Abstract
‘The legal treatment of sexual harassment in the workplace has produced difficult challenges for anti-discrimination law wherever this phenomenon has been recognised. In Ireland a large body of decisions on this issue has been built up over the last decade. Although an increasingly sympathetic approach to the problems involved can be discerned in decisions made in this period, the limitations inherent in liberal legal ideology persist. These are rooted in the tendency of the law to treat socially contingent, gendered power structures as natural, and in the enduring strength of the division between the public and private spheres. Issues such as employer responsibility, employee mitigation of harm, same-sex sexual harassment, and the analysis of evidence in sexual cases illustrate these limitations. This article points to some improvements which might be made in gender equality laws to deal with such issues while acknowledging that the effect of law is to regulate rather than prohibit sexual harassment in the workplace.’
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