Sexual Harassment (sexual + harassment)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Distribution within Psychology


Selected Abstracts


INCORPORATING ECONOMIC ANALYSIS INTO UNDERGRADUATE BUSINESS LAW AND LEGAL ENVIRONMENT COURSES: EMPLOYER LIABILITY FOR SEXUAL HARASSMENT AS A MODEL

JOURNAL OF LEGAL STUDIES EDUCATION, Issue 2 2000
Susan Willey
[source]


LONGITUDINAL ANALYSIS OF DISPOSITIONAL INFLUENCES AND SEXUAL HARASSMENT: EFFECTS ON JOB AND PSYCHOLOGICAL OUTCOMES

PERSONNEL PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 1 2000
LIBERTY J. MUNSON
Research consistently demonstrates that sexual harassment is related to a variety of negative outcomes. Negative outcomes, however, may be influenced by respondents' dispositions or response biases rather than by their sexual harassment experiences alone. This study investigates relationships between negative outcomes and sexual harassment over time in an attempt to assess this possibility. Further, little empirical research on sexual harassment has explored the impact of various coping strategies on experiences of harassment over time. Sexual harassment experiences, job-related and psychological outcomes, and coping responses were obtained from 216 female faculty and staff members at a midwestern university at 2 times, 24 months apart. Patterns of results suggests that sexual harassment has important effects on job-related and psychological outcomes that operate independently of dispositional influences or response biases. Results also indicate that sexual harassment at Time 1 is a better predictor of harassment at Time 2 than are coping strategies. [source]


Extent and Nature of Sexual Harassment in the Fashion Retail Workplace: 10 Years Later

FAMILY & CONSUMER SCIENCES RESEARCH JOURNAL, Issue 1 2005
Catherine Amoroso Leslie
Sexual harassment continues to be a pervasive and costly problem for businesses, government, and educational institutions. In the past 15 years, workplace sexual harassment has become prominent in the public consciousness. In fashion retailing, an industry with a large number of young, unmarried female employees and relatively large power differentials between organizational levels, sexual harassment is an important issue. The purpose of this study was to replicate Workman's 1993 article "Extent and Nature of Sexual Harassment in the Fashion Retail Workplace." The same instrument was administered to 144 female clothing and textile students at a large state university. One hundred six participants (73.6%) had experienced at least one incident of sexual harassing behavior. This was consistent with Workman's finding of 73.5%. In the majority of the variables tested, very little had changed between 1993 and 2003. [source]


Perceptions of Effectiveness of Responses to Sexual Harassment in the US Military, 1988 and 1995

GENDER, WORK & ORGANISATION, Issue 1 2003
Juanita M. Firestone
This analysis compares patterns of response to the harassment experiences that had the greatest effect on the respondents to the ,1988 Department of Defense (DoD) Survey of Sex Roles in the Active-Duty Military' and Form A of the ,1995 Armed Forces Sexual Harassment Survey'. We analyse the respondents' perceptions about effectiveness of their responses, and respondents' opinions about the efforts of senior military leadership, and their own immediate supervisors' efforts to ,make honest and reasonable efforts to stop sexual harassment in the active-duty military' (DoD, 1988; Bastian et al., 1996). Results indicate that while the military has been somewhat successful in attempts to lower actual incidence of sexual harassment, the percentage of those experiencing such uninvited and unwanted behaviours remains high. Similar patterns of responses in both years, with most employing personal solutions and few filing complaints with officials, may reflect the fact that official DoD policy focuses on individual behaviour and does not address the masculine environmental context that promotes such behaviours (see also Harrell and Miller, 1997). Findings also suggest that the ,no tolerance' policies adopted by the military may concentrate on the military image but ignore the wishes of the complainants who fear reprisals. If the rights and wishes of all parties involved are not taken into account, policies are unlikely to be successful (see, for example, Rowe, 1996). [source]


