Ending Sexual Harassment: Protecting the Progress of #MeToo

ABSTRACT

How can we best protect and safeguard the progress of the #MeToo movement? This article presents 11 reforms designed to ensure the movement’s drive toward justice. These fall into three areas. The first concern process reforms designed to (a) protect all those involved—accusers and the accused—in investigations of sexual harassment, (b) end differential treatment of those found guilty, and (c) ensure punishments are commensurate with the crime and proportional in terms of other transgressors. The second set of reforms focus on transparency of the process, including clarifying (a) how to file charges, (b) who makes decisions, (c) relevant public information on how charges and procedures are followed, (d) what transgressions result in which punishments, and (e) how complaints are investigated to protect the rights and privacy of all. Finally, I address cultural issues that address (a) our portrayal of women, (b) our societal attempts to prepare young people so they can better protect themselves, and (c) attempts to encourage bystanders to intervene in the face of sexual harassment of others.     

Changing Frameworks in Attitudes Toward Abortion

For more than two decades, legal abortion has been the subject of heated political debate and adversarial social movement activity; however, national polls have shown little change in aggregate levels of support for abortion. This analysis examines how the determinants of abortion attitudes have changed between 1977 and 1996, using data from the General Social Surveys. While in early time periods, whites were more approving of abortion than blacks, that pattern had reversed by the late 1980s. After controlling for other factors, older people are more accepting of abortion throughout the two decades, while gender is generally unrelated to abortion views. Catholic religion weakens slightly as a predictor of abortion attitudes, while religious fundamentalism and political liberalism increase in explanatory power. The associations between attitudinal correlates and abortion approval also change over this time period. Religiosity becomes a less powerful predictor of abortion attitudes, while respondents' attitude toward sexual freedom and belief in the sanctity of human life increase in their predictive power. Support for gender inequality remains a weak but stable predictor of abortion attitudes. This pattern of results suggests that the public is influenced more by the pro-life framework of viewing abortion than by the pro-choice perspective.     

Tracing Differentiation in Gendered Leadership: An Analysis of Differences in Gender Composition in Top Management in Business,Politics and the Civil Service

The aim of this article is to discuss the relationship between the gendering of leadership positions and sector‐specific structures within politics, business and the civil service in Denmark in the context of differences between the Nordic countries and other western countries. The analysis is based on data from a survey of top male and female leaders within the three sectors. The theoretical point of departure of this article is constructivist. It looks at gender as constituted by actions in social space, orchestrated by structural processes and a symbolic order of gender. This constitutes a cultural discourse on gender reflected in gender conventions in society and in a range of possibilities of gender positioning. Expressions of this are discussed in the analysis of the patterns of difference in structural conditions for women and men in leadership positions to be found within the three sectors. The structural conditions encompass access conditions and conditions for gendered positioning and are analysed on the basis of data on social background, education, career course, family, children and distribution of housework. The analysis shows that there is a correlation between gender composition of leadership and possibilities of gendered positioning within a sector. The results are finally discussed as possible expressions of an egalitarian culture.     

Linguists and other animals

Book reviewed in this article:
Joan Dunayer, Animal Equality: Language and Liberation     

贾宝玉“性爱体系”的层次界定问题

《红楼梦》中的贾宝玉有“情痴情种”、“天下第一淫人”之称。有人说他是泛爱者 ,有人则说他是专爱者 ,彼此矛盾。指出贾宝玉“性爱体系”的说法 ,并对该体系逐层递进的性爱层次进行界定 ,这将使得人们在“泛爱”与“专爱”的矛盾面前 ,不再显得尴尬 ,对作者的创作动机也会有深入一步的了解     

Person Perception through Gait Information and Target Choice for Sexual Advances: Comparison of likely Targets in Experiments and Real Life

Point-light and full-view short video clips of female walkers were displayed on a CRT monitor and male students rated the likelihood of selecting a walker for various advances. Relationships between the ratings, the walkers’ self-reported frequencies of being approached, gait cues, and self-rated personality traits were examined. In the point-light condition, raters selected slow walkers with a short stride length and personality traits implying vulnerability as targets for inappropriate touching. In the full-view condition, the raters selected fashionably groomed or physically attractive walkers as sexual advance targets. These criteria corresponded partially with reported occurrences of advances. Awkward movement impression was suggested as a kinematic gait quality influencing sexual advance target choice.     

Social identities and political cleavages: the role of political context

Summary. Using a novel method, the paper investigates the influence of social group identities on attitudes and on voting in a variety of political contexts. Examining the major regions of Britain, Canada and the USA, we find considerable national and regional diversity in the nature of social cleavages. For example, social class and race had widely different effects across societies, but within societies their effects on attitudes and on voting were very similar. However, despite that, age and religion had a similar effect on attitudes across societies; the effects on voting varied considerably. The significant within-country differences underline the importance of using region, rather than country, as the unit of analysis. More importantly, these results highlight the role of political context, especially competing cleavages and the structure of party competition, in the establishment of politically relevant social cleavages.     

Ethnic preferences and perceptions among Asian and White British middle school children

Asian and White middle school children were shown photographs of unknown Afro-Caribbean, Asian, and White individuals of approximately the same age as themselves, and asked which one wax most like them, which one they would prefer to be, which ones they would prefer to engage in various activities with, and finally, to allocate positive and negative traits to the three groups or to nobody. A similar majority of both Asian and While children selected an own-race photograph as being most like them, but only about a half selected the own-race photograph as the one they would most like to he. For sharing activities, children showed a strong own-tender preference, followed by an own-race preference. White children stated a greater preference for sharing activities with White children, then with Afro-Caribbean children, and least with Asian children. Asian children preferred Asian and White children the most, Afro-Caribbean the least. On a stereotypes test, similar trends were obtained; White children evaluated While children highest and Asian lowest; Asian children tended to evaluate Asian children highest but to a nonsignificant extent. The relative proportion of Asian/White children in school appeared to have little systematic influence on the results, thus arguing against the contact hypothesis of prejudice reduction in its simple form.     

Challenging sexual violence against girls: A social awareness approach

Most strategies to prevent child sexual abuse rely on therapeutic work with abusers or direct work with children training them to recognize and resist molestation. However, many authors, activists and professionals in this field assert the need to challenge broader social attitudes towards sexuality and violence. In 1992 an attempt at such an intervention was employed by Edinburgh District Council in their “Zero Tolerance Campaign”. This was a public awareness campaign which aimed to increase people's understanding of the extent and nature of violence against women and girls and to emphasize that such crimes should not be tolerated. Through challenging misconceptions, encouraging public discussion and focusing on strategies to prevent such crimes, the campaign organizers hoped to transform the social climate which is conducive to the abuse of women at any age. This article explores public response to the Zero Tolerance Campaign and, in particular, focuses on reactions to the two advertisements which addressed the sexual abuse of girls.     

Male Adolescents: Sexual Victimization and Subsequent Sexual Abuse

Veneziano, Veneziano and LeGrand (2000) found support for the victim to victimizer hypothesis of sexual aggression with 74 sexually abusive youth. This project, a further step in examining this theory (Burton, 2000, Burton, Miller, & Shill, 2002) builds on their ideas with data from 179 adolescent sexual abusers, and supports their findings. In an examination of relationships, gender, modus operandi, and acts, the sexually abused youth were likely to repeat what was done to them. This project also offers a further analysis of how victimization accounts for a significant portion of the variance in perpetration by these youth. Implications for research and practice are offered.