An administrative dilemma: Sexual harassment and liability

Conservative estimates suggest that 40% of working women and 15% of their male counterparts have experienced some form of sexual harassment; and law enforcement personnel are no exception. Police officers are expected to adhere to the highest ethical standards and are subjected to greater public scrutiny than civilians. With criminal and civil remedies readily available to deter police misconduct, police agencies should be establishing policies that take a strong, pro-active stance against sexual harassment in the workplace. Surprisingly, though, 34% of police agencies in this country are still without formal policies regulating such behavior. This article is a guide to the legislation and case law that regulates those behaviours. Recommendations for policy formulation and implementation also are included. sexual harassment in the workplace presents a clear and present danger to law enforcement agencies. A recent survey found that thirty-four percent of law enforcement agencies in the United States have yet to formulate a written sexual harassment policy.     

Women in Law Enforcement: Subverting Sexual Harassment with Social Bonds

Female law enforcement officers who have strong social bonds with their colleagues can reduce the effect that sexual harassment has on job satisfaction. Social bond theory was tested to examine the relationship between sexual harassment and job satisfaction in a sample of 109 active-duty male and female police and correctional officers. Law enforcement personnel are thought to be particularly vulnerable to stressors on the job, like sexual harassment, but they can significantly benefit from strong departmental and colleague support. With some progress toward gender equity, this study shows that female officers still face barriers that are linked to this predominantly male-dominated career.     

Changing Perceptions of Sexual Harassment in the Federal Workforce, 1987–94

Recent criticisms of sexual harassment law and workplace training policies contend that they have "sanitized" the workplace through their stigmatization of sexual expression that does not amount to actual discrimination. This study assesses some of the empirical foundations for those normative arguments. Using data from the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board's 1987 and 1994 surveys, we examine differences over time in federal workers' perceptions of what types of behavior constitute sexual harassment. The article draws on a sociolegal theory of the endogenous nature of law as well as research on perceptions of sexual harassment. We hypothesize that, because of increased attention to sexual harassment, and to the hostile environment theory specifically, by scholars, judges, and the news media, and related policy changes in workplace training programs, federal workers likely came to view a wider range of sexual conduct as constituting harassment during this time period. The results support our expectations. We also find that sexual harassment training in their agency increased workers' likelihood of viewing both hostile environment behavior and quid pro quo behavior as harassment.     

有效合规管理的两种模式

自我国监管部门引入合规监管方式以来,有效合规管理大体形成了两种相对独立的制度模式。其中,日常性合规管理是企业在行政监管部门的指导和监督下,以预防相关合规风险为主要出发点,建立常态化的合规管理体系;合规整改则是企业在行政机关、司法机关的执法压力下,或在国际组织采取制裁措施的情况下,以减轻处罚或者取消制裁为目标,针对业已暴露的违法、违规或犯罪行为,采取有针对性的合规整改措施。在确保企业有效防控合规风险方面,这两种合规管理模式各有其制度结构和公司治理功能,也存在着各自的优劣得失。在企业合规管理体系的建构方面,这两种模式既可以相互转化,也可以相互补充和完善。     

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

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.     

Sexual harassment in higher education: a victim's remedies and a private university's liability

Sexual harassment is a pervasive problem in education. With victims of harassment pursuing administrative and judicial redress, an awareness of and a program for response to the sexual harassment issue are good risk management strategies for a private university and its staff, employees, and students. This article examines, first, the two types of sexual harassment recognized by law; second, the situations in which harassment in the educational context may occur; and, third, avenues of recourse for the victim of sexual harassment and the responsibility and liability of the private university when the harassment is reported or discovered. It is designed to inform and educate the faculty and administrators of private universities about the legal implications of their response to notice of sexual harassment.     

