¶ … Sexual Harassment Charges The chair of the kinesiology department at a college or university confronted with a sexual harassment charge from a student concerning the inappropriate touching of a breast by a male instructor during weight training instruction and who now refuses to return to class will need to understand the legal definition of sexual harassment and relevant precedential case laws to provide an appropriate organizational response. To this end, this paper reviews the literature to provide a definition of sexual harassment, when it was implemented into law in the United States, and an analysis of selected sexual harassment cases including their validity. Finally, a recommendation for the college or university, a summary of the research and important findings concerning sexual harassment cases are presented in the conclusion.

Review and Analysis

According to the legal definition provided by Black's Law Dictionary, sexual harassment is "a type of employment discrimination [which] includes sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, or other physical or verbal conduct of a sexual nature prohibited by Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and commonly by state statutes" (1375). By contrast, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Guidelines (1980) define sexual harassment as follows:

Unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature constitute sexual harassment when: submission to or rejection of this conduct explicitly or implicitly affects an individual's employment, unreasonably interferes with...

(203).
As can be seen from the above definitions, the strict legal definitions of sexual harassment apply only to employees but there have also been cases involving students at public and private colleges and universities (Lee and Greenlaw 123). Following the passage of the 1991 amendments to Title VII that provides for jury trials in cases of sexual harassment, the number of sexual harassment cases filed in the United States has significantly increased, and there are currently about 60 new cases filed each workday across the country (Preusser and Bartels 47). The economic outcomes of sexual harassment cases have also increased and currently average about $38,500 for settlement (Preusser and Bartels 47).

Some of the more high-profile sexual harassment cases in recent years have included an out-of-court settlement of $34 million to employees of Mitsubishi Motor Manufacturing. This case was filed by the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission (EEOC) as a class action on behalf of 300 women employed by Mitsubishi. In this case, the EEOC alleged that "the toleration of a sexualised working environment [was] manifested in managers attending 'audience participation' sex bars as part of Japanese business trips, obscene graffiti, male workers exposing themselves, the passing around of pornographic photographs of male workers engaged in sex acts, and verbal and physical assaults against women" (Mitsubishi lawsuit, 2016). The Court held that Mitsubishi's argument that the claims were barred by the statute…