Foucault, Politics and Organizations: (Re)-Constructing Sexual Harassment

GENDER, WORK & ORGANISATION, Issue 1 2001
Joanna Brewis
This article reviews the body of knowledge around workplace sexual harassment. In deploying a Foucauldian analysis, it attempts to argue that this knowledge, as part of the wider discourse on sex, may (re)produce consequences counter to those which its proponents espouse. In particular, the discussion seeks to problematize the status of harassment knowledge as truth; the depiction within this knowledge of ,good' and ,bad' sex; the roles this knowledge identifies for men and women within the phenomenon of harassment; and the theme within harassment knowledge that sex is central to our existence. The conclusion aims to suggest the ways in which this kind of analysis is useful by addressing the criticisms usually levelled at Foucault's work. [source]


Sexual Harassment as an Exercise of Power

GENDER, WORK & ORGANISATION, Issue 1 2001
Fiona Wilson
This article argues that the key to the explanation as to why sexual harassment is a feature of organizational life lies in the issue of power. Yet there has been little attempt to link sexual harassment with theories or explanatory models of power. This article first takes Lukes's (1986) three-dimensional model as a framework to explore how harassment may be understood as an exercise of power at different levels then shows how radical feminist and post-structuralist analyses overlap with and are distinct from Lukes's third dimension of power. [source]


A Study on Singaporeans' Perceptions of Sexual Harassment From a Cross-Cultural Perspective,

JOURNAL OF APPLIED SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 4 2005
Shu Li
This paper addresses the question of whether culture and language in Singapore affect the interpretation of sexual harassment; that is, whether speakers from a different language and ethnic background will interpret the discourse domain of sexual harassment differently. Three studies constitute this research. The first study investigates whether certain cues relating to sexual harassment are judged equivalently across the ethnic groups. The second study examines how verbal space is conceptualized and ruled by the use of different languages used by different ethnic groups. The third study explores whether English, as a medium of communication, is a low-context language. Results show that different ethnic groups perceived the cues differently; that ethnicity affects the interpretation of a single English phrase; and that English as used by Singaporeans is a high-context language, which complicates the understanding of victims' coping responses. [source]


Risk Factors of Sexual Harassment by Peers: A Longitudinal Investigation of African American and European American Adolescents

JOURNAL OF RESEARCH ON ADOLESCENCE, Issue 2 2007
Sara E. Goldstein
The present research explores risk factors for, and longitudinal associations of, sexual harassment by peers during adolescence. Eight-hundred and seventy-two African American and European American adolescents (65.4% African American, 51.1% females) were assessed during the summer after the eighth grade (mean age=14.2 years) and then again in the 11th grade (mean age=17.1 years). At the first assessment, adolescents were asked about their experiences with sexual harassment, their psychological reactions to sexual harassment, and also about their peer relationships, perceived pubertal timing, problem behavior, and mental health. At the second assessment, adolescents reported on their problem behavior and mental health. In general, youth who associated with peers who were involved in problem behavior were at risk for victimization. Among females, those who perceived themselves to be experiencing early pubertal development were also at risk. Additionally, for some adolescents, sexual harassment predicted later adjustment difficulties. [source]


Creating Peer Sexual Harassment: Mobilizing Schools to Throw the Book at Themselves

LAW & POLICY, Issue 1 2006
JODI L. SHORT
This paper describes how peer-to-peer sexual harassment rapidly was transformed from an unremarkable reality of secondary school life into a serious social and legal problem. First, it shows how organizations and professionals served as an entry point for social change and legal mobilization. I argue that schools were quick to address peer sexual harassment because activists framed it as a moral and pedagogical issue that resonated with educators' deeply held professional values. Second, the paper shows how law and organizations developed endogenously. Without any legal mandate, schools created and institutionalized harassment policies. Courts then looked to these organizational practices to determine the content and scope of Title IX. In this way, schools literally "enacted" the law through their practices. This finding goes beyond previous work on endogeneity in that school policies influenced law at the level of doctrine, not simply at the level of meaning, enforcement, or application. [source]


