hunter of justice

Two powerful new reports on lgbt families and youth

Two major reports came out today that have the potential to significantly influence policy debates in their respective, related areas.

A trio of organizations published All Children Matter: How Legal and Social Inequalities Hurt LGBT Families, which spells out in more than 100 pages (with more than 450 footnotes) the ways in which anti-gay policies impede three key needs of every child: stable, loving homes; economic security; and health and well-being. In each area, the report documents the problems, demonstrates the effects of discriminatory laws and policies, and provides recommendations. The Child Welfare League of America wrote the foreword and endorsed the report, which was co-authored by the Movement Advancement Project, Family Equality Council and the Center for American Progress. 

The second publication is from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights:  Peer to Peer Violence and Bullying: Examining the Federal Response. As a threshold matter, its very issuance signals that the Commission is alive again, after having been starved and sidelined by years of Republican administrations. This  report, also lengthy and well-documented, includes specific findings and recommendations:

The Commission, by majority vote, concluded  that  bullying and harassment, including bullying and harassment based on sex, race, national origin, disability, sexual orientation, or religion, are  harmful to American youth, and developed findings and recommendations to address the problem, including the following recommendations:

 The U.S. Departments of Education and Justice should track their complaints/inquiries regarding sexual harassment or gender-based harassment by creating a category that explicitly encompasses LGBT youth.

 The U.S. Departments of Education and Justice should track complaints that they receive regarding harassment based solely on sexual orientation that are closed for lack of jurisdiction.

 The U.S. Department of Education should track complaints that it receives regarding harassment based solely on religion that are closed for lack of jurisdiction.

 The U.S. Department of Education should consider issuing a new Dear Colleague Letter regarding the First Amendment implications of anti-bullying policies. The new Letter should provide concrete examples to clarify the guidance that the Department of Education previously provided [on] July 28, 2003.

Two really impressive contributions. 

For women, more authority = more harassment

Data presented at this year's meeting of the American Sociological Association demonstrate that women in management positions are significantly more likely to be harassed than women who do not supervise others. The study also found that effeminate men were susceptible to harassment, an observation borne out by the large number of same-sex harassment cases, almost all filed by male employees who are perceived for a variety of reasons to be weak.

Women who hold supervisory positions are more likely to be sexually harassed at work, according to the first-ever, large-scale longitudinal study to examine workplace power, gender and sexual harassment.

The study, "A Longitudinal Analysis of Gender, Power and Sexual Harassment in Young Adulthood," reveals that nearly fifty percent of women supervisors, but only one-third of women who do not supervise others, reported sexual harassment in the workplace. In more conservative models with stringent statistical controls, women supervisors were 137 percent more likely to be sexually harassed than women who did not hold managerial roles.

While supervisory status increased the likelihood of harassment among women, it did not significantly impact the likelihood for men.

"This study provides the strongest evidence to date supporting the theory that sexual harassment is less about sexual desire than about control and domination,"said Heather McLaughlin, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota and the study's primary investigator. "Male co-workers, clients and supervisors seem to be using harassment as an equalizer against women in power."

McLaughlin and her co-authors examined data from the 2003 and 2004 waves of the Youth Development Study (YDS), a prospective study of adolescents that began in 1988 with a sample of 1,010 ninth graders in the St. Paul, Minnesota, public school district and has continued near annually since. Respondents were approximately 29 and 30 years old during the 2003 and 2004 waves. The analysis was supplemented with in-depth interviews with a subset of the YDS survey respondents.

The sociologists found that, in addition to workplace power, gender expression was a strong predictor of workplace harassment. Men who reported higher levels of femininity were more likely to have experienced harassment than less feminine men. More feminine men were at a greater risk of experiencing more severe or multiple forms of sexual harassment (as were female supervisors).

In a separate analysis examining perceived and self-reported sexual orientation, study respondents who reported being labeled as non-heterosexual by others or who self-identified as non-heterosexual (gay, lesbian, bisexual, unsure, other) were nearly twice as likely to experience harassment.

Researchers also found that those who reported harassment in the first year (2003) were 6.5 times more likely to experience harassment in the following year. The most common scenario reported by survey respondents involved male harassers and female targets, while males harassing other males was the second most frequent situation.

McLaughlin co-authored the study with sociologists Christopher Uggen, chair of the University of Minnesota's sociology department and a distinguished McKnight professor of sociology, and Amy Blackstone, associate professor of sociology at the University of Maine. The multi-method research was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Mental Health and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

From Signs of the Times.

Judge Posner and sexual harassment

HT to Feminist Law Professors for this link to the audio recording of a debate at University of Chicago Law School between Professors Mary Anne Case and Martha Nussbaum, critiquing two of Judge Richard Posner's opinions in sexual harassment cases, and Judge Posner defending himself.