Sexual harassment in schools : issues of identity and power : negotiating the complexities, contexts, and contradictions of this everyday practice

Based on empirical qualitative research undertaken with students and teachers in both co-educational and single sex boys' and girls' high schools in Australia, this chapter explores the multiple, complex and contradictory nature of sexual harassment. This research reinforces the view of sexual harassment in schools as a widespread socio-cultural phenomenon, but it goes further to suggest that this practice is integral to the constitution and regulation of identities. It also examines the ways in which sexual harassment is utilised to constitute and regulate schooling practices and organisational hierarchies of power, such as those associated with authority. To understand sexual harassment, a feminist poststructuralist and discursive theoretical approach is incorporated in this discussion (Doughty, 2006; Foss & Rogers, 1994; Robinson, 200Sc; Wood, 1994), with a particular focus on the ideas and concepts of Michel Foucault.