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Sexual Harassment Litigation: a Road to Re-victimization or Recovery?

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Abstract

Various aspects of the judicial process have been hypothesized as damaging to sexual harassment plaintiffs, though limited research has been conducted that actually examines this hypothesis. We examined data from a large sample of women who participated in a class action lawsuit alleging workplace sexual harassment and discrimination (n = 1218) and another sample of similarly situated women who opted out of litigation (n = 465, non-litigants). We then followed the litigants for 5 years. This study takes an initial look at some of the variables theorized to play a role in the psychological outcomes of both harassment and subsequent litigation. Both the severity of harassment and participation/persistence in the litigation process were related to psychological outcomes at each of three assessments across a 5-year period; the frequency and severity of harassment, as well as plaintiffs’ cognitive appraisals of their situation, appeared to have the strongest relationship to psychological harm. Results of multivariate analysis of covariance (MANCOVA) revealed that participation and persistence in litigation played a consistent role in psychological outcomes across time, over and above the impact of harassment itself. However, litigation did not appear to be the cause of psychological outcomes as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptomatology, in particular, was the result of the original harassment experience.

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Notes

  1. Respondents were only included for analyses if they completed at least 50 % of the survey. This study was approved by the Human Subject’s Review Board at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

  2. The non-litigant sample did not receive either introductory letters from the law firm or follow-up; nor were they surveyed at time 2 or 3 (see Wright & Fitzgerald, 2009, for further description of time 1 procedures). The principle purpose of surveying the non-litigants was to determine their similarity to litigants to enable the ruling out of possibly confounding variables for understanding various litigation-related issues. Because they had chosen not to participate in the lawsuit, ethical considerations prohibited further contact.

  3. Newsletters did not contain data concerning participant’s emotional responses to their harassment. Rather, only innocuous data, such as job satisfaction, reasons for participating in the suit, and supervisor satisfaction, were provided.

  4. The accuracy of mailing addresses likely deteriorated across time, particularly with limited intervening contact.

  5. The version of the BSI administered at time 2 included fewer subscales; the satisfaction with life measure was not administered at time 2, which also did not include the women who did not join the class.

  6. Lack of differences across time periods in variables such as self-esteem and eating disorder symptoms appears to be the result of limited variance and limited observed power to detect differences. Further, limited observed power also marked analyses which compared the small sample of women who participated in mediation/arbitration with women who settled their claims. Finally, effect sizes were generally largest for the relationship between PTSD symptomatology and litigation status.

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Acknowledgements

This article is based in part on the doctoral dissertation of the first author under the direction of the second author, work supported in part by the National Institute for Mental Health under Award No. MH50791-08. Portions of this dataset were also published by Wright & Fitzgerald (2008); Collinsworth et al. (2009); and Larsen & Fitzgerald (2011). The authors would like to acknowledge the contributions of Linda Collinsworth, Fritz Drasgow, Nicole Allen, and Karla Fischer to earlier versions of the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Northwestern University, 676 N. St. Clair Street, Ste 1845, Chicago, IL, 60611, USA

    Angela K. Lawson

  2. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL, USA

    Louise F. Fitzgerald

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  1. Angela K. Lawson
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  2. Louise F. Fitzgerald
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Correspondence to Angela K. Lawson.

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This study was approved by the Human Subject’s Review Board at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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All procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (national and institutional). Informed consent was obtained from all individual subjects participating in the study.

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No animal studies were carried out by the authors for this article.

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Lawson, A.K., Fitzgerald, L.F. Sexual Harassment Litigation: a Road to Re-victimization or Recovery?. Psychol. Inj. and Law 9, 216–229 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12207-016-9269-z

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