Injustice Frames, Legality, and the Everyday Construction of Sexual Harassment

LAW & SOCIAL INQUIRY, Issue 3 2003
Anna-Maria Marshall
This paper examines the frames that women use to understand their experience with sexual harassment. While legal frames do provide crucial guidance to women evaluating the behavior of their colleagues and supervisors, working women deployed a number of other interpretive frames when deciding whether they had been harmed by such behavior. Some of those frames emerge from feminist messages about discrimination and male abuse of power in the workplace; some emerge from management ideology that emphasizes efficiency and productivity; and some emerge from the criticism of sexual harassment policies as an unnecessary limitation on women's sexual freedom. But feeling a sense of harm does not automatically translate into the use of the label sexual harassment. Rather, women also employed an objective standard that compared their experience to some threshold of harassing behaviors. Only when the behaviors met this standard of offensiveness and were perceived as harmful did women consider their experiences sexual harassment. [source]


Recent Thinking about Sexual Harassment: A Review Essay

PHILOSOPHY AND PUBLIC AFFAIRS, Issue 3 2006
ELIZABETH ANDERSON
First page of article [source]


Extent and Nature of Sexual Harassment in the Fashion Retail Workplace: 10 Years Later

FAMILY & CONSUMER SCIENCES RESEARCH JOURNAL, Issue 1 2005
Catherine Amoroso Leslie
Sexual harassment continues to be a pervasive and costly problem for businesses, government, and educational institutions. In the past 15 years, workplace sexual harassment has become prominent in the public consciousness. In fashion retailing, an industry with a large number of young, unmarried female employees and relatively large power differentials between organizational levels, sexual harassment is an important issue. The purpose of this study was to replicate Workman's 1993 article "Extent and Nature of Sexual Harassment in the Fashion Retail Workplace." The same instrument was administered to 144 female clothing and textile students at a large state university. One hundred six participants (73.6%) had experienced at least one incident of sexual harassing behavior. This was consistent with Workman's finding of 73.5%. In the majority of the variables tested, very little had changed between 1993 and 2003. [source]


Sexual harassment in the Marines, posttraumatic stress symptoms, and perceived health: Evidence for sex differences,

JOURNAL OF TRAUMATIC STRESS, Issue 1 2009
Jillian C. Shipherd
Sex differences and pretrauma functioning have been understudied in examinations of posttraumatic stress symptoms (PSS) and health. This study examined relationships between sexual harassment and assault in the military (MST), PSS, and perceived physical health when accounting for pre-MST PSS, pre-MST health, and current depression. Relationships were examined separately in 226 female and 91 male Marines endorsing recent MST (past 6 months). MST predicted increased PSS for women and especially men. For men, higher levels of MST were associated with worse perceived physical health, whereas for women, lower levels of MST were associated with worse perceived health. For men with MST, there was some evidence for the association being partially mediated by PSS, but no mediation was found in women. [source]


Extent and Nature of Sexual Harassment in the Fashion Retail Workplace: 10 Years Later

FAMILY & CONSUMER SCIENCES RESEARCH JOURNAL, Issue 1 2005
Catherine Amoroso Leslie
Sexual harassment continues to be a pervasive and costly problem for businesses, government, and educational institutions. In the past 15 years, workplace sexual harassment has become prominent in the public consciousness. In fashion retailing, an industry with a large number of young, unmarried female employees and relatively large power differentials between organizational levels, sexual harassment is an important issue. The purpose of this study was to replicate Workman's 1993 article "Extent and Nature of Sexual Harassment in the Fashion Retail Workplace." The same instrument was administered to 144 female clothing and textile students at a large state university. One hundred six participants (73.6%) had experienced at least one incident of sexual harassing behavior. This was consistent with Workman's finding of 73.5%. In the majority of the variables tested, very little had changed between 1993 and 2003. [source]


Perceptions of Effectiveness of Responses to Sexual Harassment in the US Military, 1988 and 1995