The Shadows of the Law: Contemporary Approaches to Regulation and the Problem of Regulatory Conflict

Regulatory analyses often assume that compliance is desirable, with literature focusing on strategies to encourage "excellence" in adherence to regulatory goals. Yet, it is not unusual for disparate regulatory goals to exist that are based on competing values of what constitutes the "good society." It is this conflict that forms the substance of this paper. In cases of competing regulatory goals, techniques that encourage exemplary compliance in one area can create incentives to breach regulatory provisions of a competing regime. In such cases, generic regulatory techniques are unable to provide a useful means for resolving regulatory conflict but do allow a political delegation of conflict resolution to the "scientific" strategies of the regulator. In turn, the regulator places responsibility on companies for resolving competing regulatory demands. Successive delegation leads to juridification as well as regulators vying to retain primacy for their regime. This problem is examined through analysis of responsibilities for subcontractor safety under Australian health and safety law and sections of the Australian Trade Practices Act 1974 aimed at protecting competition.     

Europeanization or National Specificity? Legal Approaches to Sexual Harassment in France, 2002–2012

This paper examines whether—and if so how—a 2002 European Directive on sexual harassment has changed the practice and content of sexual harassment law in France. It finds that the European Directive shaped how French courts address sexual harassment and informed the content of a new sexual harassment law France passed in 2012. Yet, its influence has been mediated by dominant national attitudes about: (1) the nature of sexual harassment, (2) which legal institutions are best suited to address it, and (3) the character of women who claim to have been harassed. This paper further suggests that news reporting on a 2011 arrest of a French politician for sexual assault led to more positive attitudes about sexual harassment victims.     

Untangling the Web: A Review of Certain Secure e-Commerce Legal Issues

A number of critical legal aspects in the area of secure e-commerce and cybertrade are examined including doing business on the internet and web sites. Key issues including compliance with data protection laws, web site ownership and hypertext linking are raised.The use of the internet for communication on an intercompany basis provides concerns over security, confidentiality, defamation, harassment and infringement and companies must consider implementing ground rules for the use of e-mail and the internet in order to reduce or avoid corporate liability as well as directors and officers own personal liability.The growth of cybertrade raises issues relating to the underlying legal and regulatory global infrastructure and at present whilst the technology exists the other infrastructures do not and therefore there are urgent needs for co-ordination on an international basis in this area in relation to public key infrastructures, validity of digital signatures, the implementation of guidelines for trusted third parties, certification authorities and CyberNotaries.     

Resisting the Enforcement of Sexual Harassment Law

Most people in the United States believe that sexual harassment should be illegal and that enforcement is necessary. In spite of such widespread support for antiharassment regulations, sexual harassment policy training provokes backlash and has been shown to activate traditional gender stereotypes. Using in‐depth interviews and participant observations of sexual harassment policy training sessions, this study uncovers the micro‐level mechanisms that underlie ambivalence about the enforcement of sexual harassment law. I find that while the different locations of men and women in the status hierarchy lead to different manifestations of resistance, gender stereotypes are used to buttress perceptions that sexual harassment laws threaten norms of interaction and status positions that men and women have an interest in maintaining. The research has implications for understanding the role of law in social change, legal compliance, and the potential/limits of law for reducing inequality.     

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

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.     

Regulatory Analysis in Corporate Law

Drawing on recent experiences in the US, UK, and EU, this article suggests that regulatory analysis of corporate law policies, as currently understood and applied, suffers from severe weaknesses. The effects of proposed corporate law policies are often difficult to predict and even more difficult to quantify, which negatively impacts analytical reliability. Moreover, given its nature and strong intersections with economic, societal and political issues, corporate law is less amenable to technocratic assessments than other areas of law. Based on three case studies, the article explores these problems. It outlines a revised ‘procedural’ view, suggesting that regulatory analysis in corporate law should be understood as a process for enhancing information, transparency, and monitoring, independently of specific normative criteria. This leads to several implications. In short, regulatory analysis should combine quantified analysis with leeway for regulatory judgment and focus on increased consultation, critical engagement, review, and transparency as the dominant guiding factors.     

