Law and Lawyers Inside

Legal Consciousness and Responses to Sexual Harassment

Studies of legal mobilization often focus on people who have perceived some wrong, but these studies 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 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. We also discuss strategies that workers employ to cope with and confront harassment. We find that traditional formal/informal dichotomies of mobilization responses may not fully account for the range of ways that individuals respond to harassment, and we propose a preliminary typology of responses.

How do individuals respond when they feel their rights have been violated? Do those who perceive a wrong simply tell the wrongdoer, do they tell others, or do they ignore it? Following Ewick and Silbey’s (1998) groundbreaking work on the common place of law, a growing body of literature has taken up these and related questions of legal consciousness and mobilization (e.g., Albiston 2005; Connolly 2002; Fleury-Steiner 2003; Hoffman 2005; Litowitz 2000; Lovell 2006; Marshall 2005; Marshall & Barclay 2003; Richman 2001). Central to these studies are the interrelated processes by which individuals first come to experience or perceive some wrong and then do something about it. In this study of sexual harassment, we attempt to link these two processes – in this case, subjectively experiencing sexual harassment and then going on to tell a supervisor or government agency that it has occurred. We also examine how individuals respond to harassment and why they employ particular response strategies. We find multidimensional responses to harassment, such that traditional formal/ informal dichotomies may not adequately account for the diversity of strategies that individuals employ. We therefore propose a preliminary multidimensional typology of mobilization responses.