Responses of Nurses and Other Healthcare Workers to Sexual Harassment in the Workplace

Sexual harassment against healthcare workers is an international problem, but little is known about how recipients of sexual harassment respond to this type of workplace violence. An integrative review was conducted that summarized the findings of 15 studies from around the world that revealed how healthcare workers respond to sexual harassment. The review indicated that recipients of sexual harassment experience a wide variety of aversive feelings, including fear, anger, and shock. Some also experience negative psychological and physical harms and negative employment-related consequences. In conclusion, more studies using increasingly sophisticated designs are required to develop an explanatory model that explicates complex relationships among characteristics of the harassment, institutional responses, and responses of the recipients over time.