Sexual Harassment

If you’re the victim of harassment, when you do the right thing and report it, your employer should start a good faith investigation into your allegations. Strictly speaking, there’s no law mandating that an investigation be done, but courts have interpreted antidiscrimination laws as requiring the employer to investigate if it wants to avoid liability. […]

If an employer receives a complaint of sexual harassment or has reason to suspect that harassment is occurring, that employer should investigate, in good faith, whether harassment is actually going on. Strictly speaking, no statute requires that sexual harassment in the workplace be investigated, but depending on the circumstances, a good-faith investigation may result in a

If you are the victim of sexual harassment, the law is not a mathematical formula. If it is serious enough, a single act of harassment could be considered illegal sexual harassment, though generally, the more often it happens, the stronger the case. For example, if a billionaire real estate developer grabbed a female employee’s genitals

Harassment cases are judged on the facts of each situation. Unless one harasser is terrorizing an entire workforce, the actions and words of the alleged harasser are unique to each situation. Therefore, judges and juries need to decide whether the evidence shown at a trial establishes that harassment, as it has been defined by antidiscrimination

Ideally, an employer has policies in place to discourage sexual harassment. If a claim is reported, the company should investigate and take appropriate steps if it determines that harassment took place. In Smith v. Rock-Tenn Services, Inc., a recent case decided by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, the court laid out

It’s best to report harassment (whether it’s based on your sex, race, religion, disability, or another reason) to management or human resources if you want to protect your legal rights. The courts generally want to give employers an opportunity to correct the situation and discourage employees from going straight to court without notifying employers of

If a person works in a professional field, it doesn’t mean that he or she acts professionally. Doctors, accountants, and lawyers can all sexually harass others. A harasser is one who wants to exploit his or her position of power for personal gratification, no matter what his or her job title may be.   Attorneys