Brief Examination of Harassment Laws
Harassment laws are an area of law that has only recently become developed. Some harassment laws are a subsection of employment and labor laws. Labor laws have been slow to develop, and are a continual source of conflict. Labor law began to develop in the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries. Harassment laws began to receive a larger amount of attention at the close of the Twentieth Century with their areas of concern being expanded at the start of the Twenty-First Century. Harassment law which is under the auspices of labor law are concerned with the relationship between employers and employees, as well as the interactions between individual employees. Many harassment laws concerned with an individual’s rights within the workplace. Violations of harassment law may also cause perpetrators to have to deal with criminal law courts, as well as civil litigation, depending on the severity of the violation.
As with many other areas of law, harassment law is concerned with protecting the rights of those who cannot protect their own rights. Harassment law is generally meant to protect against nine different violations: bullying, psychological harassment, racial harassment, religious harassment, sexual harassment, stalking, mobbing, hazing, and police harassment. Bullying has begun to receive an increased level of attention recently from specialists in harassment law. After the January 2010 suicide of a fifteen year old girl in Massachusetts, the Massachusetts legislation decided to strengthen the criminal penalties that harassment laws levy against those found guilty of bullying. As a result of police finding in the investigation of the case nine different teens have been arrested for violating a variety of harassment laws. Charges filed include statutory rape, violation of civil rights with bodily injury, harassment, stalking and disturbing a school assembly. Bullying often violates many of the harassment laws which govern other forms of harassment. As a result, many states do not have specific harassment laws which criminalize bullying as a specific crime, choosing instead to prosecute under other violations of harassment law.
Racial harassment laws are also known as racial discrimination laws. Racial harassment law is concerned with the criminalization of acts designed persecute a person based on ethnic grounds or as a result of their skin tone. Sexual harassment law is closely related. Religious discrimination laws are similar, but are predicated upon harassment based on an individual’s practice of religion. Sexual harassment is defined as unwanted and unwelcome, words, deeds, actions, gestures, symbols, or behaviors of a sexual nature that make the target feel uncomfortable. sexual harassment laws protect both men and women from being harassed by members of the same and opposite gender. Harassment laws regarding stalking only take effect after the victim fears for their safety and their has been an unfair impingement upon their privacy. Psychological harassment laws are concerned with actions that lower a person’s self esteem or causes an individual torment. Another violation of harassment law, mobbing, has been called vigilantism. Police harassment law violations include the excessive force and profiling. Hazing is the violation of harassment laws against a person considered inferior by the perpetrator, and is usually done in a systematic matter.
