Employment Lawyer Blog

Yale University, perhaps the Ivy League's most respected school, is still reeling from a public relations nightmare stemming from charges of sexual harassment and intimidation on campus. Earlier in the spring, the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights investigated complaints launched by 16 current and former students that Yale had violated Title IX of the United States gender equality laws. Last week, Yale took a decisive step towards stamping out sexual harassment, intimidation, and hostility on campus by punishing a campus fraternity, Delta Kappa Epsilon (a.k.a DKE), for intimidating and threatening women.

Last October, the DKEs were recorded marching around campus chanting "No means yes! Yes means anal!" Video of the sexist, misogynist chant got posted on YouTube and went viral. In light of this release, Yale University officials felt compelled to take action to punish the fraternity. A May 17th story from an article in Reuters detailed the University's actions:

• DKE may not recruit or engage on fraternity activities on Yale's campus for five years.
• DKE may not use Yale's name or communicate with Yale students.
• Yale University has asked the national organization of Delta Kappa Epsilon to suspend Yale's chapter for five years.
• The Dean of the Yale College, Mary Miller, released a statement explaining the University's draconian actions: "It is my hope that this will not only shed some light on the matter of public concern but also provide notice of the outcomes to all those who may have been affected by sexual harassment and, accordingly, educate our community."

Did Yale go too far in punishing DKE? Did the university not go far enough?

Can sexual harassment - and discrimination in general - ever be "stamped out" in our nation's universities and colleges? And how should schools balance the desire to cultivate freedom of expression and the need to punish people for abusing that freedom to hurt others?

These are not easy questions to answer.

Bastions of learning, like Yale, were designed not only to educate young people and instill ideals of scholarship but also to challenge them to communicate in new ways and to engage in critical, dynamic thinking. Clearly, even our nation's most elite universities struggle with how to temper the desire to stimulate with the mandate to protect students and others from needless harassment, discrimination, and retaliation.

What we learn at college can shape the way we think, behave and interact with others for a lifetime. If we learn that loud, bullying, misogynistic behaviors on campus will go unpunished and perhaps even rewarded by our peers, we will be more likely to carry these behaviors with us after we graduate and enter the professional sphere. Moreover, once we learn that the "power over other" mentality gets results, we will have difficultly unlearning it, even after we intellectually come to appreciate how it can damage others and ourselves.

Fortunately, victims of mistreatment at work can leverage a variety of resources to end bad practices and make the office safe and supportive.

If you or someone you care about has experienced mistreatment at work, the law firm of Joseph & Kirschenbaum can give you a free and totally confidential case evaluation. Learn more at www.jhllp.com or call 866-348-7394.

On May 18th, the Los Angeles Times laced into former California Governor (and action movie star, and former Mr. Universe) Arnold Schwarzenegger -- not only for his recent sexual infidelity but also for his past sexual harassment.

As anyone who has been reading the news or scanning internet headlines already likely knows, Governor Schwarzenegger recently split from his wife, Maria Shriver, after Shriver discovered that her husband had carried on an affair with a household staffer and had fathered a child with her as well. The explosive revelations marked yet another crazy turn in Schwarzenegger's extreme and polarizing personal story.

The Governator has never been a stranger to charges of lurid misconduct. As the Los Angeles Times story notes: "When he first ran for Governor of California in the 2003 campaign to recall Governor Gray Davis, Schwarzenegger was dogged by allegations of sexual harassment... of having groped more than a dozen women over the years who did not want his attention and who were humiliated and angered."

Indeed, these charges dogged Schwarzenegger throughout his campaign. One of the key defenses he utilized was his wife's testimony about his character. As Ms. Shriver famously noted nearly a decade ago: "you can listen to the people who have never met Arnold or who met him for 5 seconds 30 years ago. Or you can listen to me." As Times' article shrewdly noted, following Ms. Shriver's defense, "the voters elected [Schwarzenegger] in a landslide."

Who knows whether Ms. Shriver may be reconsidering her past staunch defense of Schwarzenegger in light of the revelations of his infidelity. It's impossible to get inside her thinking, obviously. But the whole escapade - especially one considered in the context of the allegations of harassment throughout Schwarzenegger's career - is oddly telling.

It helps us perhaps understand how and why harassment can be such a difficult problem to solve - both for the victim and the victimizer. It is often very difficult for people to recognize and accept their own failings. And even if someone understands that he or she has done something wrong (such as retaliated against an employee unfairly or sexually harassed someone at work), retooling how that person thinks and operates often requires both deep inner work and the institution of systems and structures to keep bad behavior in check.

If you've been a victim of harassment, retaliation, discrimination, or any other workplace conduct, you don't have to work through your challenges alone. The team at Joseph & Kirschenbaum can provide a free and comprehensive consultation for you. Just call 866-384-7394 or explore additional resources and articles at www.jhllp.com.

