Rethinking Sexual Harrassment

About this book

In the 1970s, the term 'sexual harassment' was coined by American women to describe what until then had been an experience without a name. The phenomenon subsequently acquired a discourse that has gone largely unchallenged in the intervening years. But do prevailing definitions of harassment adequately reflect the complexity of the issue? Or is it now time to challenge the conventional assumptions that underlie our approach to - and our ways of dealing with - the problem of harassment? Rethinking Sexual Harassment makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the issue by questioning the language we use to describe harassment and the assumptions we make when we think about it. It investigates the connections that exist between types of behaviour usually described as harassment; it reexamines the complicated relationship between gender and ethnicity, sexuality, age, religious belief and other aspects of identity; it scrutinises the ways in which harassment is perceived. Rethinking Sexual Harassment is an innovative and challenging contribution from feminists in Britain to an important and continuing debate.