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

Abstract

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.

Academic Freedom in the Heartland: Rights Consciousness and the United States Supreme Court

“…"Law provides individuals with a powerful set of interpretative tools in [the] disputing process. So prevalent in U.S. culture and politics, legal ideas and concepts are an important source of cultural schemas and frames" (Marshall, 2003). But the relationship between the law and a population's expression and understanding of that law is complex.…”

“…An important reason for this limitation is the fact that the law is not self-enforcing; while "judicial opinions…articulate rights…those rights depend heavily on the initiative of ordinary individuals to invoke them-not just in the courtroom, but also in the context of their daily lives" (Marshall, 2005, 119). Those individual initiatives to enforce legal values are frequently confronted by more political concerns and larger institutional interests (Marshall, 2003;Lovell, 2006;Kihnley, 2000).…”

“…A more common method for observing the presence of rights consciousness is the use of interviews with or surveys of participants in a particular act of legal mobilization (McCann, 2008;Marshall, 2003Marshall, , 2005Vanhala, 2009 There is an intuitive justification for a methodology that produces a thick description of the legal consciousness of individuals and groups engaged in legal mobilization. Studies of legal mobilization have focused on the individual, non-professional participants and have developed a constitutive theory of law, in which law consists of both formal and informal/cultural elements.…”

The Antecedents of Disputes: Complaining and Claiming

“…One area that has received a lot of attention is consumer problems, both by legal scholars and by researchers interested in consumer behavior more generally (Warland et al 1975, Best and R.Andreasenn 1977, Day and Hunt 1978, Best 1981, Ladinsky and Susmilch 1985, Office of Fair Trading 1986, Vidmar 1988; in fact for those working in the latter tradition there is a specialized journal, Journal of Consumer Satisfaction, Dissatisfaction & Complaining Behavior, published now on an annual basis. 4 Two related areas that have received significant attention from scholars are discrimination (Bumiller 1987, Bumiller 1988, Kritzer et al 1991b, Hirsh and Kornrich 2008 and sexual harassment (Quinn 2000, Marshall 2003, Marshall 2005 Oñati Socio-Legal Series, v. 1, n. 6 (2011) ISSN: 2079-5971 7 Blackstone et al 2009). One other area where there has been at least one study looking at the decisions of grievants to seek redress is medical negligence (May and Stengel 1990).…”

Occupying the Constitutional Right to Housing

“…346 Framing also describes how movements "organize discontent, leading activists and even the general public to see harm where none existed before and sponsoring action to redress their grievances." 347 A legal frame is when movements "invoke legal rights when articulating their demands." 348 Many of the movements studied in this Article use the human right to housing as a legal frame, even in the absence of a formal legal right, but they enshrine the right to housing in American law through private and local law reforms.…”