Sexual Harassment In American Culture

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Sexual harassment in American culture is prevalent enough that all workplaces have policies and rules to keep that type of thing out of a workplace environment. It has been portrayed in television shows and movies, a worker that gets touched the wrong way or is offered a higher positon at the job in return for sexual favors. There are many behaviors that fall under the definition of sexual harassment but it can only be subject to litigation if a person’s job security is decided by a sexual act or if the work environment changes for the person involved in the harassment. These two conditions could be considered the two types of sexual harassment, “‘economic injury’ and ‘hostile environment’”. (Popovich 274) Sexual harassment has only been recognized …show more content…
Someone that works as an exotic dancer might believe an action is harmless that an accountant would consider harassment. Studies have shown that if the perpetrator shares certain characteristics such as race or organizational status, it is an influencer as to how a worker would define or experience sexual harassment and whether or not they would report it or not. This makes defining and controlling sexual harassment in organizations tricky because there is no black and white definition of it even though forty to sixty percent of women (similarly for men) have experienced sexual harassment in some way shape of form throughout the time that they were at work. (Giuffre, p.771) This is where the Personal Dimension of Ethics (Avtgis, Chapter 9) could come into play. Those forty to sixty percent of men and woman that have experienced harassment could use their experiences to create their standard of behavior for the future. This could come into play as a monkey see monkey don’t, so to speak. Because a worker saw or experienced the outcome of sexual harassment, the next time they go to do something inappropriate in the future themselves, they might stop because ethically they have constructed what is right and wrong behavior in a workplace environment based on what had happened in the …show more content…
It has to be made known that workplaces are against that type of behavior because it could create , “a work environment or climate in which employees feel that they cannot perform to the best of their abilities because of unwanted sexual attentions” (Popovich, 281). Even if a worker feels uncomfortable there is no guarantee that they report it through the proper channels. An employee would most likely start off by communicating displaced dissent (Avtgis, Chapter 9) with a good coworker during a lunch break instead of articulated dissent (Avtgis, Chapter 9) to a higher up in the company. This could hold true if the person needs approval that what happened was actually a reportable offence. It could also hold true if the person that did the harassing is the worker’s higher up, or is the person the worker is supposed to report