“An idea is a feat of association.” Robert Lee Frost

Harassment on the basis of gender, race or religion is not allowed in work place and should not be allowed in the public square either.  Let me quote a short paragraph from the Wikipedia article, republished below, in the very beginning:

In 1964, the United States Congress passed Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibited discrimination at work on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin and sex. This later became the legal basis for early harassment law.

In our haste to condemn Islam we should not demolish everything worthwhile that the West has constructed in the last 2-3 centuries.

If harassment is condoned in the public square, it makes it less practical to police it in the work place.  Employees could be watching Fox TV in USA, a right wing news channel, in work place and it would be harassing all Muslims periodically and the employers could be sued for allowing the channel in the work place.  Or the channel could be playing in airports and could be harassing all Muslim passengers and employees of airline.  Fox channel may not like to be on the prohibited list of employers, so whenever it wants to put Muslims or Islam on trial, it may want to invite people to offer defense or they can send the script to the Muslim Times for prior approval.  Here is some description of harassment from U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission:

Harassment is a form of employment discrimination that violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967, (ADEA), and the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, (ADA).

Harassment is unwelcome conduct that is based on race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy), national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information. Harassment becomes unlawful where 1) enduring the offensive conduct becomes a condition of continued employment, or 2) the conduct is severe or pervasive enough to create a work environment that a reasonable person would consider intimidating, hostile, or abusive. Anti-discrimination laws also prohibit harassment against individuals in retaliation for filing a discrimination charge, testifying, or participating in any way in an investigation, proceeding, or lawsuit under these laws; or opposing employment practices that they reasonably believe discriminate against individuals, in violation of these laws.

Petty slights, annoyances, and isolated incidents (unless extremely serious) will not rise to the level of illegality. To be unlawful, the conduct must create a work environment that would be intimidating, hostile, or offensive to reasonable people.

Offensive conduct may include, but is not limited to, offensive jokes, slurs, epithets or name calling, physical assaults or threats, intimidation, ridicule or mockery, insults or put-downs, offensive objects or pictures, and interference with work performance. Harassment can occur in a variety of circumstances, including, but not limited to, the following:

• The harasser can be the victim’s supervisor, a supervisor in another area, an agent of the employer, a co-worker, or a non-employee.
• The victim does not have to be the person harassed, but can be anyone affected by the offensive conduct.
• Unlawful harassment may occur without economic injury to, or discharge of, the victim.

Prevention is the best tool to eliminate harassment in the workplace. Employers are encouraged to take appropriate steps to prevent and correct unlawful harassment. They should clearly communicate to employees that unwelcome harassing conduct will not be tolerated. They can do this by establishing an effective complaint or grievance process, providing anti-harassment training to their managers and employees, and taking immediate and appropriate action when an employee complains. Employers should strive to create an environment in which employees feel free to raise concerns and are confident that those concerns will be addressed.

Employees are encouraged to inform the harasser directly that the conduct is unwelcome and must stop. Employees should also report harassment to management at an early stage to prevent its escalation.

Harassment

Harassment (/həˈræsmənt/ or /ˈhærəsmənt/) covers a wide range of behaviors of an offensive nature. It is commonly understood as behaviour intended to disturb or upset, and it is characteristically repetitive. In the legal sense, it is intentional behaviour which is found threatening or disturbing. Sexual harassment refers to persistent and unwanted sexual advances, typically in the workplace, where the consequences of refusing are potentially very disadvantageous to the victim.

