The terms ‘bullying’ and ‘harassment’ are often used interchangeably. However, the former does not appear in the Equality Act 2010, which focuses specifically on harassment.
Bullying may be characterised as offensive, intimidating, malicious or insulting behaviour, or an abuse or misuse of power through means that undermine, humiliate, denigrate or injure the recipient.
Harassment is defined in section 26 of the Equality Act 2010 as unwanted conduct related to a relevant protected characteristic and which violates a person’s dignity or has the purpose or effect of creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment.
The relevant protected characteristics are:
These behaviours may be displayed by an individual towards another individual or involve groups of people.
Any unwanted behaviour which affects the dignity of individuals or groups in the workplace may constitute harassment, and, as such, should never be allowed or tolerated.
There does not need to be a pattern of persistent unwanted behaviour for it to amount to harassment. Isolated incidents might be considered harassment if the action is demeaning or humiliating to the recipient.
Harassment can be verbal or non-verbal and need not happen face-to-face. Behaviours might include but are not limited to:
It is important to recognise that the perpetration of harassment via electronic means of communications such as social media and email has significantly increased over time, so due attention should be paid to ensuring this dimension is fully tackled when addressing workplace bullying and harassment.
You consider yourself a hard worker and you always work your hours, but work-life balance is important to you. You try to leave the office before 7pm and do not check emails over the weekend. Your line manager constantly criticises you and says you are not putting in the hours required to achieve results. One day your line manager tells you the real problem is that you do not have a good work ethic. From that moment onward, you notice your line manager is excluding you from development opportunities that could really benefit your career.
It is indeed possible that in this scenario your manager may be guilty of harassing you. They have unrealistic expectations and instead of trying to negotiate a better way of working with you, they adopt behaviours that have a negative impact on your career opportunities. At this stage, if you feel you are able to, it may be advisable to bring these concerns directly to your manager. If this brings no changes, you may have grounds for a harassment claim.
Sexual harassment can be verbal, non-verbal or physical conduct including unwelcome sexual advances, inappropriate touching, forms of sexual assault, sexual jokes, displaying pornographic photographs or drawings, or sending email with material of a sexual nature.
(Dependent on the type of harassment, legal action can also be pursued as a criminal or civil matter using the Protection from Harassment Act 1997. Such cases would include stalking, unwanted calls, texts, letters and online abuse including on social media).
One of your colleagues is showing pictures on their mobile phone to a group of co-workers. From across the office, you overhear some of their remarks about the pictures and you find them inappropriate. You choose not to say anything there and then but over the next few days you realise that those comments are making you uncomfortable around that colleague and this is affecting your ability to perform well in the workplace.
We would need more details to make a definitive decision, but this scenario could well amount to harassment as your colleague’s behaviour was inappropriate and perceived by you as offensive, although you were not directly targeted.
You could therefore have good grounds to bring a harassment claim against your colleague. Even if you decide not to make a formal complaint, it is still recommended that you raise your concern informally with your colleague (or if you do not feel confident enough to do so, with HR or your colleague’s line manager) so the inappropriate behaviours can be addressed and the likelihood of these happening again significantly reduced.
Men and women can be both victims and perpetrators of sexual harassment and their experiences can differ. Studies have found that men who complain of sexual harassment tend to be believed less, liked less and punished more.
However, evidence continues to suggest that women are more likely to be sexually harassed, and perpetrators of more serious harassment tend to be male (McDonald, P and Charlesworth, S. (2015) Workplace sexual harassment at the margins, Work, employment and society, pages 1 to 17).
