Amy S. Quinn of the Human Resources website www.hrworld.com recently sent me a link to their post The Top 20 Sexual-Harassment Cases of All Time. I'm not sure if I would agree with their definition of the Top 20--it seems as if the list is missing some of the influential sexual-harassment cases from the 1970s and 1980s that helped make sexual-harassment the issue it is. Nevertheless, I found their list interesting. Below are a few examples:

1) 6-Year Old Boy v. Brockton School District: How old do you have to be in order to stand accused of sexual harassment? In this particular case, involving the Brockton School District near Boston, you only have to be 6 years old. The elementary school boy was apparently found with "his hand inside the waistband of a girl's pants, touching the skin on her back," a violation of the school's sexual-harassment policy. According to the boy's mother, however, her son "doesn't even know what that word 'sexual' is. I don't see how I'm going to explain it to him," she added. Though the school wished to press charges, the district attorney's office deemed the boy too young to be prosecuted.

2) Maxine Henderson and Gwen: In 1996, artist Maxine Henderson's impressionist portrait of a nude woman named Gwen rocked the small town of Murfreesboro, Tenn. A local assistant superintendent noticed the painting when it was hung on a wall in City Hall and was so offended by its alleged vulgarity that she "submitted a sexual harassment complaint to the city legal department." The city ultimately decided that the painting violated its own sexual-harassment policies and removed it. As a result, the artist sued the city "for violating her First Amendment rights." Henderson won the case in a U.S. District Court, under the pretenses that the painting hung in a public space and that the city's sexual-harassment policy was not detailed enough in its description of what constituted offensive material.

3) S.A.C. Capital Advisors LCC: Major hedge-fund company S.A.C. Capital Advisors, founded in the early 1990s, is a "$14 billion dollar group of multi-strategy, multi-discipline" company. Yet in 2007, a scandal erupted that "stunned" Wall Street. Former S.A.C. Capital Advisors employee Andrew Tong filed suit against his supervisor Ping Jiang, whom is said to have forced Tong into taking female hormones and wearing female clothing in order "to eliminate the trader’s aggressive male attitude so he could become a more obedient and detail-oriented player" at work, The New York Times reports. According to CNBC, S.A.C. Capital Advisors and Ping Jiang "vehemently deny the charges" and have reached no settlement with Tong.

4) Professor James Maas: The Center for Individual Rights asks, "was [this] famous Cornell professor a harasser or the victim of a witch hunt?" Immensely popular psychology professor James Maas was accused by former students in 1994 of sexual harassment. The case was initially brought forward to Cornell University authorities, who were not able to find any wrongdoing on the part of Professor Maas but decided to punish him anyway. The case was then taken to the courts of New York, which dismissed Maas's lawsuits against Cornell University.

All 20 of the cases can be seen here.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 30th, 2007 at 8:37 pm and is filed under Sexual Harassment.