Legitimacy in corrections

Research Summary
To extend research on legitimacy to the correctional system, we study a sample of 202 adult inmates randomly assigned to serve their 6-month sentence at one of two institutions—a traditional prison or a military-style correctional boot camp. Findings show that perceptions of justice system legitimacy changed during the course of incarceration, that the prison (but not the boot camp) proved delegitimizing, and that certain regime characteristics explained why.
Policy Implications
Across academic disciplines, studies continue to link compliance with perceived legitimacy. Compliance with the law, for instance, is related closely to the legitimacy of the justice system and its actors. These findings suggest implementing legitimacy-building policies such as procedurally fair treatment and decision making by police officers and judges. This article, by finding legitimacy to be malleable even at the final stage of the justice process, proposes the efficacy of similar policies in the correctional system. As research from England and Wales has shown, legitimizing strategies in this context could increase compliance both during and after incarceration.     

Workplace Sexual Harassment in Policing: Perceived Psychological Injuries by Source and Severity

Relatively little is known about employee perceptions of workplace psychological injuries following sexual and nonsexual harassment. In quasi-military occupational organizations, such as policing, the rate of sexual harassment to workplace injuries from other sources is comparatively high. In an exploratory 5?×?2 between-subjects factorial experimental projection study, 220 New South Wales Police Force officers responded to one of ten experimental vignettes in which sources of psychological injury and the gender of the injured worker were systematically varied. Results revealed an unexpected effect of experience. Employees aged 30 years and older were significantly more likely to anticipate psychological consequences and clinically diagnosable symptoms than their younger counterparts. As hypothesized, a main effect of injury source, but not gender of the target, emerged for the severity of psychological consequences: a physical injury was perceived to produce significantly more severe psychological injuries than sexual harassment in the form of coercion and unwanted sexual attention. Contrary to the hypothesis, participants rated gender-based hostility higher than other types of sexual harassment as a source of severe psychological harm. Participants believed that gender-based hostility requires more professional intervention and predicted more negative workplace consequences than other psychological injuries caused by other workplace events. As hypothesized, women employees were generally viewed as significantly more vulnerable to negative workplace outcomes than men. The police officers who participated in this study considered women as more likely to experience workplace problems following sexual coercion than other types of workplace injury. Physical injuries, gender-based hostility, and sexual coercion were distinguished from nonsexual harassment and unwanted sexual attention as significantly more likely to produce clinically diagnosable injuries, irrespective of target gender. Implications of these findings for research, practice, and legal policy are discussed.     

A Multidimensional View of Legal Cynicism: Perceptions of the Police Among Anti‐harassment Teams in Egypt

In Egypt in 2012, several anti‐harassment groups were established to respond to an increase in sexual violence in public spaces and to the failure of the state to tackle the issue. Anti‐harassment groups organized patrol‐type intervention teams that operated during demonstrations or public celebrations to stop sexual assaults. This article examines how activists perceived the police in five anti‐harassment groups between 2012 and 2014, and the role these perceptions played in groups' decisions about cooperating with the police, and on‐the‐ground strategies of action. I argue for a multidimensional view of legal cynicism that conceptualizes legal cynicism as composed of three dimensions: legitimacy (a sense that law enforcement agencies are not entitled to be deferred to and obeyed), protection (a perception that the law fails to protect rights and provide public safety), and threat (a perception that the law represents a threat). This approach helps uncover the various meanings that legal cynicism takes for different actors in different contexts, and how actors justify their strategies of action based on their specific perceptions of the police's legitimacy, protective role, and threat.     