Etymology

The word is based in English since circa 1618 as loan word from the French harassement, which was in turn already attested in 1572 meaning torment, annoyance, bother, trouble ^[1] and later as of 1609 was also referred to the condition of being exhausted, overtired.^[2][3] Of the French verb harasser itself there are the first records in a Latin to French translation of 1527 of Thucydides’ History of the war that was between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians both in the countries of the Greeks and the Romans and the neighbouring places where the translator writes harasser allegedly meaning harceler (to exhaust the enemy by repeated raids); and in the military chant Chanson du franc archer^[4] of 1562, where the term is referred to a gaunt jument (de poil fauveau, tant maigre et harassée: of fawn horsehair, so meagre and …) where it is supposed that the verb is used meaning overtired.^[5]

A hypothesis about the origin of the verb harasser is harace/harache, which was used in the 14th century in expressions like courre à la harache (to pursue) and prendre aucun par la harache (to take somebody under constraint).^[6] The Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch, a German etymological dictionary of the French language (1922–2002) compares phonetically and syntactically both harace and harache to the interjection hare and haro by alleging a pejorative and augmentative form. The latter was an exclamation indicating distress and emergency (recorded since 1180) but is also reported later in 1529 in the expression crier haro sur (to arise indignation over somebody). hare ‘s use is already reported in 1204 as an order to finish public activities as fairs or markets and later (1377) still as command but referred to dogs. This dictionary suggests a relation of haro/hare with the old lower franconian *hara (here) (as by bringing a dog to heel).^[7]

While the pejorative of an exclamation and in particular of such an exclamation is theoretically possible for the first word (harace) and maybe phonetically plausible for harache, a semantic, syntactic and phonetic similarity of the verb harasser as used in the first popular attestation (the chant mentioned above) with the word haras should be kept in mind: Already in 1160 haras indicated a group of horses constrained together for the purpose of reproduction and in 1280 it also indicated the enclosure facility itself, where those horses are constrained.^[8] The origin itself of harass is thought to be the old Scandinavian hârr with the Romanic suffix –as, which meant grey or dimmish horsehair. Controversial is the etymological relation to the Arabic word for horse whose roman transliteration is faras.

Although the French origin of the word harassment is beyond all question, in the Oxford English Dictionary and those dictionaries basing on it a supposed Old French verb harer should be the origin of the French verb harasser, despite the fact that this verb cannot be found in French etymologic dictionaries like that of the fr:Centre national de ressources textuelles et lexical es or the fr:Trésor de la langue française informatisé (see also their corresponding websites as indicated in the interlinks); since the entry further alleges a derivation from hare, like in the mentioned German etymological dictionary of the French language a possible misprint of harer = har/ass/er = harasser is plausible or cannot be excluded. In those dictionaries the relationship with harassment were an interpretation of the interjection hare as to urge/set a dog on, despite the fact that it should indicate a shout to come and not to go (hare = hara = here; cf. above).^[9] The American Heritage Dictionary prudently indicates this origin only as possible.

History

United States

In 1964, the United States Congress passed Title VII of the Civil Rights Act which prohibited discrimination at work on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin and sex. This later became the legal basis for early harassment law. The practice of developing workplace guidelines prohibiting harassment was pioneered in 1969, when the U.S. Department of Defense drafted a Human Goals Charter, establishing a policy of equal respect for both sexes. In Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson, 477 U.S. 57 (1986): the U.S. Supreme Court recognized harassment suits against employers for promoting a sexually hostile work environment. In 2006, U.S.A. President George W. Bush signed a law which prohibited the transmission of annoying messages over the Internet (aka spamming) without disclosing the sender’s true identity.^[10]

New Jersey’s Law Against Discrimination (“LAD”)

The LAD prohibits employers from discriminating in any job-related action, including recruitment, interviewing, hiring, promotions, discharge, compensation and the terms, conditions and privileges of employment on the basis of any of the law’s specified protected categories. These protected categories are race, creed, color, national origin, nationality, ancestry, age, sex (including pregnancy and sexual harassment), marital status, domestic partnership status, affectional or sexual orientation, atypical hereditary cellular or blood trait, genetic information liability for military service, or mental or physical disability, including AIDS and HIV related illnesses. The LAD prohibits intentional discrimination based on any of these characteristics. Intentional discrimination may take the form of differential treatment or statements and conduct that reflect discriminatory animus or bias.

