Youth Challenge

Unit 4: Tackling Sexual Harassment in Your School

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Resource sheet:
What’s so wrong about
sexual harassment?

Now we know what sexual harassment is – but what’s so wrong with it?

Think about some of the insults that you’ve heard used at school. Do any of these sound familiar?

You can probably think of your own examples.

Why are these expressions offensive?

Think about not only the words themselves, but who says them and who they are directed at. Why is it a bad thing for a boy to be called a ‘girl’ or an ‘old woman’? Why are so many insults directed at girls and women based on female animals?

Using insults like these is a way of exerting power over another person and a way of defining ‘correct’ behaviour for males and females.

Name-calling, such as these examples, is a form of bullying - sometimes it can be discrimination and against the law.

Either way, these words can make a person feel like they have no worth or value. And not only for a short time – if people hear the same thing over and over, it can shape how they think about themselves for the rest of their lives.

Sometimes people use these sorts of insults without thinking – it’s just a reflex action and they do it to be ‘funny’. Often, however, people seek to deliberately hurt and abuse someone else.

It pays to be aware of the sort of language that people use. Many of the words and phrases that get thrown around a playground are full of assumptions and stereotypes about what it means to be a ‘man’ and what it means to be a ‘woman’. Some of them aren’t too helpful.

Everyone has basic human rights and responsibilities. If these rights aren’t respected then we can be treated in a way that reduces our humanity.

So, while we have the right to be free from harassment and intimidation, we also have the responsibility to treat other people in the way we expect them to treat us. It’s a matter of mutual respect.

A famous psychologist, Abraham Maslow, saw it this way.

“We have a hierarchy of needs. For us to be fully human in a society we must be able to satisfy all these needs. If any one ‘layer’ of needs is not being achieved, then we cannot fully be human.”

Which level or levels of needs do the laws about sexual harassment apply to?

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