Sexual harassment

Sexual harassment is a wide spectrum of offensive behavior toward a sexual nature, typically in the workplace or other setting where raising of objections and refusing may lead negative consequences to themselves. Sexual harassment rationally referred toward women being sexual abuse rather than to men and it is usually more sensitive over in the West than the East, especially the United States of America.

This is because women were sexually harassed long before there was even a word for it. From the history of US, we see that under slavery, women or I should say African American women were usually sexually abused by their white masters. After industrialization came in, women started to work in factories and offices where they had to endure another type of sexual comments and demands by bosses and coworkers as the price for survival.

Women live under this type of conditions for decades and centuries, which was long enough until women started to voice out for themselves. Even though sexual harassment was recognized as a legal claim for sex discrimination at work under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, long before it was commonly accepted as harmful.

Women began to speak in public for the first time about this form of sexual abuse in the mid-1970s. That was in May 1975 when The Women's Center at Cornell University held the first Speak Out; whereby the feminists in Boston and women workers in New York formed action groups. This was the very first time where the words "sexual harassment" has emerged to describe and give coherence, communality, and communicability to an experience that women previously had no choice but to consider just life.

Since then sexual harassment is considered a form of illegal discrimination in the United States of America. The harassment must impact individuals of a specific sex in a discriminatory manner in order to be considered as sexual harassment, for example any unwelcome sexual advance or conduct on the job, having the effect of making the workplace intimidating, hostile or offensive.

Today sexual harassment not only referring just on women being sexual abused and discriminated by men or vice versa but also looking into same sex harassment over in the workplace. This is because men or women are capable of sexually harassing other men or women, and it does not manner whether their personal sexual orientation is heterosexual or homosexual. This is because a heterosexual man can sexually harass a homosexual or a heterosexual man.