GENDER, WORK & ORGANISATION, Issue 1 2003
Juanita M. Firestone
This analysis compares patterns of response to the harassment experiences that had the greatest effect on the respondents to the ,1988 Department of Defense (DoD) Survey of Sex Roles in the Active-Duty Military' and Form A of the ,1995 Armed Forces Sexual Harassment Survey'. We analyse the respondents' perceptions about effectiveness of their responses, and respondents' opinions about the efforts of senior military leadership, and their own immediate supervisors' efforts to ,make honest and reasonable efforts to stop sexual harassment in the active-duty military' (DoD, 1988; Bastian et al., 1996). Results indicate that while the military has been somewhat successful in attempts to lower actual incidence of sexual harassment, the percentage of those experiencing such uninvited and unwanted behaviours remains high. Similar patterns of responses in both years, with most employing personal solutions and few filing complaints with officials, may reflect the fact that official DoD policy focuses on individual behaviour and does not address the masculine environmental context that promotes such behaviours (see also Harrell and Miller, 1997). Findings also suggest that the ,no tolerance' policies adopted by the military may concentrate on the military image but ignore the wishes of the complainants who fear reprisals. If the rights and wishes of all parties involved are not taken into account, policies are unlikely to be successful (see, for example, Rowe, 1996). [source]


Foucault, Politics and Organizations: (Re)-Constructing Sexual Harassment

GENDER, WORK & ORGANISATION, Issue 1 2001
Joanna Brewis
This article reviews the body of knowledge around workplace sexual harassment. In deploying a Foucauldian analysis, it attempts to argue that this knowledge, as part of the wider discourse on sex, may (re)produce consequences counter to those which its proponents espouse. In particular, the discussion seeks to problematize the status of harassment knowledge as truth; the depiction within this knowledge of ,good' and ,bad' sex; the roles this knowledge identifies for men and women within the phenomenon of harassment; and the theme within harassment knowledge that sex is central to our existence. The conclusion aims to suggest the ways in which this kind of analysis is useful by addressing the criticisms usually levelled at Foucault's work. [source]


Sexual Harassment as an Exercise of Power

GENDER, WORK & ORGANISATION, Issue 1 2001
Fiona Wilson
This article argues that the key to the explanation as to why sexual harassment is a feature of organizational life lies in the issue of power. Yet there has been little attempt to link sexual harassment with theories or explanatory models of power. This article first takes Lukes's (1986) three-dimensional model as a framework to explore how harassment may be understood as an exercise of power at different levels then shows how radical feminist and post-structuralist analyses overlap with and are distinct from Lukes's third dimension of power. [source]


A Study on Singaporeans' Perceptions of Sexual Harassment From a Cross-Cultural Perspective,

JOURNAL OF APPLIED SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 4 2005
Shu Li
This paper addresses the question of whether culture and language in Singapore affect the interpretation of sexual harassment; that is, whether speakers from a different language and ethnic background will interpret the discourse domain of sexual harassment differently. Three studies constitute this research. The first study investigates whether certain cues relating to sexual harassment are judged equivalently across the ethnic groups. The second study examines how verbal space is conceptualized and ruled by the use of different languages used by different ethnic groups. The third study explores whether English, as a medium of communication, is a low-context language. Results show that different ethnic groups perceived the cues differently; that ethnicity affects the interpretation of a single English phrase; and that English as used by Singaporeans is a high-context language, which complicates the understanding of victims' coping responses. [source]


The relationship between self-perception of physical attractiveness and sexual bullying in early adolescence

AGGRESSIVE BEHAVIOR, Issue 5 2010
Nancy J. Cunningham
Abstract The relationship between self-perception of physical attractiveness and four measures of sexual bullying behavior (victimization, perpetration, having friends who sexually bully, and observation of sexual bullying among peers at school) was examined in a sample of 396 middle school age students. Students who perceived themselves to be more physically attractive than their peers reported sexually bullying others more, being sexually bullied by others more, observing more sexual bullying, and having more friends who sexually bully others than did students who perceived themselves as average looking. In addition, males who perceived themselves to be less physically attractive than their peers reported being victimized more and reported observing more sexual bullying in the school environment. These findings highlight the importance of physical attractiveness in the early initiation of sexual harassment. Implications for future research and interventions with early adolescents are discussed. Aggr. Behav. 36:271,281, 2010. © 2010 Wiley-Liss, Inc. [source]


Violence against women: is psychology part of the problem or the solution?

