SEXUAL HARASSMENT

Anita Hill says harassment in the workplace has two sides; the behavior and the reaction

Sexual harassment doesn't wait for the workplace. If you're a girl, boys nudging you or saying sexual things to you are just part of life. It doesn't feel like sexual harassment; it's just the way guys grow up.

Boys say girls should feel flattered that some guy likes them enough to make sexual comments or to touch them. But the guy doesn't do it because he likes you, because if he likes you, he respects you.

Phyllis Schlafly, longtime critic of women's expanded role outside the home, acknowledged this early form of harassment. Soon after the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings, she said: "If a girl can survive high school, she ought to be able to deal with the office."

Hill vs. Thomas

During those hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee in October 1991, Hill told the nation that she had to deal with sexual harassment while she worked for Thomas.

In the battle of accusations that followed, Thomas prevailed to become a Supreme Court justice, and Hill became a national symbol for women in the workplace.

"I told the truth then, and I have no intention of changing that story now because it was the truth then, it is the truth now," Hill told Children's Express before a February speech at Purdue University. "But people choose to believe really what they feel comfortable believing. And a lot of people just would never have felt comfortable believing that an individual who is a sexual harasser could advance to a position of power.

"Unfortunately, it happens all too often in our society. And I think we are going to see more and more evidence of it. . . . People just don't want to believe bad things about people they've come to respect. And so I understand why it is difficult to believe, but that doesn't make it untrue."

Hill did not walk away intimidated from those hearings but has put her career on hold to engage in a national speaking tour on "Race and Gender in the 1990s."

At the hearings, she appeared stressed and rigid, her back stiff. In February, she was hard to recognize, she was so relaxed and friendly.

Defining harassment

Hill states that sexual harassment is an age-old, unfortunate tradition in our society. The line is often vague between sexual harassment and being "plain friendly," she said, but some high school leers and jeers might be forms of sexual harassment, according to her criteria.

"What defines sexual harassment is really two things. It is the behavior itself and then the reaction to it," she said. "The reaction to it has to be unwanted. And the behavior has to create a hostile or offensive environment. . . . So you can't really draw a white line saying this is and this isn't. You have to look at the totality of the situation."

Harassment in the workplace is usually more sinister, she said. "It usually involves a manipulation of power and abuse of power, and an individual trying to use their power to their own advantage and to the disadvantage to the people they've victimized."

It was this form of sexual harassment that Hill testified to in 1991. Then a professor of commercial law at the University of Oklahoma, she said Thomas had made crude comments about pornographic films and sex organs while she worked for him at the U.S. Department of Education and, later, at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Hill denies allegations that her impetus to testify was political revenge.

"When I testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, I testified because I was subpoenaed to testify," Hill said. "I testified because my affidavit had been leaked to the press. I had no intention of testifying. And I was not urged by any group to testify or anybody _ nobody put me up to it . . . When a situation becomes politicized, people will use it to their own advantage. And that is something that you have to live with."

Despite the harsh, sometimes insulting questioning of the senators, Hill's courage and poise appears to have given other women the strength to voice their complaints.

"A lot people (feared) that women would be afraid to come forward," she said. "But I think it really had the opposite effect surprisingly . . . and a lot of people were energized because of that. They just finally said, `This is enough.' . . .

"A lot of women say that seeing those hearings and realizing that they were not suffering alone gave them the impetus to come forward with their own claim. I think that the whole situation did have a positive effect."

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission logged a record 9,920 harassment complaints in the past year _ a rise of 50 percent from previous years. Still, some people, particularly women, fail to believe Hill.

She reasons that many women are skeptical because they have never been sexually harassed, or they do not consider some acts to be forms of harassment.

"I think that for many of us who have experienced harassment, that the hardest thing to face is when other women do not believe us," Hill said. "But there is a variety of women that truly do not believe, and the one real reason is sort of self- protection because they cannot come to terms that it could happen to them.

"One of the things that I have heard from women who said that they initially didn't believe (is that they forced themselves) to go back and think about their own experiences and then (they) started to realize, `Yeah, I've experienced this, too.' And they got a really better understanding of it. Or they talked to friends who possibly had." Hill's advice to victims

Hill says it is difficult to give uniform advice to sexual harassment victims.

"Every situation is individual," she said. "You cannot give blanket advice. You cannot say to everyone that you should confront your harasser because, for some women, that can be physically dangerous. You cannot say that a woman should always go to the EEOC and file a complaint immediately because there can be repercussions that she may not be protected against.

"What you have to get people to understand is: `What resources do they have available in their own situation?' `Is there counseling available?' `Are they going to be protected if they file a complaint?' . . . `Will they have the support of friends and family for filing a complaint?' So there are a number of things that you have to take into account."

Although Hill's testimony forced her into the public spotlight, she gained a lot from the ordeal.

"There are a lot of shared experiences, and what I've learned is to be open and to try to be sympathetic and understanding to other people's painful experiences, even (if they) are not like my own," she said.

EDITED BY: Robin Potasnik, 17