Victims of workplace sexual harassment often experience psychological "collateral damage." In other words, not only do victims suffer consequences in the real world (loss of a job, demotion, unfair payment terms, etc.), but they also experience mental scarring that leads to insidious, longer-term damage to self esteem.

If someone at your work propositions you for sexual favors or makes derogatory comments about your clothing, you may consciously reject the criticism/harassment. But your subconscious mind might still pick up -- and even begin to believe -- the judgments. For instance, say your superior one day makes a comment like: "you look enormous in that skirt. Are you pregnant?" Your conscious reaction might be to laugh off the insult or even to insult him back. But once the exchange ends, the slow poison of that cutting remark can really start to do its work. Hours (or days or weeks) later, long after you've forgotten that the exchange even happened; you may find yourself steering clear of that pretty dress. You may even reassess your body image and begin to think that you really are "fat and unattractive."

Believe it or not, the relationship between the insult and its long term psychological "damage" may be even more indirect. For instance, weeks after the harassment, you may develop a vague sense of anxiety about a work project. Subconscious and unconscious connections can remain entrenched, kind of like psychological scar tissue.

So what can you do to correct this latent damage once it's been done?

This question is obviously far too big for a single blog post to answer. But consider that different individuals may have different psychological "immune systems." Scientists are only barely beginning to understand how they function. For some people, insults may not create much, if any, longer-term damage because their "immune systems" function at a high level. For others, the damage can be totally out of proportion to the initial insult. So a tactic to salve the unconscious trauma might work for you, but it might not work for your coworker. Or -- even more subtly -- what works for you in one situation might not work for you in another situation.

All that said, victims can deploy a surprising variety of tactics and strategies to overcome the ravages of being mistreated. Counseling, meditation, leaving the "offending environment," and even developing alternative sources of self-esteem (e.g. getting really good at playing darts or aerobics, hanging out with people who value and compliment you, etc.) might be useful measures to deploy.

Another hugely important tactic is to gain successful closure to the offending incident by resolving and even getting compensated for mistreatment. The law firm of Joseph & Kirschenbaum provides a fully confidential and complete free case evaluation. If you experienced something hurtful and possibly illegal at the workplace - harassment, discrimination, wage and hour violations, or the like - connect with their team at 866-348-7394 or www.jhllp.com.

Victims of sexual harassment, racial discrimination, and other workplace violations often feel fairly confident that the perpetrators "knew what they were doing." A boss, for instance, who makes lascivious suggestions to a secretary, clearly understands that he is engaging in illegal or at the very least untoward behavior. A plant manager who intentionally demotes (or fails to promote) an African-American might not admit out loud that he is "racially discriminating" - but in his heart of hearts, he is clearly aware of what he's doing - and that it's wrong.

Right?

Perhaps... but perhaps not.

Clearly, many cases are cut and dry. Some superiors who mistreat their workers just don't care, or they think they can "get away with it." But others may simply be running unconscious scripts or deferring to what they perceive to be the normal culture of their industry. The unconscious forces that play on all of us - employers and employees alike - are quite profound.

If you take a look at some of Abraham Lincoln's statements about African-Americans -- even just a few years before the Civil War, you might be shocked at how "racist" Lincoln comes across. Here's a real quote from the 16th President:

"While [blacks and whites] do remain together, there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race."

Remember: this is the man who literally put his life and his country on the line to liberate African-Americans from their shackles. The cultural influences on the way Lincoln thought about race were so powerful that they locked him into a certain way of thinking.

We often tend to demonize the people who do the harassing or discrimination as monsters and uncaring and evil people. And their actions and comments - intentional or not, conscious or not - can certainly have monstrous effects. But as the eminent psychologist Dr. Marshall Rosenberg -- Founder of a school of thought known as Nonviolent Communication (NVC) -- puts it, we are often so blinded by the "enemy images" we have of one another that we fail to see the broader pathologies at work in any given situation.

For instance, say your boss screams at you every morning if you make her coffee even slightly wrong. You might be tempted to think that the woman is crazy - or that she is harassing you or discriminating against you. And, indeed, she may be. But once you get away from the "enemy images" you have of her, you may see that she is concurrently responding to pressures from her superiors or she is simply imitating cultural norms of her industry. For instance, as the Kevin Spacey movie Swimming With Sharks illustrates, executives in the entertainment industry can often adopt terrifying and dictatorial personas - not because these people are intrinsically dictatorial but because they are, for whatever reason, attempting to mimic an archetypal "Hollywood exec" persona.

A quality, experienced law firm, such as Joseph & Kirschenbaum can work with you to identify and put an end to workplace misbehavior and mistreatment. For a free consultation today, call 866-348-7394, or review the firm's resources at www.jhllp.com.