JOURNAL OF COMMUNITY & APPLIED SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 6 2002
A content analysis of psychological research from 1990 through 199
Abstract Previous critiques of traditional psychology portrayed a discipline that examines social problems from an exceptionalistic perspective and decontextualizes the subjects of its inquiries. We analysed 10 years of psychological research on domestic violence, sexual assault, and sexual harassment to determine whether this criticism applied to violence against women research. Specifically, we examined the purpose, level of analysis, sample, and context of 1396 PsychLit abstracts. We found that almost half reported an examination of causal factors. Only one quarter reported intervention studies. Most studies focused at the individual level of analysis and few included contextual factors. Investigators explored questions about domestic violence most frequently among samples of victims and perpetrators drawn from clinical settings. Sexual assault and sexual harassment researchers depended on victims and perpetrators to a lesser extent, but tended to rely upon convenience samples from college settings. Representative community samples were used in only 9% of studies. These findings support the view that psychological research on violence against women suffers from a heavy emphasis on exceptionalism at the expense of a universalistic perspective, the latter of which we contend is critical to advancing the field and reducing a major threat to women's health and wellbeing. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]


Pathways to false allegations of sexual harassment

JOURNAL OF INVESTIGATIVE PSYCHOLOGY AND OFFENDER PROFILING, Issue 1 2006
William O'Donohue
Abstract A sexual harassment allegation is either true or false. Whether specific allegations are true or false is important to questions of epidemiology, clinical diagnosis and treatment, administrative and legal proceedings, as well as the welfare of actual victims and innocent alleged perpetrators. It is naïve and harmful to operate with the heuristic: ,All claims are true'. However, the truth of many allegations is very difficult to determine, particularly as is often the case when there are no witnesses, no conclusive hard evidence, and the presence of a situation where both parties have divergent accounts of the alleged occurrence. There has been little theoretical or empirical work on what would cause a person to make a false allegation of sexual harassment. This paper gives an overview of the intricacies associated with sexual harassment investigations and enumerates 14 possible pathways to false allegations: lying; borderline personality disorder, histrionic personality disorder, psychosis, gender prejudice, substance abuse, dementia, false memories, false interpretations, biased interviews, sociopathy, personality disorders not otherwise specified, investigative mistakes, and mistakes in determination of the degree of harassment. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]


Risk Factors of Sexual Harassment by Peers: A Longitudinal Investigation of African American and European American Adolescents

JOURNAL OF RESEARCH ON ADOLESCENCE, Issue 2 2007
Sara E. Goldstein
The present research explores risk factors for, and longitudinal associations of, sexual harassment by peers during adolescence. Eight-hundred and seventy-two African American and European American adolescents (65.4% African American, 51.1% females) were assessed during the summer after the eighth grade (mean age=14.2 years) and then again in the 11th grade (mean age=17.1 years). At the first assessment, adolescents were asked about their experiences with sexual harassment, their psychological reactions to sexual harassment, and also about their peer relationships, perceived pubertal timing, problem behavior, and mental health. At the second assessment, adolescents reported on their problem behavior and mental health. In general, youth who associated with peers who were involved in problem behavior were at risk for victimization. Among females, those who perceived themselves to be experiencing early pubertal development were also at risk. Additionally, for some adolescents, sexual harassment predicted later adjustment difficulties. [source]


Sexual harassment in the Marines, posttraumatic stress symptoms, and perceived health: Evidence for sex differences,

JOURNAL OF TRAUMATIC STRESS, Issue 1 2009
Jillian C. Shipherd
Sex differences and pretrauma functioning have been understudied in examinations of posttraumatic stress symptoms (PSS) and health. This study examined relationships between sexual harassment and assault in the military (MST), PSS, and perceived physical health when accounting for pre-MST PSS, pre-MST health, and current depression. Relationships were examined separately in 226 female and 91 male Marines endorsing recent MST (past 6 months). MST predicted increased PSS for women and especially men. For men, higher levels of MST were associated with worse perceived physical health, whereas for women, lower levels of MST were associated with worse perceived health. For men with MST, there was some evidence for the association being partially mediated by PSS, but no mediation was found in women. [source]


