I ripped this from the Harvard Review in Question: (I think it is all here I had to clean up the imported HTML)
Here is the case that woke me, personally, up to the dangers of an unthinkingly broad, advocacy-based definition of sexual harassment. An employee, who disclosed eventually that she had been the victim of sexual abuse as a child and was ever-vigilant about her personal security, brought repeated complaints of sexual harassment against male faculty. She experienced being physically bumped by a male faculty member in the tight quarters of a copy room to be a sexual assault so humiliating that she could not communicate directly any more with that person. Hallway eye contact that lasted too long had the same effect on her — giving rise to an accusation against another faculty member for repeated unwanted sexual conduct. Eventually we realized that these complaints would keep coming in and, on investigation, keep failing to meet any reasonableness standard. It was a tragic situation — the episodes were both severe and persistent for her, and severely limited her work activities, but we could not keep entertaining the idea that they were sexual harassment.
It is not at all clear to me that this case, which occurred more than a decade ago, would be handled the same way today. Then, we were working in a framework that required sexual harassment enforcers to identify a wrongdoer. But the “prevention” branch of hostile environment policy emanating from advocates and the OCR In dealing with sexual harassment, schools must “end such conduct, prevent its recurrence, and address its effects.” DCL, supra note 8, at 2. OCR advises that schools’ basic obligations are to “end the sexual violence, eliminate the hostile environment, prevent its recurrence, and, as appropriate, remedy its effects. But a school should not wait to take steps to protect its students until students have already been deprived of educational opportunities.” Q&A,supra note 8, at 2–3. is eroding the link between harm and wrongdoing. Increasingly, schools are being required to institutionalize prevention, to control the risk of harm, and to take regulatory action to protect the environment. Academic administrators are welcoming these incentives, which harmonize with their risk-averse, compliance-driven, and rights-indifferent worldviews and justify large expansions of the powers and size of the administration generally.
I recently assisted a young man who was subjected by administrators at his small liberal arts university in Oregon to a month-long investigation into all his campus relationships, seeking information about his possible sexual misconduct in them (an immense invasion of his and his friends’ privacy), and who was ordered to stay away from a fellow student (cutting him off from his housing, his campus job, and educational opportunity) — all because he reminded her of the man who had raped her months before and thousands of miles away. He was found to be completely innocent of any sexual misconduct and was informed of the basis of the complaint against him only by accident and off-hand. But the stay-away order remained in place, and was so broadly drawn up that he was at constant risk of violating it and coming under discipline for that.
When the duty to prevent a “sexually hostile environment” is interpreted this expansively, it is affirmatively indifferent to the restrained person’s complete and total innocence of any misconduct whatsoever.
more throttle ..... less brakes.....
The Moth Attracted to the Flame 4 years, 6 months ago.
