Harassment is a topic which, in the past few decades, has been taken increasingly seriously in the United Kingdom, and has been the subject of a number of pieces of legislation.
'[3] Harassment also occurs when, on the grounds of race, disability, sex, sexual orientation, belief or religion, an employer - or their agent such as another employee or a manager - engages in unwanted conduct which has the purpose or effect of violating an individual's dignity or creating an interrogating, degrading, hostile offensive or humiliating environment for the employee in question.
[3] 'In life one has to put up with a certain amount of annoyance',[5] but 'To cross the boundary from the regrettable to the unacceptable, the gravity of the misconduct must be of an order which would sustain criminal liability under section 2.
'As with any common English word, what amounts to harassment, alarm or distress in any given situation is a question of fact for the magistrates.
[8] Moreover, in the case of Hayes v Willoughby,[9] harassment was described as a persistent and deliberate course of unreasonable and oppressive conduct, targeted at another person, calculated to cause 'alarm, fear and/or distress.
'[9] Furthermore, following Pill LJ's judgment: 'To harass as defined in the Concise Oxford Dictionary, Tenth Edition, is to "torment by subjecting to constant interference or intimidation.
The marginal note to section 1 of the Protection from Eviction Act 1977 refers to "harassment of occupier".
There are also a variety of civil remedies that can be used including awarding of damages, and restraining orders backed by the power of arrest.
In Scotland the Act works slightly differently: Under the Protection from Harassment Act[3] ‘1(3) Subsection (1) [or (1A)] does not apply to a course of conduct if the person who pursued it shows— For example, shown again in the case of Hayes v Willoughby[9] where the defendant was making allegations against his former employer of fraud, embezzlement and tax evasion and engaged in a six-year campaign, writing to the police of the Department of Trade and Industry, among others.
'[4] Hence, the defence under Section 1(3)(a)[3] was not upheld: '[13] It cannot be the case that the mere existence of a belief, however absurd, in the mind of the harasser that he is detecting or preventing a possibly non-existent crime, will justify him in persisting in a course of conduct which the law characterises as oppressive.
[9] [15] ‘Before an alleged harasser can be said to have had the purpose of preventing or detecting crime, he must have sufficiently applied his mind to the matter.
He must have thought rationally about the material suggesting the possibility of criminality and formed the view that the conduct said to constitute harassment was appropriate for the purpose of preventing or detecting it.