Quote:
Originally Posted by 33girl
And it's up to the supposedly offended party - the sorority - to voice their displeasure. We always hear "if a person feels they've been harassed/assaulted/victimized they have. This doesn't seem to go the other way - if people DON'T feel victimized, some nebshit feels the need to go over their heads and complain about it anyway, and pays no attention to what the "offended party" actually wants or what would make them happy.
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I'm curious about this and maybe Kevin can help clarify here. The legal concepts of sexual harassment and free speech intersect in this situation. How does one affect the other?
My understanding of federal sexual harassment guidelines is that just because the recipient of the comments was not offended or did not report it, that does not mean that sexual harassment did not take place. Specifically, if two people are making sexual comments to one another and a nearby third party hears and is offended, that could still be sexual harassment. Therefore, there might be a problem with what 33girl just said (quoted above). So, hypothetically, if the House Mom heard these lewd songs, or a professor in her office across the street heard them, could those people still complain?
As I was attempting to educate myself, I came across this document from the American Bar Association:
http://apps.americanbar.org/abastore...0intro_abs.pdf
In it, on pages 18-21, the document discusses Bystander or Nontargeted Harassment, Free Speech and Title IX Claims Relating to Sexual Harassment.
Bystander or Nontargeted Harassment seems to say that the offended party needs to be in the same protected class or category as the target of the harassment.
Free Speech indicates that the First Amendment could be a viable defense against a sexual harassment claim.
However, I was then interested to note that section 6 "Title IX Claims Relating to Sexual Harassment" mentions "...the Supreme Court has held that students have an implied private right of action to sue schools under Title IX in case of teacher-on-student and student-on-student sexual harassment..." (pg. 20-21).
So, these ideas really seem to intertwine in this particular case of a fraternity serenading with a lewd song. I'm not a lawyer; so, I cannot comment on the merits of anyone's legal recourse in this matter. I'm just trying to understand for myself the line that gets drawn between free speech and sexual harassment and when one crosses from one side to the other.
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