Joseph Oncale was hired as a roustabout to work as part of an eight-man crew on an offshore drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico. Although he anticipated the usual rigors and dangers of offshore rig work, he did not expect to step into a scene from Deliverance. Not long after he came on board, co-workers and supervisors remarked, "you know you got a cute little ass" and "I'm going to get you," In addition, he was threatened with rape and while in the shower, other men attempted to force a bar of soap between his buttocks. Oncale went to the company's Safety Compliance clerk and complained about his co-workers' actions. However, he did not find a sympathetic ear. In fact, the clerk complained that the same men had harassed him and added insult to injury by referring to Oncale with a homosexual epithet. Eventually, Oncale quit and cited verbal abuse and sexual harassment as his reasons for leaving the job.
Most of those harassed were degraded about their masculinity.
He filed suit in United States District Court in Louisiana claiming that he had suffered workplace discrimination on the basis of sex in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The district court, however, granted summary judgment to the drilling company because there was no case law in that jurisdiction that provided a cause of action for same-sex harassment. Oncale appealed his case to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals who affirmed, based on an earlier case holding in the circuit that same-sex harassment was not actionable under federal discrimination law. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear the case.
Holding: The Fifth Circuit's decision was reversed The Court unanimously held that Title VII allows for recovery of damages based on workplace discriminatory activity as long as that activity occurs because of the recipient's gender. The Court analogized same-sex harassment to racial discrimination committed by a person of the same race and noted that in those cases, the Court bad found such discrimination to be actionable under federal civil rights laws. The Court found that there was no good mason to bar a claim of discrimination simply because both the plaintiff and defendants were males, so long as males were singled out for abuse. The Court observed that Oncale was not being harassed because he was a homosexual, but rather because he was a male.
| William Foote, Ph.D. Forensic Psychologist The Forensic Panel |
Dr. Foote comments: Oncale specifically opens the door (or floodgates) in all jurisdictions for claims arising from same-sex harassment. This poses a challenge for forensic practitioners. The fact is, little research has been done in same-sex harassment, leaving clinicians with a meager basis for clinical decision making in such cases. At the same time, we might expect that more cases of same sex harassment may be presented to practitioners to determine injuries to plaintiffs.
The research that does exist indicates that men outnumber women as targets of same-sex harassment. Between 22 and 44 percent of men who have experienced sexual harassment were harassed by other men. Between 1.6 and 3 percent of the women targets were harassed by one or several women.
Further, the research indicates that patterns of same-sex harassment differ from patterns that occur across genders. In a recent study conducted by Magley, Watkldo, Drasgo, and Fitzgerald in which 8,523 Department of Defense employees were questioned concerning sexual harassing, 83 percent of male respondents who had been harassed reported harassment consisting of mostly degrading traits about the masculine gender. A very small percentage of men (less than seven percent) reported unwanted male sexual attention, and an even smaller percentage (less that two percent) reported incidents involving sexual coercion. Women, on the other hand, experienced a somewhat higher degree of unwanted sexual attention (25 percent) and sexual coercion (5.8 percent).
The emotional impact of same sex harassment is similar to what has been observed in a broad range of cross-gender sexual harassment studies The most common finding is a positive correlation between the frequency of harassment and the emotional impact of that harassment. Women who were harassed experienced a broad range of emotional reactions. However for those experiencing same sex harassment, it was only subjective measures of physiological and physical health that were affected. Overall, the respondents rated their level of distress to same-sex harassment as relatively low as compared to the reactions to cross-sex harassment The largest number of men who experienced sexual harassment rated the experience as being not all that offensive upsetting or angering.
This research has its problems, however. For many years, researchers examining the impact of child sexual abuse of adult rape on men observed that when answering questionnaires, men tended to under-report the incidence and severity of sexual abuse. In contrast, oral interviews often produced higher rates and more severe reactions. Because of traditional constructions of masculinity, male victims have difficulty accepting a victim role, admitting that they were not in charge of the sexual activity, and connecting subsequent emotional reactions with the abusive events. These emotional reactions differ greatly from those of female victims because men tend to act out in substance abuse, violence, or animal behavior rather than experiencing the depression, anxiety, and social withdrawal characteristic of women's traumatic responses.
In reviewing the literature on same-sex harassment (in which males are the predominant targets), it becomes clear that both men and women have conspired to make little of this phenomenon. Many of those researching sexual harassment have been reluctant to move away from the male perpetrator/female victim paradigm. [For a thoughtful discussion of this issue, see the paper by Alan Vaux in the Journal of Vocational Behavior, 1993, Feb Vol. 42(1): 116-135.1 At the same time, men examining the topic are reluctant to ask hard questions of other men, perhaps out of their own sense of vulnerability and shame surrounding issues of victimization.
All of this suggests that the clinician assessing male victims of same-sex harassment should carefully query the plaintiff to determine not only what happened in the alleged events, but also the consequent reactions to those alleged events. To do less would serve neither the client nor justice.
