Legal Consciousness and Responses to Sexual Harassment

TLDR

Legal mobilization research often overlooks how individuals are selected as potential mobilizers and why some victims speak up while others stay silent. The study aims to integrate sociolegal, feminist, and criminological theories into a conceptual model linking sexual harassment experience and mobilization. The authors model harassment experience and mobilization as jointly determined outcomes and analyze their relationship through interviews with a subset of survey respondents. Results indicate that harassment targets are selected partly because they are least likely to disclose the experience, that coping strategies vary, and that traditional formal/informal mobilization dichotomies fail to capture the full range of responses, prompting a preliminary typology.

Abstract

Studies of legal mobilization often focus on people who have perceived some wrong, but rarely consider the process that selects them into the pool of potential "mobilizers." Similarly, studies of victimization or targeting rarely go on to consider what people do about the wrong, or why some targets come forward and others remain silent. We here integrate sociolegal, feminist, and criminological theories in a conceptual model that treats experiencing sexual harassment and mobilizing in response to it as interrelated processes. We then link these two processes by modeling them as jointly determined outcomes and examine their connections using interviews with a subset of our survey respondents. Our results suggest that targets of harassment are selected, in part, because they are least likely to tell others about the experience. Strategies that workers employ to cope with and confront harassment are also discussed. We find that traditional formal/informal dichotomies of mobilization responses may not fully account for the range of ways individuals respond to harassment, and we propose a preliminary typology of responses.