ther because no formal legal system exists or it does exist but is not available to the individuals in question (Black, 1983, pp. 35-6).
Two different types of social interactions in which self-help or kinds of private justice are likely to occur describe the relationships that most often obtain in situations in which sexual harassment occurs. Black notes that private justice is attractive when the law is ôrelatively unavailable both to those with grievances and to those who are the objects of self-help, as when people of low status who are intimate have conflicts with each other (Black, 1983, p. 42). This is the case in a family or household where all members have relatively low social status, a locale that often breeds sexual harassment.
Private justice is also attractive in the case when the ôlaw may be relatively unavailable to those with grievances in comparison to those who have offended themö (Black, 1983, p. 42). This is almost always the case when a man harasses a woman, although the condition is exacerbated when the man is of higher economic status as well.
Before discussing how the concepts of private justice and social learning theory can be blended together to create a possible strategy against sexual harassment, a brief overview of the complex theoretical perspective of social learning theory is in order.
The basic ideas expressed in social learning theory are relatively straightforward; however, scholars have spent a great deal of time in articulating exactly how people learn to respond to complicated social stimuli within the environment of complex social systems and have repeatedly refined their definitions of the terms of this model. This discussion begins by examining these complexities and refinements of contemporary social learning theory.
Learning theory has at its core the concept of conditioning or the idea that behavior is related to an individualÆs environment. Classical conditioning (also r...