Balancing Social and Corporate Culture in the Global Economy: The Evolution of Japanese Corporate Structure and Norms

Japanese corporate law is undergoing a transition with new Commercial Code amendments in 2003 that allow corporations to opt for an Anglo‐American model of governance. Combined with shifts in securities regulation, shareholder activism, and the notion of Japanese lifetime employment, there is an important issue of whether these shifts represent a move towards an optimal corporate governance paradigm. The evolution is tempered by particular cultural norms that drive Japanese corporate law. While there is a perception in North America that Japanese corporations have shifted to an Anglo‐American model of corporate governance, the reality is more layered. It may be that ultimately, the governance model that evolves will adopt the best elements of increased transparency, corporate accountability, enhanced shareholder protection, employee long‐term employment protections, and production synergies, that would allow Japanese corporations to compete internationally, but retain those elements of corporate community that have long been considered a primary objective of the social and economic life of Japan.     

The Paradox of Complaining: Law, Humor, and Harassment in the Everyday Work World

This article addresses the question of women's seeming rejection of sexual harassment law by refusing to apply the label "sexual harassment" in the face of incidents that would easily qualify as such. Building on the work of Bumiller (1988) and the tradition of sociolegal studies focusing on understanding the power of the law in its everyday context (e.g., Merry 1979; Engel 1987; Sarat and Kearns 1993), this analysis explores the "tactical milieu" in which both hostile work environment sexual harassment and tactics for its resistance are produced. Using in-depth interviews with both women and men, the author explores the ways a particular form of hostile work environment harassment–dubbed "chain yanking"–poaches on the realm of ambiguous humor to effect male group solidarity and women's disempowerment. A common countertactic–"not taking it personal"– is analyzed for its simultaneous power as resistance and unwitting collaboration. The contradictory effects of this tactic-countertactic pairing on the naming and claiming of the harm of sexual harassment are examined, as well as the implications this has for combating sexual harassment in the workplace.     

涉案企业合规刑行衔接的初步研究

涉案企业合规改革的推行和深化,离不开行政监管部门的全面配合.检察机关在涉案企业合规改革探索过程中,也较为注重发挥行政监管部门的作用,并尝试利用现有的制度空间解决好与行政监管部门的衔接配合问题.但由于行政监管部门并没有配合刑事执法机关参与办理企业合规案件的法定义务,加上衔接配合的规则和程序粗陋缺失,刑行衔接程序出现不畅问...     

From the kitchen to the bedroom: frequency rates and consequences of sexual harassment among female domestic workers in Brazil

Sexual harassment has been investigated mostly in developed countries. The authors examined frequency rates and consequences of sexual harassment among female domestic workers in Brazil. Twenty-six percent had been sexually harassed at work during the past year. Live-in workers were at significantly greater risk for experiencing sexual harassment than those residing in their own homes, when controlling for participants' age, race, and social class. Women residing in their employers' residences used more alcohol and drugs than their counterparts. Harassed women had significantly higher self-esteem impairment and anxiety and depression than nonharassed women. Nonharassed women residing in their own homes had the best physical well-being. Concerning participants' worst sexually harassing experiences, the perpetrators were likely to be men (75%), who also engaged in more severe types of sexual harassment than female perpetrators. The emotional reactions to such incidents were significantly more negative when perpetrated by men than by women. Implications for foreign in-home workers employed by Europeans and North Americans are discussed.     

"People Are Too Quick to Take Offense": The Effects of Legal Information and Beliefs on Definitions of Sexual Harassment

Using data from a nationwide study of sexual harassment in the United States' federal workplace, this article investigates how legal understanding, opinions about the regulation of sexual harassment, and social status affect whether people define uninvited sexual jokes or remarks as harassment. The results indicate that how people define sexual harassment is directly related to the extent to which they view sexual harassment rules as ambiguous and threatening to workplace norms. Moreover, results show that while women generally define sexual harassment more broadly than men, they actually resist defining sexual jokes or remarks as harassment. Finally, knowledge of the workplace sexual harassment policy moderates the effect of beliefs on definitions of sexual harassment. These findings suggest a complexity in the way people reconcile their knowledge of the law with their personal views about power and social interaction in the workplace.