Routine Activities and Sexual Harassment in the Workplace

This article draws from criminological research on victimization and on organizational models of the social context of sexual harassment to propose a routine activities explanation of sexual harassment victimization. The authors propose that certain features of organizations can be used to conceptualize guardianship as well as the proximity component of target suitability in the routine activities framework. The authors also discuss the features of individuals (target attractiveness) that may make them more or less susceptible to victimization, holding organizational features constant. They test hypotheses from a routine activities explanation of sexual harassment using data from a national company in the U.S. telephone industry. The authors find general support for the importance of both organizational features and individual characteristics in the prediction of sexual harassment victimization. However, they find little evidence that individual characteristics and organizational features interact in the production of harassment victimization, which is counter to a routine activities approach.