Canada

In 1984, the Canadian Human Rights Act prohibited sexual harassment in workplaces under federal jurisdiction.

United Kingdom

In the UK, there are a number of laws protecting people from harassment, including the Protection from Harassment Act 1997 and the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994

Ambiguity

Both because the term is used in common English, and because where the term is defined by law, the law varies by jurisdiction, it is difficult to provide any exact definition that is accepted everywhere.

The ambiguity begins with the fact that some kinds of harassment are, or seem to be, unconscious, small, ephemeral and non-actionable. See microinequity.

In some cultures, for instance, simply stating a political opinion can be seen as unwarranted and a deliberate attempt to intimidate—in a totalitarian society any such statement could be interpreted as an attempt to involve or implicate someone in rebel activity, with the implication that refusal could endanger the person’s life. More usually, some label such as “anti-social” or related to treason is used to label such behaviour—it being treated as an offense against the state, not the person. This resembles the use of psychiatry to imprison dissidents, which is common in many countries.

Another example is that under some versions of Islamic Law merely insulting Islam is considered to be a harassment of all believers, and in Japan insulting any faith is usually considered taboo and has legal sanctions^{[citation needed]}. Because of these variations, there is no way even within one society to provide a truly neutral definition of harassment.

Categories

However, broad categories of harassment often recognized in law include:

• Legal harassment — Legal actions against an individual or a group, for example SLAPP suits.
• Sexual harassment (with a much stricter definition in the workplace)
• Verbal harassment (Probably the most complicated form to deal with)
• Psychological harassment — repetitive unprovoked intrusions or interruptions
• Group psychological harassment
• Hate speech — comments which express or encourage hate towards a particular group

Types

There are a number of abusive behaviors that fall into this category.

Bullying

Harassment that can occur on the playground, school, in the workforce, or at home (may it be sexual harassment or verbal harassment or sandwich board harassment^[11]) or any other place. Usually physical and psychological harassing behaviour perpetrated against an individual, by one or more persons. In recent years bullying in the workplace and in schools has come to light as being much more serious and widespread than previously thought. Harassment at home can occur from a parent or sibling.

Psychological harassment

This is humiliating, intimidating or abusive behaviour which is often difficult to detect leaving no evidence other than victim reports or complaints. This characteristically lowers a person’s self-esteem or causes them torment. This can take the form of verbal comments, engineered episodes of intimidation, aggressive actions or repeated gestures. Falling into this category is workplace harassment by individuals or groups mobbing.

Community-based Harassment — stalking by a group^[12] against an individual using repeated distractions that the individual is sensitized to. Media reports of large numbers of coordinated groups stalking individual stalking victims, including a press interview given by an active duty police lieutenant, have described this community-based harassment as gang stalking. ^[13][14]

Institutional harassment

On the part of an institutional representative, such as a human resources worker, an insurance adjuster, et al., behavior intended to disturb or upset the subject, and it is characteristically repetitive, such as sending numerous and often hard to interpret policies. In the legal sense, it is intentional behaviour which is found threatening or disturbing, such as threatening to terminate the subject from the workplace or insurance policy. A key feature is that the harassing agent’s actions are persistent and unwanted, misleading, or the agent demands are unreasonable, such as losing submitted documents by the subject, asking for unreasonable amounts of paperwork, making the subject carry out bureaucratic activities for no cause. Another feature of institutional harassment in the workplace involves the consequences of refusing by the victim are potentially very disadvantageous. Making someone work on the weekend,on short notice when they were not scheduled to work it in the first place.

Racial harassment

The targeting of an individual because of their race or ethnicity. The harassment may include words, deeds, and actions that are specifically designed to make the target feel degraded due to their race or ethnicity.

