Most legal and scholarly definitions of sexual harassment refer to any form of unwanted sexual attention that occurs at work or in school. Sexual harassment may include, among other behaviors, unwanted touching, exposure to offensive materials, offensive joking, or demands for sexual favors. In the view of many scholars and activists, sexual harassment is best conceived of as a form of sexual violence.

The term sexual harassment entered public consciousness during the second wave of the feminist movement, in the 1960s and 1970s, and attention to the problem of sexual harassment was raised further after the 1979 publication of Catherine MacKinnon's groundbreaking book, Sexual Harassment of Working Women. Since that time, social psychologists, sociologists, and other scholars have developed a large literature on the topic, and ...