Women and Gender

Cohen: Sexual harassment of SU grad proves need for stricter prosecution policies

Sexual harassment in the workplace is a form of gender discrimination and creates a significant barrier in allowing people to do their jobs. It’s important that there are policies in place to protect workers and to prosecute those who harass them.

Last week, a New York court ruling failed to protect a Syracuse University graduate who filed a sexual harassment case against her boss. This treatment of young people is unfair and degrading.

Lihuan Wang was a 22-year-old unpaid intern at Phoenix Satellite Television U.S. from December 2009 to January 2010 while getting her master’s degree in journalism from SU.

She experienced sexual advances from the station’s Washington, D.C., bureau chief, Zhengzhu Liu, according to the lawsuit. Liu allegedly lured Wang and other female interns to his hotel room under the pretense of business discussions.

Wang lost the lawsuit on the grounds that she did not receive a salary, and is therefore not considered a company employee. Unpaid interns are not protected under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, meant to outlaw major forms of discrimination
Like Wang, interns are oftentimes college students. Not protecting them against sexual harassment makes them incredibly vulnerable.



An internship is an opportunity to learn and grow, and safety should not be compromised.

This injustice is particularly detrimental toward women. A Huffington Post poll from August found that one in five women said they’d been harassed by a boss, and one in four said they had been harassed by another coworker.

It’s frustrating to see that little has changed since 1994, when nursing student Bridget O’Connor lost her sexual harassment suit against the Rockland Psychiatric Center in New York, where she interned.

One of the doctors allegedly began to refer to her as Miss Sexual Harassment, told her that she should participate in an orgy and suggested that she remove her clothing before meeting with him. Other women in the office made similar claims.

It continues to be a recurring problem for the United States to create laws that are inclusive to all people who may experience harassment in the workplace.

A sharply divided Supreme Court made it harder for Americans to sue businesses for discrimination this summer. In Vance v. Ball State University, an African-American worker accused her supervisor of racial harassment.

The court decided that the person she accused was a coworker and not a supervisor.

The court’s conservatives then ruled that a person must be able to hire and fire someone to be considered a supervisor in discrimination lawsuits, making it harder to blame a business for a coworker’s sexism or racism.

Workers should be able to press charges for employment discrimination when it occurs. It’s only humane to make this process accessible for someone who has already been abused in some way.

Currently, only Oregon offers legal protection from sexual harassment to unpaid interns — and that law was just passed in June.

A supervisor of an internship position still acts as an intern’s boss, and oftentimes has the ability to terminate their employment, even if unpaid. If he or she sexually harasses an intern, the same scenario should play out if it were salaried employment.

There’s no excuse for ignoring claims of sexual harassment from interns. This sends the message that they are not people who deserve equal rights.

The current system in place allows for repeated abuse of young, college-aged men and women, and the cycle should end before more interns suffer.

Laura Cohen is a junior magazine journalism and women’s and gender studies major. Her column appears weekly. She can be reached at [email protected].





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