What is Harassment?
Harassment is unwanted behaviour related to a protected characteristic that violates someone's dignity or creates an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating, or offensive environment. It can be physical, verbal, or non-verbal, and can be intentional or unintentional. It also includes treating someone unfairly because they accepted or rejected such behaviour in the past. This behaviour can impact an individual's learning, working, or social life.
Protected characteristics under the Equality Act 2010 include age, disability, gender reassignment, pregnancy or maternity, race, colour, nationality, ethnic or national origin, religion or belief, sex or sexual orientation.
Examples of harassment include:
- Unwanted Physical Conduct: Touching, pinching, pushing, grabbing, brushing past someone, invading their personal space, unwanted sexual advances, requests for sexual favours, and other verbal and physical conduct of a sexual nature.
- Offensive Comments or Gestures: Intimidating comments, insensitive jokes or pranks.
- Mocking or Belittling: Making fun of or mimicking a person’s disability.
- Derogatory Remarks: Racist, sexist, homophobic or ageist jokes, or stereotypical remarks about a particular ethnic or religious group or gender.
- Outing: Revealing or threatening to out someone’s sexual orientation without their consent.
- Exclusion: Ignoring or deliberately excluding someone from conversations or a social activity.
A person can feel harassed even if they were not the intended target. For example, someone might feel harassed by racist jokes about a different ethnic group if the jokes create an offensive environment.
Hate Crimes: Some forms of harassment are considered hate crimes. A hate crime or incident involves any act of violence or hostility against a person or property motivated by prejudice towards someone based on a protected characteristic.
What is Bullying?
Bullying is never okay. It can be difficult to understand what it is unless you’ve experienced or witnessed it. Here are some helpful definitions:
Bullying
Bullying is offensive, intimidating, malicious or insulting behaviour involving the misuse of power that can make a person feel vulnerable, upset, humiliated, undermined or threatened. Power does not always mean being in a position of authority, but can include both personal strength and the power to coerce through fear or intimidation.
Bullying can take the form of physical, verbal and non-verbal conduct. Non-verbal conduct includes postings on social media outlets. Bullying may include, by way of example:
- shouting at, being sarcastic towards, ridiculing or demeaning others
- physical or psychological threats
- overbearing and intimidating levels of supervision
- inappropriate and/or derogatory remarks about someone's performance
- abuse of authority or power by those in positions of seniority
- deliberately excluding someone from meetings or communications without good reason
If you want to talk to someone, please contact an advisor. Or alternatively, you can make an anonymous disclosure which will allow us to investigate if there are multiple instances in one area.