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Pathways to false allegations of sexual harassment
Author(s) -
O'Donohue William,
Bowers Adrian H.
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
journal of investigative psychology and offender profiling
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.479
H-Index - 22
eISSN - 1544-4767
pISSN - 1544-4759
DOI - 10.1002/jip.43
Subject(s) - allegation , harassment , psychology , false accusation , social psychology , personality , sadistic personality disorder , criminology , personality disorders , law , political science
Abstract A sexual harassment allegation is either true or false. Whether specific allegations are true or false is important to questions of epidemiology, clinical diagnosis and treatment, administrative and legal proceedings, as well as the welfare of actual victims and innocent alleged perpetrators. It is naïve and harmful to operate with the heuristic: ‘All claims are true’. However, the truth of many allegations is very difficult to determine, particularly as is often the case when there are no witnesses, no conclusive hard evidence, and the presence of a situation where both parties have divergent accounts of the alleged occurrence. There has been little theoretical or empirical work on what would cause a person to make a false allegation of sexual harassment. This paper gives an overview of the intricacies associated with sexual harassment investigations and enumerates 14 possible pathways to false allegations: lying; borderline personality disorder, histrionic personality disorder, psychosis, gender prejudice, substance abuse, dementia, false memories, false interpretations, biased interviews, sociopathy, personality disorders not otherwise specified, investigative mistakes, and mistakes in determination of the degree of harassment. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.