The long, twisted path for sexual harassment victims to find legal justice

Sexual harassment is illegal in every American workplace. It doesn’t matter if the perpetrator is a supervisor or a co-worker; it's a form of gender discrimination under the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

But using this law to pursue legal action against your employer is a long and confusing process.

It’s not as simple as filing a lawsuit against your employer and finding ways to prove the harassment occurred. Rather, there is a winding path that tries to get the accuser to resolve the case with their employer and come to a mutual agreement before even allowing the accuser to litigate the case in court. And when they get to court, the deck is stacked against the accuser to an extreme degree.

In short, the legal system fails victims of sexual harassment.

The process starts when an accuser files a complaint with the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Walk through this flowchart to see how tangled the process is, and how difficult it can be to get justice through the current system:

Help our reporting

Have you filed a workplace sexual harassment complaint through the EEOC? Contact alexia@vox.com to share your story and complaint (Vox will not publicly identify you without your explicit consent).

Will you join us?

Our biggest supporters are our readers — and we’re so grateful to everyone who has made a contribution during our September campaign. We’re less than 1,000 contributions away from reaching our goal for the month, which in turn will allow us to say yes more often when our incredible journalists come to us with questions they want to answer and projects they want to pursue. Will you make a contribution before the month ends and support our policy coverage through 2024 and beyond?

One-Time Monthly Annual

$5/month

$10/month

$25/month

$50/month

Other

$

Yes, I'll give $5/month

Yes, I'll give $5/month

We accept credit card, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. You can also contribute via