| The
significance of including sexual harassment and social changes
as separate issues in the targets of research
Being a woman, and especially being
a young woman in recent post-/re-colonised world, is governed by numerous
contradictory pressures. One particular pressure is connected to sexuality
and power, the issues being intertwined also with gendered violence. The
leader of the network, Vappu Sunnari, defines violence as any action
or structure that diminishes another human being and as a brutal means
by which people seek control over the other. Sunnari understands sexual
harassment as unwanted and unwelcome sexual advances, request for sexual
favours and other verbal or physical conduct, which is related to the sex
or gender of the person in a context of formal or informal power imbalance. She,
however, thinks this definition to be unsatisfactory. When discussing harassment, you always deal with issues connected with
relations: there
are people who act, and people who experience the acts in some way. This
situation produces the possibility that the aims of the acts and the experiences
they produce are conflicting.
The term gender, Sunnari uses as
an analytical and context-bound tool, which means that she understands
gender and issues connected with gender to be characteristically historical
and cultural phenomena. She thinks that different ideological, institutional
and discursive formations and belief systems appear to constitute the central
basis on which people value and locate their material and ideal world and
its events and processes, and that belief systems connected with gender
are one part of these formations. (See e.g. Sunnari's doctoral thesis 1997.
Her comprehension is influenced for example by Scott 1986; Hirdman 1990,
1994; Connell 1987, 1995; Acker 1991) She further thinks that the shaping
of gender(s) contains different processes. One of them is the creation
of differences and discriminations between the sexes and between people
of different sexual orientations. Other gendering processes are the construction
of symbols and images that explain the discriminations and different norms
which visibly and invisibly direct people's actions and behaviour on the
basis of what is "right" and what is "wrong" for each gender. In addition
to processes, we think that institutional structures are also gendered.
One form of gendered violence also
in educational institutions is sexual harassment, the issues having been
almost out of the school-violence discussions and also out of the discussions
in teacher education in Nordic countries and in North-West Russia. Some
surveys on sexual harassment have been conducted in higher education (e.g.
by Teija Mankkinen, T. Varjus, M. Sinkkonen and A. Rautio with her co-researchers
in Finland in the mid 1990's). The results of the surveys are contradictory
in many ways, although they show that sexual harassment in higher education
is surprisingly common. The results and contradictions arising from them
create a need for further research on the issues in more detail and also
with qualitative approaches. We have even fewer studies of that quality.
One example of them is the one conducted in Stockholm by Kullenberg and
Ehrenlans in the mid 1990s. Sanna Aaltonen, from Helsinki, Finland, who
is a participant in the network, and is applying for an individual grant,
is preparing her doctoral thesis on the topic. You also can find some articles
where the topic is mentioned. (e.g. articles written by Kerstin Hägg
from Umeå, Sweden; Anne-Lise Arnesen from Oslo, Norway; Elina Lahelma,
Tuula Gordon and Hannele Saarikoski, from Finland). Also there is some
mention about female teachers and student teachers as targets of sexual
harassment in some texts. (In Finland in some texts written by Vappu Sunnari,
Elina Lahelma, and Matti Haikonen). One of the special challenges on the
topic area is, what is the influence of organisational culture and structure
on the occurrence of sexual harassment. (Timmerman & Bajema 1999, 7,
18.)
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