Sexual Harassment Is Not About Sex

c2de355aa08d71411eb5d01b8810d041First it was a six-year-old boy who kissed the hand of a female classmate, last week he was suspended from school when it accused him of sexual harassment.  Now there is another student suspended and charged with sexual harassment, this time a seventeen-year-old high school senior who will not graduate on time because video surveillance captured him hugging a teacher. In both cases the action appears to be unwelcome, if this is accurate then indeed some form of discipline is warranted. But to charge either of these boys with sexual harassment is wrong, as it is an expansion of the legal definition of the term.

Sexual harassment requires the harasser to be in some position of power over the victim, an employer or supervisor, one who also has the ability to cause the victim some form of financial harm including termination of employment. This is why many victims fear reporting their harasser.  Due to the nature of the harassment, the word “sexual” rather than “gender” was an unfortunate choice of wording for I believe that may well be the reason for the subjective expansion of the violation.

Those who were charged with defining it, the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission wrote it thus:

It is unlawful to harass a person (an applicant or employee) because of that person’s sex. Harassment can include “sexual harassment” or unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical harassment of a sexual nature.

Harassment does not have to be of a sexual nature, however, and can include offensive remarks about a person’s sex. For example, it is illegal to harass a woman by making offensive comments about women in general.

Although the law doesn’t prohibit simple teasing, offhand comments, or isolated incidents that are not very serious, harassment is illegal when it is so frequent of severe that it creates a hostile or offensive work environment or when it results in an adverse employment decision (such as the victim being fired or demoted).

In a random web search I Bing’d up this law dictionary page, the same type of definition, information found on it:

Sexual harassment is a kind of Sex Discrimination that occurs in the workplace.  Persons who are the victims of sexual harassment may sue under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (42 U. S. C. A. § 2000 et seq.), which prohibits sex discrimination in the workplace.

While no unwelcome physical contact is permissible or ought to be ignored, to re-define such an egregious violation by trivializing it to random acts performed by students, even very young children who are not yet aware of just what sexual activity is, does an extreme disservice to those true victims of the harassment. As I say, some form of discipline or correction may well indeed be warranted but to slap a “sex offender” label onto the child’s file for the rest of his life is ridiculous in the extreme.

Sometimes common sense goes a very long way toward resolution.

Maureen Mullins

California PolitiChick Maureen Mullins was born in March 1963 and if ever asked the proverbial 'Where were you when JFK was shot? she may confidently reply, 'In my playpen.' Her first true recollection of politics was when the usual after school re-runs of Gilligan's Island and Hogan's Heroes were being pre-empted by the Watergate hearings. This carried through to her discovery of CSPAN, when in doing research for an essay on Abscam for her high school government class, she heard Newt Gingrich giving Special Orders speeches on the subject from the well of the House of Representatives. Her first foray into political activity was to volunteer for the Reagan For President campaign in 1980, as she was only 17 that November and would not be able to cast a vote for him until 1984. She has subsequently done volunteer work on various House and presidential campaigns throughout the years. A dedicated Constitutionalist, one of Maureen's greatest honors was to be a charter member of Hillary Clinton's Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy and continues to this day to help the people of this country recognize and remember the value of true liberty.

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