It seems as if the list of celebrities being accused of sexual harassment has become endless. It began with Harvey Weinstein, and has now grown to list individuals such as Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose, and Senator Al Franken. Many of these accusations do not stand alone- most of the accused have more than one story standing against them. Every story seems to just add to the pile, which begs the question: what does the term "sexual harassment" mean, on a basic level?
Merriam-Webster defines sexual harassment as, "uninvited and unwelcome verbal or physical behavior of a sexual nature especially by a person in authority toward a subordinate (such as an employee or student)."
Seiya Nomura, Morgan Valois, Zachary Spaulding, and Jessica Ritenour don't disagree, regardless of their personal experiences. Listen to their personal definitions of sexual harassment below:
According to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission there were 12,860 receipts given concerning sexual harassment reports filed in 2016. It's also worth mentioning that 16.6% of these reports were filed by men, leaving the other 83.4% of cases targeting women.
This falls in line with the interviews that were conducted as well. Jess and Morgan reported having had some basic experiences such as catcalling and small physical boundaries being crossed, while Zachary and Seiya had never had any person experiences being the victim of harassment.
Image: Chart of men and women who have been victims of completed or attempted rape in 2017.
It seems as if more women are dealing with this issue from day-to-day, though men should not be disregarded in this matter. Zachary makes a good point in one segment of his interview, where he addresses the issue of the validity of these claims:
However, these statistics from The Connecticut Alliance to End Sexual Violence suggest that most claims that are filed have some grain of truth to them.
Image: Percentage of validity versus false claims concerning sexual harassment.
But what about the incidents that weren't reported? Sexual harassment is handled in different ways on the media, leaving people with wildly different perspectives.
Above we hear the two ends of the scale. Seiya expresses a satisfaction with the way the media portrays and deals with the idea of sexual harassment. However Jessica discusses a perspective in which sexual harassment isn't taken seriously in the media and even suggests that men being harassed "should have enjoyed it." Some of these ideas could factor into whether or not someone reports the incident in question.
Image: A victim is often familiar with the individual sexually harassing them.
As seen above, the victims of sexual assault often know who their harassers are. This means that the victim runs the risk of seeing this person repeatedly, also leaving room for repeated offenses.
Image: Reasons people chose not to report their sexual assault.
In the pie graph above there are more reasons people did not report their assault/harassment. 43% percent of people believed that nothing could be done about the assault, while a whole 12% of people were afraid of how people would react- including officers of the law.
One of the myths or misconceptions about harassment is that if it is ignored it will simply go away. However this is not always true. Not acting upon the issue can often cause the problem to worsen rather than improve. The behavior doesn't have to be repeated to be considered harassment either. It is often motivated out of a desire for dominance and/or power, and should be taken care of sooner rather than later to prevent the incident from becoming a larger issue.
Sexual harassment is an issue that is believed to be prevalent everywhere. Morgan states this when asked if sexual harassment is still relevant to the typical college campus.
The growing list of accusations flashing across headlines says one thing: sexual harassment is worth talking about.
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A thank you to the four people who allowed me to interview you about this topic. It can be sensitive and your openness was valued.