Religious harassment

Verbal, psychological or physical harassment is used against targets because they choose to practice a specific religion. Religious harassment can also include forced and involuntary conversions.^[15]

Sexual harassment

Harassment that can happen anywhere but is most common in the workplace, and schools. It involves unwanted and unwelcome words, deeds, actions, gestures, symbols, or behaviours of a sexual nature that make the target feel uncomfortable. Gender and sexual orientation harassment fall into this family. Involving children, “gay” or “homo” is a common insult falling into this category. The main focus of groups working against sexual harassment is protection for women, but protection for men is coming to light in recent years.

Stalking

The unauthorized following and surveillance of an individual, to the extent that the person’s privacy is unacceptably intruded upon, and the victim fears for their safety.

Mobbing

Violence committed directly or indirectly by a loosely affiliated and organized group of individuals to punish or even execute a person for some alleged offense without a lawful trial. The ‘offense’ can range from a serious crime like murder to simple expression of undesired ethnic, cultural, or religious attitudes. The issue of the victim’s actual guilt or innocence is often irrelevant to the mob, since the mob usually relies on contentions that are unverifiable, unsubstantiated, or completely fabricated.

Hazing

To persecute, harass, or torture in a deliberate, calculated, and planned manner as part of an induction into a group. Because hazing tends to take place as part of a group’s initiation rituals, the targeted individual is typically a subordinate or outsider; for example, a fraternity pledge, a new employee, or a first-year military cadet. Hazing is illegal in many instances.

Police harassment

Unfair treatment conducted by law officials, including but not limited to excessive force, profiling, threats, coercion, and racial, ethnic, religious, gender/sexual, age, or other forms of discrimination.

Cyberstalking

The use of electronic tools such as email or instant messaging to harass or abuse a person or persons. Can also include particularly intense and/or coordinated incidents of trolling, especially when they occur repeatedly and specifically target a single person or group.

Electronic harassment

The invisible (to the unaided eye) use of electronic weapons or directed energy weapons to harass or abuse a person or persons.

Sociological harassment

a. Sociological (denoting the source and methods) harassment involves elements of many categories of harassment; once a record is kept of seemingly unrelated elements of harassment, from isolated provocation episodes (inviting a response for ensnarement purposes) to passive-aggressive group intimidation etc. these may merge into a greater whole pointing to certain coordinating individuals belonging to a group however loosely sharing consensus in ideas to be promoted and how this is to be done.

b. This also extends to how individuals and other groups may be moved to submit to this agenda. This takes the form of organized group based psychological harassment with a political or ideological motive in organizational, institutional and academic contexts. It was first observed and described in the United Kingdom 2000 through 2010- ; although similar forms of harassment have always existed this form is characterized by its unusually high level of organization, the ostensible unrelatedness of episodes and incidents, and certain typical phases, patterns and practices.

c. The aim of the controlling group is to obtain maximum control over the targeted or controlled group (inclusive of as many individuals as possible) in an organization or institution. Individuals or even groups who are seen as a threat are eliminated or silenced.

d. Blame or detection for any action is avoided by generalizing the harassment patterns or displacing the initiative to another individual or group who then takes over the initiative. In academic contexts, sociological rationalisations, like ‘theories’, may be offered when related problems are brought to the attention of authorities so as to explain away criminal or para-criminal practices/appearances. An effective counter to this is to identify possible indirect political justifications in the context of such rationalisations or theories e.g. characteristics of sociological socialism.

Colloquial speech

In some contexts of colloquial speech, the word “harassment” and its derivatives can mean in a playful manner “bothering”. In computer gaming contexts, “harassment” might constitute provocative or annoying actions in the game. Harassment in strategy games may also mean early attacks aimed to stunt an opponent’s growth of either economy or technology. In these contexts, the severity of the terminology is much less intense, and does not carry the same connotations as the legal definitions.

See also

References

External links

Look up harassment or harass in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Interview with Martha Nussbaum about harrassment
• Harassment at the Open Directory Project