Sexual harassment is a widespread problem and one that is widely acknowledged by a number of powerful institutions (as well as the victims of the practice) and yet it remains difficult to counteract for several reasons. This paper examines how a perspective that incorporates ideas about private justice and perspectives taken from social learning theory can suggest one possible strategy to reduce the problem of sexual harassment.
The first of the two primary reasons that sexual harassment is a difficult behavior to remove from society are that it is perpetuated in general by the powerful against the weak û in this case, by men against women. While in a democracy the weak are protected by the rule of law, laws are in fact always differentially enforced, and always (as a general rule) enforced less well against the powerful. Women who seek justice against men (who may also be their bosses and are in most cases likely to have greater economic power) are disadvantaged from the start. The second difficulty in suppressing sexual harassment results from the fact that people have genuinely different concepts of what constitute harassment, and what one person may do or propose in perfectly good faith is simply unacceptable to someone else. Such differences are conditioned by age, gender, ethnicity and religious beliefs û as well as by personal preference û and are so variable as to make legalistic concepts and definitions difficult to come by.
Given that women (and men who are the victims of sexual harassment as well) may feel that they have few remedies within the formal justice system, and given the difficulty of defining sexual harassment even when people of good will attempt to do so, the arena seems an appropriate one in which to utilize the concepts of private justice, or ôself-helpö as Black (1983) terms it. Self-help or private justice can be seen simply as a mode of conflict management pursued outside a formal legal system ei...