An evaluation of stress symptoms associated with academic sexual harassment

JOURNAL OF TRAUMATIC STRESS, Issue 3 2000
Jennifer Fine McDermut
Abstract It is clear that sexual assault can precipitate posttraumatic stress disorder. Some theorists have suggested that less severe sexually harassing behaviors may also have trauma-like sequelae. In a study evaluating this hypothesis, 69 female participants completed self-report measures of instances of sexual harassment, basic beliefs, psychological distress/symptoms, and PTSD symptoms. Participants watched videotapes depicting sexual harassment, emotional arousal (not sexual in nature), and a neutral interaction while their heart rate was monitored, and they were interviewed using the SCID for PTSD. Results revealed that those who had been sexually harassed reported more negative basic beliefs, more general distress, and more negative state mood after watching the sexual harassment video, relative to those who had not been harassed. The severity of sexual harassing behaviors experienced was positively correlated with PTSD symptoms. Heart rate reactivity to the videotapes did not differ across groups defined by sexual harassment status. [source]


A novel mating system in a solitary carnivore: the fossa

JOURNAL OF ZOOLOGY, Issue 3 2009
C. E. Hawkins
Abstract The mating strategies of male mammals have long been treated as broadly predictable on the basis of just two factors: the dispersion of females and the benefit of paternal care to male reproductive success. Female strategies and finer scale variations in mating systems remain poorly understood. In the fossa Cryptoprocta ferox, we had the rare opportunity to examine the mating system of a wild solitary carnivore directly, and identified features not classified or predicted by mating system theory. Males competed for mating opportunities at a traditional site monopolized by a female, high in a tree. The female mated with multiple males, repeatedly mated with some individuals and appeared to express mate choice. We observed three females thus, one replacing another on the site after each was seen to mate with four to five males over a period of 1,6 days. Copulations were prolonged (up to 3 h 8 min), involving a weak copulatory tie, and males appeared to guard females briefly after mating. Fossas are at low population density and do not use a den regularly; we suggest that both these factors impede individuals from locating a mate. We hypothesize that the observed mating system reduces this problem for both sexes, and increases the number of mates available to a female while ensuring a low risk of sexual harassment. [source]


Creating Peer Sexual Harassment: Mobilizing Schools to Throw the Book at Themselves

LAW & POLICY, Issue 1 2006
JODI L. SHORT
This paper describes how peer-to-peer sexual harassment rapidly was transformed from an unremarkable reality of secondary school life into a serious social and legal problem. First, it shows how organizations and professionals served as an entry point for social change and legal mobilization. I argue that schools were quick to address peer sexual harassment because activists framed it as a moral and pedagogical issue that resonated with educators' deeply held professional values. Second, the paper shows how law and organizations developed endogenously. Without any legal mandate, schools created and institutionalized harassment policies. Courts then looked to these organizational practices to determine the content and scope of Title IX. In this way, schools literally "enacted" the law through their practices. This finding goes beyond previous work on endogeneity in that school policies influenced law at the level of doctrine, not simply at the level of meaning, enforcement, or application. [source]


Injustice Frames, Legality, and the Everyday Construction of Sexual Harassment

LAW & SOCIAL INQUIRY, Issue 3 2003
Anna-Maria Marshall
This paper examines the frames that women use to understand their experience with sexual harassment. While legal frames do provide crucial guidance to women evaluating the behavior of their colleagues and supervisors, working women deployed a number of other interpretive frames when deciding whether they had been harmed by such behavior. Some of those frames emerge from feminist messages about discrimination and male abuse of power in the workplace; some emerge from management ideology that emphasizes efficiency and productivity; and some emerge from the criticism of sexual harassment policies as an unnecessary limitation on women's sexual freedom. But feeling a sense of harm does not automatically translate into the use of the label sexual harassment. Rather, women also employed an objective standard that compared their experience to some threshold of harassing behaviors. Only when the behaviors met this standard of offensiveness and were perceived as harmful did women consider their experiences sexual harassment. [source]


Unraveling the Ivory Fabric: Institutional Obstacles to the Handling of Sexual Harassment Complaints

