Hi, my name is Jennifer Hancock. I'm the author of the bully vaccine and founder of humanist learning systems. And this is ending harassment and retaliation in the workplace. In this program, I'm going to discuss how to end harassment and retaliation in the workplace using something called operant conditioning. Now, I'm going to explain what that is. But for right now, let's understand that harassment occurs in many forms, and almost always attempts to get it to stop or we're going to result in retaliation of some sort.

In this program, we're going to discuss what harassment is why retaliation occurs so that we can better understand the retaliation dynamic as a process so that we can learn what exactly has to happen to make it stop. And again, this is a science based program using behavioral science and operant conditioning as our guide. Let's start with harassment. There are several definitions of harassment but I'm going to use the one I like the most floor. I'm in Florida, Florida State law defines harassment as a course of conduct directed at a specific person which causes substantial emotional distress to that person and serves no legitimate purpose. It goes on to say that this course of conduct means a pattern of conduct composed of a series of acts over a period of time.

However short, that evidence is a continuity of purpose, the purpose being to harass the other person. The term harassment does not include constitutionally protected activity, such as picketing, or other organized protests. Alright, so if there's a legitimate purpose to the behavior, it's not harassment, even though you might be harassing the person is, it's only legally a crime. If the behavior says serves no legitimate purpose. Now, a single obnoxious Statement no matter how rude it is, is not harassment because it's only a single as it's not a pattern of behavior, a series of noxious statements designed to denigrate or dehumanize person over a period of time. Is harassment.

All right? Now, you might wonder why I started with state law. And the reason is because in Florida as in most states, harassment, when it's done willfully, maliciously and repeatedly is considered a crime. That crime is called stalking. All right, which is why most states have legal definitions of what harassment is now harassment is also illegal in the workplace for protected classes. All right.

Now, you may have noticed that this definition does not concern itself with the reasons why the behavior is happening, or what form it takes. All right, and I said harassment not just behavior that has oppression Even if it harasses is not harassment, harassment serves no legitimate purpose, right? So it doesn't matter why it's happening. It doesn't matter what form it takes. All right, if you intentionally inflict emotional harm on someone for no good reason, you have harassed them. Now, in the workplace, certain forms of harassment are illegal.

And whether they're illegal, and rise to the level of stalking or not, is up to debate now specifically, it's illegal to harass someone because of their race, color, religion, sex, their gender, national origin, age over 40 and or disability. All right, these are the protected classes. These forms of harassment are illegal when they create a hostile work environment or when and during harassment becomes a condition of continued employment. All right. Now again, even if you're not in a protected classes, could still be considered criminal behavior. But well, you know, we're going to talk about how to get to stop.

So I'm not going to get too much into the detail on on that. Now, what's interesting about the protected classes, you know, race, color, religion, sex, gender, national origin, age and disability, is that they pretty much match up with a study done on verbal bullying. Exactly. They match up exactly, not pretty much. There's a Dr. Lieberman at MIT did a study on verbal and cyber bullying, and he found that 95% of bullying, verbal bullying was about six things 95% were about six things. These six things were race, ethnicity, sex, appearance, intelligence, and social inclusion or exclusion.

There are a reason these six things are repeatedly uses insults to denigrate off others so often. It's because it works because you can't really change these things about yourself. harassment is really just an adult form of bullying. And the part of it that's really important that is applicable to this problem is that it the harassment is almost always done to socially include or exclude people through the use of power through the use of dehumanizing people through these comments.