What Constitutes Sexual Harrassment

Student number

Program CA01

Course Code

Assessment 1

Topic What constitutes sexual harassment?

Word count 1827 words

Lecturer

Date due 03 August 2012

As Mark Twain (cited in Gore 2006, p.21) said: ‘It ain’t what you don’t know that get you in trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so’. According to the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC 2008) ‘every year, sexual harassment in the workplace is one of the most common types of complaints that it received under the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 – Section 28A (Cth)’. It is therefore of significant importance for employers to take action to effectively avoid and also to respond to sexual harassment that interrupts the work environment with detrimental and sometimes devastating effects. In Australia, an employer is legally responsible if one employee harasses another employee, unless the employer takes all reasonable steps to prevent it happening (Stone 2011).

This essay will demonstrate from a human resource point of view and in accordance with the Act, the importance of holding an informative workshop for employees to address the major issue of sexual harassment which is a constant problem in Australian workplaces; it will also explain to employees the ways how employees can minimise sexual harassment in the workplace; how employees should respond or observe harassing behaviour if they experience such a situation. Finally, some cases will be introduced to demonstrate the magnitude of this aspect of life at work and its costly financial consequence to organisations who fail to take sexual harassment complaints seriously. With the use of “PowerPoint”, this workshop will address a workplace policy to identify, to minimize and develop a strategy in response to sexual harassment. Finally this essay will demonstrate sexual harassment to be an unwelcomed behaviour of a sexual nature in the workplace.

In order to describe sexual harassment to employees in an...