The 'new' sexual harassment

Dubai: Sexual harassment is not about being chased around the desk anymore. It is about flirtation, subtle power plays, retaliation and, of course, text messages.
When her hotel room phone rang at 2am, Megan McFeely assumed it was an emergency. Maybe a friend or family member was hurt or in trouble.

Worried, she sleepily picked it up, only to hear a male coworker on the other end. He was someone with "definitely more power than I had," urging her to come back down to the hotel bar. It was obvious he was drunk.

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"When you're not the one in power, and someone does something like that, you just feel unsafe," McFeely said.

Welcome to the new sexual harassment.

"It's rare now that somebody in the office says, 'Sleep with me or you're fired,'" says David Bowman, a labour and employment partner at the Philadelphia office of Morgan, Lewis & Bockius.

"Now it's about managers being very flirtatious at the holiday party. It's about getting drunk together at happy hour and something inappropriate being said or done. People are now aware that certain things are not acceptable, but they still stumble over the subtle areas," Bowman said.

Those subtle areas can include everything from flirtation at a company party to a complimentary text message or an unwelcome invitation.

"There's been a new generation of confusion in this area," says Jay Zweig, an employment lawyer with Bryan Cave in Phoenix. "Twenty years ago, it was, 'Sleep with me if you want the promotion.' Now most sexual harassment claims have to do with a hostile work environment, someone saying, 'This person is bothering me. I can't do my work. I'm distracted and uncomfortable.'"

Much of the problem is that newer technology—e-mail, IM, texting or posting on social-networking sites--makes it much easier for comments to be misconstrued on many levels.

Says Bowman: "When you talk in person, 80 per centof what you say is in your tone and body language. With technology, all of that is gone."

If you admire an employee's new haircut while she is in your office, she can read your tone and body language; and you can read hers.

However, a late-night text message admiring your employee's new haircut can take on a lascivious tone, even if that is not the intention.

Rick Brenner, a management consultant and workplace politics expert in Cambridge, Mass., says that while a one-time unwelcome electronic message may just be an aberration, a pattern of them, with you or with other employees, could spell problems.

Rather than running to human resources, Brenner suggests tactfully trying to find out if this person has a history of this kind of thing.

But he acknowledges that if there is a long-standing history of this issue, management may already know about it and have chosen not to act. In this case, he says, you might want to consider finding another job.

"The legal path is not for the faint of heart," he says. "You need emotional and financial resources. It depends how you want to spend your life."

Changing Jobs id not the issue. Almost everywhere we have these kinds of few people who just cant let others live in peace.Dont be shocked but not only women even guys who work nowadays face these threats of sexual harrasment. I belive these kind of issues should be first dealt within the management of the organization and even if after that it continues, its should be taken up legally and the accused must be dealt legally. If one person is punished in such a way the others will learn from it.
Aryan Paul
Sharjah,United Arab Emirates
Posted: August 12, 2009, 12:40