What's Going on with Male on Male Sexual Harassment?
Why are we reading so much about male on male sexual harassment lately?
Just last week the New York Times reported that Knicks basketball player, Ed Curry, was accused of sexual harassment by his former driver. On the same day, the ABA Journal reported a story about a Nixon Peabody lawyer who sued for discrimination stating that he was was regularly taunted, ridiculed, and subjected to partner's and co-workers homophobic statements and comments about oral sex during his time at the law firm.
A few days earlier, the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals decided, in Patterson v. Hudson Area Schools, that a school district could be held liable for its failure to stop the harassment of one of its students who was taunted and victimized by name calling (ie. "queer " "fagot" "pig") and pushing and shoving over a period of years all which escalated into an episode of sexual assault in the locker room.
Is male on male sexual harassment on the rise? Are men more willing to report the harassment? Was male on male sexual harassment reported but were the courts unwilling to recognize it?
I tried one of the first male on male sexual harassment cases in the country in 1998 -- Hampel v. Food Ingredients Specialties, Inc. . The plaintiff Laszlo Hampel worked at FIS- Nestle in Solon, Ohio in the production line as a cook. In short, the case involved one disgusting outburst of sexual provocation by my client's supervisor, followed by reporting of the incident, a failure to act on the part of the company to take prompt, remedial action (required under the law) continued harassment by the supervisor, and homicidal behavior on the part of my client. These kinds of cases were simply unheard of ten years ago.
Shortly before the trial, my father asked my what kind of case I was working on. When I told him he responded, "I wouldn't give you five dollars for that case. Why didn't he just punch him in the nose." While my father's reaction certainly concerned me, fortunately the jury did not see it that way and awarded $1.6 million dollars the majority of which constituted punitive damages.
The case was of course appealed. The Ohio Supreme Court decision in Hampel recognized male on male sexual harassment as a valid claim in line with Oncale v Sundowner Offshore Services, Inc a case recently decided by the United States Supreme Court. Interestingly though, it held that there was no sexual harassment in our case, a decision which to this day I completely fail to understand no matter how many times I read it. Fortunately for Mr. Hampel, the Court affirmed the verdict in sustaining the claim for intentional infliction of emotional distress.
So I come back to, how come we practice for over twenty five years and we see little to no cases of male on male sexual harassment and then we see three in in one week? Does it have anything to do with my father's "why doesn't he just punch him in the nose" method of resolving the problem?
Let's assume that employees out there are simply more aware of their rights and courts are more enlightened.
Images: http://www.gpac.org/images/PressReleasePics/maleworkplace.jpg and http://img.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2007/10_04/bullyingDM2810_468x720.jpg
I believe the reason we are seeing more male-male sex harassment cases than in the past are that men are finally realizing that it is okay to use the judicial system to address and rectify their harassment issues. As your father has mentioned, in the past males would just inflict violence on the perpetrator, perhaps due to not wanting to show weakness and the fact that few legal recourses would take male complaints seriously.
Now, in wake of women having a legal way to deal with harassment issues, men are seeing that they, too, have a legal means of addressing or at least calling attention to their harassment issues.
But the real issue that needs to be looked at is, why do men as perpetrators behave in such ways? Rarely do women resort to harassing other women. I think the answer lies in how men are raised, to always show strength, to not show weakness, to fight back rather than withdraw, to not cry, etc. Women have come a long ways in terms of having greater freedom of emotional and social expression, especially post-women's movement. Men, as Susan Faludi has pointed out, are still forced to behave as if it were the 1950s. And who is doing the forcing? Why it is us women and men, especially as parents. Witness how much parents regulate their sons to be masculine and dissuading them from expressing feminine traits, all the while letting their daughters be tomboys. That's where the real anti-male sexism starts. Unfortunately, given the state of parenting today, men will probably NEVER have the same freedom of emotional expressivity given women. And so male-male discrimination and harassment will continue into the foreseeable future . . .