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Sexual Harassment
What is Sexual Harassment?
Sexual harassment unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature when:
- Submission to such conduct is made an implicit or explicit term or condition of an individual’s academic performance or employment; or
- Submission to or rejection of such conduct is used as the basis for decisions about academic evaluations, employment, promotion, transfer, selection for training, performance evaluation, etc.; or
- Such conduct has the purpose or effect of creating an intimidating, hostile, or offensive educational or work environment or substantially interferes with a student’s academic performance or an employee’s work performance.
Types of Sexual Harassment
Physical: unwelcome physical or sexual touching, up to and including sexual assault; impeding someone’s movements, or following her or him around
Verbal: sexual comments, jokes, or propositions; pressure for social or sexual activities; requests or demands for sexual favors tied to work or academic
Nonverbal: whistling in a suggestive manner; visual displays of inappropriate or degrading sexual images
Hostile Environment: sexest remarks or behaviors which create an intimidating, hostile, or offensive work or educational environment
Facts About Sexual Harassment
- Sexual harassment is sex discrimination.
Sexual harassment is about power, not sex. It works to keep women “in their place.”
- Sexual harassment is sexual victimization, an insidious form of sex discrimination, not a benign mating ritual.
- 50% to 85% of American women will experience some form of sexual harassment during their academic or working life.
- Sexual harassment must be understood as part of the continuum of violence against women.
- In a typical sexual harassment case, the accuser becomes the accused, and the victim feels twice-victimized.
- Women are nine times more likely than men to quit jobs because of sexual harassment, five times more likely to transfer, and three times more likely to lose jobs.
- 90% of sexual harassment victims are unwilling to come forward for two primary reasons: fear of retaliation and fear of loss of privacy.
- Most harassers are older than their victims, married, and of the same race as their victims. Some harass many women, others harass only once.
- Harassers are found in all types of occupations, at all organizational levels, among college professors as well as in the business and professional world, and among individuals who live otherwise exemplary lives.
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