LAW & SOCIAL INQUIRY, Issue 1 2000
Jennie Kihnley
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Title IX of the Educational Amendments of 1972 make universities liable for sexual harassment that occurs within both the employment and academic contexts. This article examines how universities implement and enforce the mandates of both Title VII and Title IX through exploratory research about sexual harassment complaint procedures at a public university system on the West Coast. In-depth interviews with personnel at each campus shed light on problems with inserting a complaint resolution process into an institution that simultaneously strives to eliminate sexual harassment, while wanting to protect itself from liability. This inherent conflict of goals is reflected in the differing roles of the Title IX office and the Women's Resource Center, in creation of a user friendly policy, and in the two branches of dispute resolution. [source]


Universal problems during residency: abuse and harassment

MEDICAL EDUCATION, Issue 7 2009
Shizuko Nagata-Kobayashi
Objectives, Perceived abuse or harassment during residency has a negative impact on residents' health and well-being. This issue pertains not only to Western countries, but also to those in Asia. In order to launch strong international preventive measures against this problem, it is necessary to establish the generality and cultural specificity of this problem in different countries. Therefore, we investigated mistreatment among resident doctors in Japan. Methods, In 2007, a multi-institutional, cross-sectional survey was conducted at 37 hospitals. A total of 619 residents (409 men, 210 women) were recruited. Prevalence of mistreatment in six categories was evaluated: verbal abuse; physical abuse; academic abuse; sexual harassment; gender discrimination, and alcohol-associated harassment. In addition, alleged abusers, the emotional effects of abusive experiences, and reluctance to report the abuse to superiors were investigated. Male and female responses were statistically compared using chi-square analysis. Results, A total of 355 respondents (228 men, 127 women) returned a completed questionnaire (response rate 57.4%). Mistreatment was reported by 84.8% of respondents (n = 301). Verbal abuse was the most frequently experienced form of mistreatment (n = 256, 72.1%), followed by alcohol-associated harassment (n = 184, 51.8%). Among women, sexual harassment was also often reported (n = 74, 58.3%). Doctors were most often reported as abusers (n = 124, 34.9%), followed by patients (n = 77, 21.7%) and nurses (n = 61, 17.2%). Abuse was reported to have occurred most frequently during surgical rotations (n = 98, 27.6%), followed by rotations in departments of internal medicine (n = 76, 21.4%), emergency medicine (n = 41, 11.5%) and anaesthesia (n = 40, 11.3%). Very few respondents reported their experiences of abuse to superiors (n = 36, 12.0%). The most frequent emotional response to experiences of abuse was anger (n = 84, 41.4%). Conclusions, Mistreatment during residency is a universal phenomenon. Deliberation on the occurrence of this universally wrong tradition in medical culture will lead to the establishment of strong preventive methods against it. Current results indicate that alcohol-associated harassment during residency is a Japanese culture-specific problem and effective preventive measures against this are also urgently required. [source]


Sexual and gender-related harassment in medical education and research training: results from a Swedish survey

MEDICAL EDUCATION, Issue 1 2003
Charlotte Larsson
Objective, The aims of this study were to establish the level of perceived sexual and gender-related harassment in undergraduate and doctoral studies, in which environment the events occurred, which categories of persons had committed the harassment, and other aspects of sexual harassment at the Faculty of Medicine, Gothenburg University. Methods, A questionnaire was distributed to all registered male and female undergraduate students (n= 605) and doctoral students (n=743) by mail to their home addresses. Results, The response rate was 62% (840/1348). Of the total study population, 59% (495/840) of respondents reported at least one experience of derogatory jokes and comments, 54% (454/840) of respondents reported at least one experience of gender-related discrimination, and 22% (187/840) of respondents reported at least one incident of sexual harassment. More severe types of sexual harassment were reported by 9% (79/840) of respondents. Women, and especially undergraduate women, were more often exposed to all kinds of harassment than were men. Lecturers/professors, doctors and co-students were the categories most often identified as the harassers. The harassment mostly occurred during lectures, clinical work and coffee breaks. The most common types of self-perceived mistreatment were derogatory jokes and comments. Conclusion, This survey shows that sexual harassment happens to both men and women, although it is more commonly experienced by female undergraduate and doctoral students, and that it occurs in both the university and hospital environments. Universities should develop action plans to prevent such events. Students and teachers should be well informed about appropriate measures to take in situations where harassment is known or suspected to occur. [source]