In this article the authors present the main results from one of two existing Czech studies on sexual harassment at Czech universities. The research was carried out in 2008–2009 on a sample of 832 students at 11 public universities and colleges. The results indicate that 78% of students have personally experienced teacher behaviours that can be characterised as sexual harassment. However, only 3% of them said explicitly that they had been sexually harassed. One of the reasons for this contradiction is the relatively low awareness about sexual harassment in Czech society. Even in academic debates, a narrow definition of sexual harassment is often preferred and the gender dimension of the problem is not considered. With this in mind, the authors discuss expanding the concept of ‘sexual harassment’ to include a gender perspective. They demonstrate the use of this concept in an academic setting and the outline main methodological challenges faced by the relevant research. Against this backdrop, they identify two contentious aspects of the conceptualisation of sexual harassment: (1) the relationship between ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ definitions and (2) the relationship between expert and personal definitions (scientific and lay’s definitions).
In the article, the authors respond to the main arguments that were voiced during discussions of the results of the project ‘Sexual Harassment in Universities: Incidence and Perception’, which the authors’ team carried out in 2008–2009. They do not aim to defend the research itself, but rather to analyse the dominant discourse on sexual harassment in the Czech environment from a gender perspective. This is because they see a refusal to accept gender as a relevant analytical category. They argue for the fundamental role of gender in the conceptualization of sexual harassment and for further refinement of its significance in gender-informed definitions of sexual harassment. In the authors’ opinion, these definitions do not sufficiently reflect the current state of gender theories. The main argument of the text concerns the relationship between sexual and gender-motivated harassment. The gender perspective offers an intrinsically coherent conceptualization of sexual harassment, including its causes and options for handling individual cases. In the article, the authors discuss the extent to which the gender order is a precondition for sexual harassment. This view allows them to think also about the less discussed types of sexual harassment (e.g. homophobic harassment) or to consider the ambivalence of some situations in which sexual harassment occurs (i.e. the dynamics of pleasant and unpleasant feelings, women’s initiative, etc.). At the same time, it reveals that power inequalities do not result only from institutional hierarchies between teachers and students, but also from the logic of the existing gender order.
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