Sociological Analysis of sexual harassment against women in workplace

Sexual harassment against women is a very prevalent issue today and it could challenge the safety of working women in workplace. The vulnerability of women to sexual harassment can affect the quality of their life. For this reason it has gained considerable attention among the sociologists and criminologists over the last two decades. There is a kind of dominant approach which falsely tries to put blame on victims of sexual harassment rather than on offenders. It is whilst the wider context of sexual harassment reveals that the levels of sexual harassment that women experience every day, which, given the relative powerlessness of women, makes them more unequal victims and therefore vulnerable. So, it is very important to recognize the fact that much of the actual impact of crime on women is trivialized and hence concealed. This paper draws an original data collected from in depth interview with 30 working women aged 22 to 32 in Tehran. The intention of this paper is to present a perspective on debates surrounding women’s experience of sexual harassment in workplace. This article tries to raise key sociological issues such as inequality and demoralization abuse of power. Narratives provided by women included in this study are used throughout the paper as means of drawing the attention to the point that sexual harassment is not something that happens out of the context but is situated in the social details of individuals’ circumstances, social status of women, the system of male domination and the life style. In the other words the wider context of sexual harassment involves patriarchal, social, philosophical and political system in which women are subsumed lower than men. The authors of this paper organized their interview around a major theoretical and empirical divide in studies of sexual harassment between approaches that see harassment as a by-product of social exclusion and power relations. The research reveals that the unbalanced power relations between victim and criminal, domination of male attitudes, the lack of control in private sector and victim blaming are the most important factors which can explain sexual harassment against women. The finding of research also indicates that women are likely to become disillusioned because of their treatment, abuse, and sexual harassment by men. It is not possible to generalize the obtained data to a wider population since there is a limitation regarding the sort and the size of sample included in this study. However, it is constructive to mention that in the case study approach, if the study is well structured and carried out, and makes no claims which cannot be justified, it may well be relatable in a way that will enable members of similar groups to recognize problems and, possibly, to see ways of solving similar problems in their own group.