Now that you don’t know what harassment is and what flirting is, we explain the differences so you don’t get confused.
This weekend a controversy broke out on social networks due to an inappropriate contact described as harassment, carried out by an Uber driver to a user Bogota.
While it was wrong to use a customer’s data to contact them for personal purposes, in the text it looks like a simple flirtation, which however was denounced as harassment by a supposed friend of the affected, why? Perhaps we are confusing the terms. According to the Royal Academy of Language, harassing is:
«Persue, without giving respite or rest, an animal or a person.»
While sexual harassment it is:
“Harassment that aims to obtain sexual favors from a person when the person who performs it abuses his position of superiority over the person who suffers it.”
Secondly, Colombian law also has a definition for this crime:
“Anyone who, for their own benefit or that of a third party and taking advantage of their manifest superiority or relationships of authority or power, age, sex, employment, social, family or economic position, harasses, persecutes, harasses or harasses physically or verbally, for non-consensual sexual acts, to another person, will incur in prison from one (1) to three (3) years” according to article 210A of Law 1257 of 2008 of the Colombian Penal Code.
By denouncing what the Uber driver did as harassment, they were accusing him of a CRIME, punishable by law. The problem is that the line between flirting and bullying is very fine and it is based on interpretation, that is, what for some people is courtship, for others it is already over the line. Or as the Catholic Lady says…
The difference between ‘flirting’ and ‘sexual harassment’ is directly proportional to the ugliness of the person who performs it.
Blessings.
– Catholic Lady (@SenoraCatolica) December 30, 2014
But bullying is a reality, let’s not fool ourselves, what we have to do is call each thing by its name. For flirting to become harassment, it must have the following characteristics:
- Be persistent and constant despite the negatives
- Affect the tranquility of the person on a recurring basis
- Blackmailing, taking advantage of a position of power
- Include sexual comments in an intense and explicit way
- Handle
- Contain threats and/or intimidation
- use violence
Of course, we leave you this «instructions» to differentiate between bullying and flirtingin English, but so clear that you won’t need further explanations… Don’t take it seriously!
Sexual Harassment and You from Rowan on Vimeo.
What do you think? Where does flirting end and bullying begin? Write what you think in the comments of this note, and share it.