In our Online Sexual Harassment Prevention training your employees will learn and apply the important skills of handling sexual harassment issues and complaints. This hands on workshop thoroughly addresses the elements of how to prevent unacceptable behavior. The class includes a detailed overview of what sexual harassment is, explains legal definitions, discusses sexual harassment prevention, and shows how to handle sexual harassment complaints and maintain a positive work environment.

For more information about individual sexual harassment training courses

A History of Sexual Harassment

In 1908 Harper's Bazaar printed a series of letters in which working women wrote of their experiences of city life. (1) A typical experience was reported by G.E.D., a New York stenographer:

"I purchased several papers, and plodded faithfully through their multitude of 'ads.' I took the addresses of some I intended to call upon... The first 'ad' I answered the second day was that of a doctor who desired a stenographer at once, good wages paid. It sounded rather well, I thought, and I felt that this time I would meet a gentleman. The doctor was very kind and seemed to like my appearance and references; as to salary, he offered me  $15 a week, with a speedy prospect of more. As I was  leaving his office, feeling that at last I was launched safely upon the road to a good living, he said casually, 7 have an auto; and as my wife doesn't care for that sort of thing, I shall expect you to accompany me frequently on pleasure trips.' That settled the doctor; I never appeared. After that experience I was ill for two weeks; a result of my hard work, suffering and discouragement." (2)

The incident illustrates a common occupational hazard of women in the labor force: sexual harassment. Sexual harassment, defined as any unwanted pressure for sexual activity, includes verbal innuendos and suggestive comments, leering, gestures, unwanted physical contact (touching, pinching, etc.), rape and attempted rape. It is a form of harassment mainly perpetrated by men against women. As in many other forms of violence against women, the assertion of power and dominance is often more important than the sexual interaction. Sexual demands in the work- place, especially between boss and employee, become even more coercive because a woman's economic livelihood may be at stake.

Sexual harassment of women in the workplace is one manifestation of the wider issue of the oppression of women. Violence is central to that oppression, an essential part of establishing and maintaining the patriarchal family.

Until recently violence has only been studied psychologically, as an aberration, not as a norm. When violence occurs in the nuclear family, it is treated as the occasional act of a deviant rather than a prevalent and socially sanctioned way of enforcing the status quo. Statistical evidence shows violence to be pervasive, yet this is ignored. Rape, for example, despite repeated studies showing it is extremely common in many social settings, is still often described as the isolated act of a stranger. Wife-beating was treated as a similar infrequent (though regret- table) event.

Sexual harassment at the workplace is, I would argue, an analogous problem. It is consistent, systematic, and pervasive, not a set of random isolated acts. The license to harass women workers, which many men feel they have, stems from notions that there is a "woman's place" which women in the labor force have left, thus leaving behind their personal integrity. I would like to propose a model which sees violence, and more specifically the threat of violence, as a mechanism of social control. It is used to control women's access to certain jobs; to limit job success and mobility; and to com- pensate men for powerlessness in their own lives.

It functions on two levels: the group control of women by men, and personal control of indi- vidual workers by bosses and co-workers. Violence is used to support and preserve the institutions which guarantee the dominance of one group over others. Sexual harassment is one form. The threat of lynching hanging over Blacks in the South at the turn of the century was another such instance of the use of violence. So is rape. In neither case are the per- petrators of the "crime" totally condemned by society; though there are laws on the books against such behavior, it is clear to the victims that it may be dangerous to bring charges; and the victim is "marked" by the crime (or dead) while the attacker is considered "normal". Both "crimes" serve as warnings to certain groups not to walk the streets alone at night.

Words, gestures, comments can be used as threats of violence and to express dominance. Harassment often depends on this underlying violence - violence is implied as the ultimate response. Harassment is "little rape," an invasion of a person, by suggestion, by intimida- tion, by confronting a woman with her helpless- ness. It is an interaction in which one person purposefully seeks to discomfort another person. This discomfort serves to remind women of their helplessness in the face of male violence. To offer such a model is to suggest that it is not simply an individual interaction but a social one; not an act of deviance but a societally con- doned mode of behavior that functions to preserve male dominance in the world of work.

The economic aspect of sexual harassment in the workplace differentiates it from other forms of violence against women. A rationalized capitalist economic order tended to separate spheres of sexual power (in the family) and economic power (in the workplace). Sexual coer- cion in the workplace reasserts the connection between the two. While the women involved did not see sexual favors as a right of their employers and male co-workers, their fear of losing jobs often stifled effective protest.

Source: Mary Bularzik