was used to study whether symptoms of anxiety and depression correlated to subjection to online and offline sexual harassment and peer-relational quality. Results We found that 48.50% of girls and 28.19% of boys reported sexual harassment victimization. Offline was the most frequently reported site of victimization. Online harassment correlated significantly with increased anxiety and depressive symptoms in girls but not boys. Offline harassment as well as online and offline harassment correlated significantly with increasing symptoms for both genders. Participants who reported good peer-relationships had significantly less symptoms. Conclusions This study shows that sexual harassment remains a common plague for adolescents, especially for girls. Offline sexual harassment is the most common form of harassment for both genders. For girls, but not for boys, online sexual harassment correlated significantly with anxiety and depressive symptoms. A strong negative correlation between satisfaction to peer-relationships and mental health symptoms was found.

Sexual Harassment at the Workplace Act: Providing Redress or Maintaining Status Quo?

Despite a law against sexual harassment of women at the workplace, persons holding high offices, including senior judges, seem to enjoy impunity. By critically examining the allegations made against Justice Ranjan Gogoi (retd), former Chief Justice of India, and analysing five other cases of sexual harassment, we highlight how women are routinely denied justice. In doing so, we ask: are women actually able to file complaints of sexual harassment without the fear of facing a backlash? And do they ultimately get justice when they do so? We argue that the implementation of the law against sexual harassment is mediated by caste, class and gender, both of the survivor and of the perpetrator. We point to a changing polity that makes laws, guarantees and protections for women, but stumbles in implementing them in a fair and non-arbitrary manner.

Handling Sexual Harassment Complaints in Sri Lanka: Fair Process and Best Practices

Sexual harassment at the workplace continues to be an issue all over the world. While there are many policies with well laid-out procedures specifying the process to follow when complaints of sexual harassment are received, there is still a lack of knowledge on actual practices of handling sexual harassment complaints and best practices. Data were collected from 35 HR professionals (HRPs) from over 30 companies in Sri Lanka on how sexual harassment complaints were handled. Based on this empirical evidence and literature as well as the theory of organisational justice, a six-stage process that HRPs should follow for a fair, just and effective handling of sexual harassment complaints is proposed. The process comprises of (a) complaint stage, (b) assessment of complaint stage, (c) investigation stage, (d) action stage, (e) appeal stage and (f) post-settlement stage. Best practices of handling sexual harassment complaints identified through the empirical data and literature are also highlighted.

Victimization and Asymmetric Gendered Power Relations: A Linguistic Investigation of Harassment Complaints Registered in Lahore

This paper presents an investigation of the linguistic choices employed in harassment complaints submitted to the Punjab Commission on the Status of Women and four police stations located in Lahore during 2017-2018. In a patriarchal society such as Pakistan’s, where a woman’s honour epitomizes the whole family’s honour (Atakav 2015, 52; Sharlach 2008, 96), sexual harassment, a stigmatizing issue is hardly ever reported (Ali and Kramar 2015, 241). This paper, using Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis’s (Lazar, 2005, 2007) theoretical perspective of asymmetrical gendered power relations mirrored in harassment complaints, explores the form and severity of harassing practices which had prompted women in Lahore to report them. In order to unwrap the complex interplay of gender and power, linguistic features of the complaints are examined through Fairclough’s text analysis (1989, 1992), the first dimension of the 3D model which explores lexical choices such as adjectives, adverbs, culturally informed metaphors and metaphorical extensions, which are embedded in grammatical structure exemplified through transitivity analysis. In this paper, harassment complaints are analysed as important documents invested with socio-cultural gender ideologies that underline the need for dismantling gender oppression to achieve social transformation.

Agreement brings early resolution to student's harassment complaint

Case name: Letter to: University of Connecticut, No. 01‐16‐2092 (OCR 09/06/17).

Harassment at work in France and Italy first hypothesis for an international comparison

Abstract Since 2005, in the European working conditions survey (EWCS), a question is asked about harassment at work. Many more workers complain in France than in Italy. Objective differences in violence are not sufficient to explain this large gap in harassment complaints. One has to consider the perception and social regulation of violence, difficulties and conflicts at work. This article is pursuing two goals at the same time. The first is a theoretical goal, in order to move beyond cultural comparisons, to highlight the role of social institutions and regulations in the perception of harassment and to show that harassment is socially constructed in different ways in these countries. The second is an empirical one: to more accurately describe and explain the harassment phenomenon in France and Italy. A cultural approach is frequently used in International comparisons, but it is enough to be able to understand why French workers complain much more about harassment than Italian ones. That's why we also take a societal approach to look at the interactions between educational systems, social interactions, and hierarchical relations at work and the reason why the label of “moral harassment” covers a wider range of situations for French EWCS's respondents than for Italian ones.

