Mock Trial Response

I worked on the case of Elyse Roberts. I was arguing on the side of the District Attorney's Office of the District of Columbia. My job with the case was to prove that Ms. Roberts was not sexually harrassed. Unfortunately, we were not able to prove this. In the end the jury decided that Kevin Murphy had sexually harrassed Elyse Roberts and the District Attorney's Office of the District of Columbia did nothing to stop it. At first I did not believe this was the right the choice. I did not think that Elyse Roberts had been sexually harrassed. However, after discussing the verdict a little bit in class I saw that I was wrong. I was looking at it all from the viewpoint of an eighteen year old, male, high school senior. The things that Kevin Murphy had done or said to Elyse Roberts just seemed funny to me, because he was acting like he was my age. If it were me, I wouldn't have thought of it as such a big deal, but now that I look at it from the point of view of a mature business person I can see how wrong Kevin Murphy was. Even though I still feel like Elyse Roberts was overreacting a little bit, it is clear that what Kevin had said was wrong and in the eyes of Elyse, it made her working in environment feel hostile and unworkable. Based on that alone it is fair to say that she was sexually harrassed.
Sexual Harrassment is a very tricky thing to describe. There is no clear defination of what is and what is not sexual harrassment. There are only a few guidelines of what it is and whether or not the woman is offended even if the man did not mean to offend her. Sexual harrassment, I feel is not a big deal at DHS. I think that in high school sexual harrassment isn't as prominent because for the most part, there are boys who are too afraid to do anything to mess with a girl because they are afraid of what it will do to their reputation. The problem of date rape, like in the second case, might be a little more of an issue. I haven't heard of any cases in our school where that has happened, but I wouldn't be surprised to hear about it at a high school. Boys think that because they are dating a girl for a while that means that he is entitiled to have sex with them or sometimes he will pressure the girl into having sex with him. He might not think it was rape, but if she didn't want to have sex with him, then she can call it rape at any time.