Sexual harassment Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 4000 words

Sexual harassment - Research Paper Example For example, it is unlawful to harass a female employee, through making remarks that are offensive to the nature of women in general. Different from the traditional conception of sexual harassment, the harassing party and the victim can either be a man or a woman, and in other cases they can also be of the same sex. Despite the fact that the law does not prohibit offhand comments, teasing, or the isolated cases that are relatively subtle, harassment is illegal (Lawoko et al., 2004). This is, especially, the case when it is severe and frequent, to the extent that it makes the work environment offensive or hostile; it is considered illegal when it can lead to adverse decision-making relating to the employment of either parties (Bimrose, 2004). The adverse effects of sexual harassment include the demotion of the victim or the loss of employment, and the harasser can be a supervisor to the victim, a supervisor in another line of work, a co-worker or an external party, including a customer (EEOC 2014). This paper will explore the nature of sexual harassment, its characteristics and the experiences of sexual harassment. The main source of information for this report was the wide variety of databases for articles and publications about the area of sexual harassment: these databases include Emerald, Proquest, BIDS Ingenta, SpringerLINK, ScienceDirect, Business Source Premier and Inform Global. To offer focus to the search, different search terms were used, including sexual harassment, gender harassment, workplace violence and sexual harassment training. A majority of the sources related to the key terms were from Australia and the US – the focus of many of the sources was healthcare workers, particularly among nursing staffs (Privitera et al., 2005). Mott and Condor (1997) reported that during the 1990s, 85 percent of the studies done on sexual harassment had been carried out in the US, and that more than 70 percent of the total had used students