Not all US agencies prepared for harassment claims

Several federal science agencies are not making it clear how to report sexual harassment or discrimination claims against grant recipients, according to a report from the US Government Accountability Office (GAO), the investigative arm of Congress. Federal law prohibits sexual harassment or discrimination at universities that receive federal grants, and science agencies are responsible for enforcing those rules. The GAO looked at reporting to the Department of Energy (DOE), NASA, the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Department of Agriculture (USDA), and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which includes the National Institutes of Health. It found that the NSF was the only agency that received a large number of Title IX sexual harassment complaints: 33 from 2015 to 2019. And only the NSF and HHS received broader sexual discrimination complaints: 47 and 93, respectively. But that could be because they are the only two agencies that publicly communicate

#MeToo, Sexual Harassment and Accountability: Considering the Role of Restorative Approaches

Questions about the meaning of accountability for civil rights violations, and about what role the law can play in advancing accountability, are critically important to law reform. With respect to gender violence, the #MeToo movement has prompted widespread recognition of what feminists have long known, that sexual harassment is pervasive both in and out of the workplace. Yet its persistence, notwithstanding sexual harassment laws and policies that now have been on the books for decades, should spur reflection about what law and policy reforms actually would deter and prevent harassment, and what approaches would meaningfully advance equality at work. Sexual harassment at work lies at the intersection of parallel critiques of anti-discrimination law and of criminal legal interventions in response to gender violence. Both critiques should be taken into account in developing workplace responses to sexual harassment. In both contexts, commentary as well as pilot programs have begun to explore the possibility of incorporating restorative programs to promote healing and redress harms. This Article builds on those foundations and argues that workplaces should integrate restorative approaches into the options available to workers who raise sexual harassment complaints. It summarizes, and draws parallels between critiques of criminal legal regimes addressing gender violence, on the one hand, and workplace discrimination, on another. It describes principles common to restorative justice approaches and reviews the emerging research on the use of restorative justice with gender violence cases. It offers a beginning assessment of how restorative justice approaches might be incorporated into workplace sexual harassment responses, and identifies challenges that will have to be addressed for effective implementation.

Race, threat and workplace sexual harassment: The dynamics of harassment in the United States, 1997–2016

Sexual harassment is a persistent problem for women in the workplace. Prior research has explored the effects of sexual harassment on the psychological, physical and economic wellbeing of the victims. Despite the extensive research exploring the causes, most studies focus on micro‐level factors, and few studies examine the role of macro‐level factors on sexual harassment in the workplace. Using public Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) data and a separate dataset of individual level workplace sexual harassment complaints, we test two hypotheses about sexual harassment in American workplaces. First, we show that the decline in workplace sexual harassment complaints has been uneven, with African‐American women experiencing an increased relative risk of sexual harassment in the workplace, even as overall reported harassment complaints are down. Second, we show that economic threat — operationalized in this case through unemployment rates — drives increases in sexual harassment of women in American workplaces. While the data on harassment complaints is limited, data strongly suggests that the changes are driven by shifts in underlying levels of harassment, rather than changes in the likelihood of reporting harassment.

The law, the market, the gendered subject: workplace sexual harassment in Chennai’s information technology industry

The Indian information technology (IT) industry has, in recent years, been plagued by reports of workplace sexual harassment, disrupting the narrative of empowerment disseminated by an industry that projects itself as a pioneer in the area of gender equality. This has been further complicated by the passage of domestic legislation in 2013 mandating companies to form internal committees that will address complaints of workplace sexual harassment. This article, which has emerged out of nine months of ethnographic research on the IT industry in the South Indian city of Chennai, uses a socio-legal approach to unpack the processes and practices through which the law has been interpreted and executed, while also interrogating the law itself as a mechanism for social justice. As I argue in this article, policies for promoting diversity and inclusion in the urban Indian workplace, placed in the context of corporate adherence to the law, can themselves function as significant sites of tension in middle-class women’s undertaking of paid employment.

The promise and peril of sexual harassment programs

Two decades ago, the Supreme Court vetted the workplace harassment programs popular at the time: sexual harassment grievance procedures and training. However, harassment at work remains common. Do these programs reduce harassment? Program effects have been difficult to measure, but, because women frequently quit their jobs after being harassed, programs that reduce harassment should help firms retain current and aspiring women managers. Thus, effective programs should be followed by increases in women managers. We analyze data from 805 companies over 32 y to explore how new sexual harassment programs affect the representation of white, black, Hispanic, and Asian-American women in management. We find support for several propositions. First, sexual harassment grievance procedures, shown in surveys to incite retaliation without satisfying complainants, are followed by decreases in women managers. Second, training for managers, which encourages managers to look for signs of trouble and intervene, is followed by increases in women managers. Third, employee training, which proscribes specific behaviors and signals that male trainees are potential perpetrators, is followed by decreases in women managers. Two propositions specify how management composition moderates program effects. One, because women are more likely to believe harassment complaints and less likely to respond negatively to training, in firms with more women managers, programs work better. Two, in firms with more women managers, harassment programs may activate group threat and backlash against some groups of women. Positive and negative program effects are found in different sorts of workplaces.