Harassment

Harassment covers a wide range of behaviors of an offensive nature. It is commonly understood as behavior that demeans, humiliates, and intimidates a person, and it is characteristically identified by its unlikelihood in terms of social and moral reasonableness. In the legal sense, these are behaviors that appear to be disturbing, upsetting, or threatening. Traditional forms evolve from discriminatory grounds, and have an effect of nullifying a person's rights or impairing a person from benefiting from their rights. When harassing behaviors become repetitive, it is defined as bullying. The continuity or repetitiveness and the aspect of distressing, alarming or threatening may distinguish it from insult. It also constitutes a tactic of coercive control, which may be deployed by an abuser in the context of domestic violence. Harassment is a specific form of discrimination, and occurs when a person is the victim of unwanted intimidating, offensive, or humiliating behavior. To qualify as harassment, there must be a connection between the harassing behavior and a person's protected personal characteristics or prohibited grounds of discrimination, and the harassment must occur in a protected area. Although harassment typically involves behavior that persists over time, serious and malicious one-off incidents are also considered harassment in some cases.