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.