In 1976 the District Court for the District of Columbia, in Williams v. Saxbe, became the first U.S. court to recognize sexual harassment as a form of discrimination. In the years that followed, federal, state and local legislatures have passed a series of laws protecting employees from unwanted sexual harassment in the workplace. For employees working outside the United States, however, similar protections from unwanted harassment were not available in many countries and in fact still may be unavailable.
Although legislatures in many other countries have enacted anti-harassment laws, cultural barriers often stymie both awareness of the available legal protections as well as enforcement of the law through the judicial system.
