Legal Regulation of Harassment on the Ground of Age: Lessons from America?

Abstract

While numerous articles have now been written on the age regulations1 they tend to concentrate on the broad detail of the Regulations and their likely impact in the United Kingdom, whereas this article, while also involving analysis of the legal rules, concentrates on one aspect of the Regulations namely, age harassment. It will also involve consideration of the equivalent law in the United States because they have a much more mature set of legal rules dealing with this type of activity. The difficulty of making such a comparison is that the legal rules in the two jurisdictions are very different and the UK version is much more favourable than its US counterpart. Nevertheless, it is this writer’s view that identifying the various problems that have arisen in the US with implementing their age legislation in respect of age harassment over almost forty years2 will prove instructive and valuable to those persons required to comply with the new law in the UK and offer valuable insight into the legal treatment of this issue.