Sexual harassment in social interactions

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 - 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 - as well as by personal preference - and are so variable as to make legalistic concepts and definitions difficult to come by.

Given that women (and men who are the vi

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act far easier to accept and less paradoxical than it appears. This is possible because of certain qualities of - or assumptions about - social conformity. The first of these is that people do not violate the norms of the group to which they belong. This may well be true, but it also has an unfortunate level of circularity to it. If people do not violate their group's norms then, ipso facto, whatever they do is a norm of their group, which they then are not violating. Putting aside this rhetorical quibble for the moment, it is no doubt true that people tend to conform to the norms of their group; it is equally true that any given group to which an individual conforms may not hold the same norms as other groups in society, even other groups that are more powerful and more prestigious. The second assumption about social conformity often made by scholars is that conformity is never absolute, but rather that group norms allow for a great deal of flexibility. This means that the norms of deviant groups may not be very different from the norms of mainstream society (Gottfredson and Hirschi, 1990, p. 76). If one were to put characters into this hypothetical positions, the sense of these propositions becomes quite clear. One can look at

Category: Psychology - S