Coping with Sexual Harassment

School Library Journal

Gr 9-12 Each of these titles purports to give older teens help in handling a frightening or controversial or, in the case of beauty, frustrating area of life. Only Coping with Sexual Harassment succeeds . Material is presented in the guise of a case study, portrayed through diary entries and advice column correspondence. The personal turmoil stirred up by sexual harassment on the job or at school is thoroughly explored without becoming sensational. Factual material drawn from research and court cases is also presented. Ways of responding to and preventing sexual harassment are also given. This volume, which deals with both homo- and heterosexual harassment of males and females, will be useful to student researchers and also accessible to the teen caught in a situation of harassment. Constance Backhouse and Leah Cohen's Sexual Harassment on the Job: How to Avoid the Working Woman's Nightmare (Prentice-Hall, 1980) and sections of Gilda Berger's Women, Work and Wages (Watts, 1986) deal specifically with women's experiences. Cooney's presentation in Coping with Sexual Abuse is clinical rather than personal. Her material is accurate and current, as she differentiates between child molesting and sexual abuse. However she approaches her subject in such a matter-of-fact textbook manner that it is doubtful that teens in need will stick with it to get desperately needed help. Information is organized to help student researchers, with dry chapter summaries and discussion questions. Better titles include Louise Armstrong's Kiss Daddy Goodnight: a Speak-Out on Incest (Pocket, 1979; o.p.); Sherryll Kerns Kraizer's The Safe Child Book (Delacorte, 1985); and Anna Kosof's Incest: Families in Crisis (Watts, 1985). While offering solid advice on health, skin, makeup, hair, clothing, accessories, nails, and scent, Coping with Beauty, Fitness, and Fashion offers nothing new and has very few illustrations. Reading a Teen magazine article will be far more enjoyable, as would Jane Parks-McKay's The Make-Over: a Teen's Guide to Looking and Feeling Beautiful (Morrow, 1985), or one of the numerous beauty manuals by celebrities. Joyce Adams Burner, formerly at Spring Hill Middle School, Kans.