Harassment Happy?

Most of you have probably seen references over the past few days to a survey conducted by the American Association of University Women purporting to find that a substantial majority of college students report being the victims of sexual harassment. A Google search a few minutes ago, for example, turned up 138 references.

The findings of this survey should be taken with a grain (at least) of salt. As the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) points out,

The American Association of University Women (AAUW) Educational Foundation released a report Tuesday claiming that 62 percent of students surveyed have been sexually harassed at college. The report’s definition of sexual harassment, however, includes large amounts of constitutionally protected expression, such as any unwanted “sexual comments, jokes, gestures, or looks.” This definition is so broad that the report’s conclusions are highly misleading and dangerous to free expression on campus.

Even the New York Times was somewhat skeptical:

The survey defined harassment in an unusually broad way, an effort, its authors said, to capture the widest possible range of behaviors that could fall into the category of unwanted sexual incidents, and to prompt students, teachers and university officials to reconsider episodes that they ordinarily shrug off.

Defining harassment as any “unwanted and unwelcome sexual behavior which interferes with your life,” the poll found that more than 60 percent of students said they had experienced sexual harassment. But some scholars of discrimination said that the definition was so broad that it failed to distinguish between behavior that was an ordinary, if annoying, part of living among other teens, and incidents that were “severe or pervasive,” the legal threshold used by courts to determine whether harassment has occurred….

The poll went on ask about what it called “examples of sexual harassment,” which ranged from unwanted “sexual comments, jokes, gestures or looks,” to being flashed or mooned, to being the subject of sexual rumors.

Somewhat, but not completely; the NYT concluded:

Ninety percent of the students never reported these behaviors to campus authorities, saying that they considered them “no big deal.” Nevertheless, more than half the women and a third of the men said they felt self-conscious or embarrassed as a result of the incidents; 35 percent of the women and 16 percent of the men said the experiences shook their self-confidence.

Well, something must surely be done, for we obviously can’t have college students who are self-conscious, embarrassed, or suffering depleted self-esteem.