The following is a summary of information available on the Metropolitan Police website (https://www.met.police.uk/), with a little bit of extra commentary by me.
This is necessary, as often vague and unsubstantiated accusations of harassment can fly around AA groups and be introduced into the subject matter of business meetings and group conscience meetings, typically to regulate conduct, to impose systems of policing and control, to punish, and to exclude. Harassment, as defined below, is a serious matter but represents a very narrow slice of the array of 'behaviours' that one is confronted with in AA. It's important to be able to spot genuine harassment. The severity of one's emotional reaction to others' behaviours is not a measure of how objectively unacceptable that behaviour is. If harassment is taking place, it's almost invariably best for a couple of senior members, with character, experience, and personal authority, to have a clear conversation with the individual in question. That typically solves the problem (the person either behaves or goes away).
Examples of harassment can include:
- Physical threat or menacing behaviour
- Personal insults and jibes
- Other personally abusive communication
- Other persistent, disagreeable, unwanted interaction
- Antisocial behaviour
- Giving or sending unsolicited gifts
- Unwanted phone calls, letters, emails, or visits
- Cyber stalking
... especially where a boundary is set (i.e. a request is made for the person to stop) and the behaviour persists.
A key feature of harassment is persistence: without persistence, it's not harassment.
Examples of sexual harassment:
- Sexual comments, jokes, or gestures
- Staring or leering at someone's body
- Using names like 'slut' or 'whore'
- Unwanted sexual communications
- Sharing sexual photos or videos
- Groping and touching
- Someone exposing themselves
- Pressuring someone to do sexual things or offering someone something in exchange for sex
Stalking is like harassment, but it's more aggressive. The stalker will have an obsession with the person they're targeting.
Stalking may include:
- Regularly following someone
- Repeated attempts to communicate despite requests to stop
- Repeatedly going uninvited to their home
- Hanging around somewhere they know the person often visits
- Interfering with their property
- Watching or spying on someone
It's stalking if the unwanted behaviour has happened more than once.
The four warning signs of stalking
If the behaviour you're experiencing is:
Fixated
Obsessive
Unwanted
Repeated
... it's stalking.
What harassment is not
The above definitions are very broad, but also set quite a high bar. There are a number of behaviours that might be disagreeable but do not appear, in my view, to meet the above tests:
- Ordinary mindless and thoughtless chatter and banter
- Talk (or sharing) that is vulgar, ill-tempered, gruff, blunt, or sour
- Criticism of a person's conduct (if measured and pertinent)
- One-off observations about a person
- Appropriate discussion by the group or other officers of someone's service
- A request by a group member to perform service differently
- Others' requests to stop certain behaviours (i.e. boundaries)
- Others' refusal to comply with your demands ...
- ... (unless, of course, the demand is a request to halt harassment)
- Someone's refusal to act as a sponsor
- Disagreement
- Suggestions
- Others' responses to one's own outbound communications
- Others' unwillingness or refusal to communicate, interact, or cooperate
- Others' sullenness or coldness.
Broadly, to qualify as harassment, behaviour must be personally abusive or physically / sexually threatening, and intrusive, unwanted, and repeated.
Other behaviours must therefore be tolerated. In my experience, simply avoiding interaction with the person is perfectly sufficient to achieve this. Avoidance minimises exposure to disagreeable discourse and behaviours and solves the problem without any unnecessary intervention.