Sexual Justice: Supporting Victims, Ensuring Due Process, and Resisting the Conservative Backlash

A pathbreaking work for the next stage of the #MeToo movement, showing how institutions can address sexual harms with fairness to both victims and the accused

In the past few years, a remarkable number of sexual harassment victims have come forward with their stories, demanding consequences for their assailants and broad societal change. Each prominent allegation, however, has also set off a wave of questions—some posed in good faith, some distinctly not—about the rights of the accused. The national conversation has grown polarized, inflamed by a public narrative that wrongly presents feminism and fair process as warring interests.

Sexual Justice is an intervention, pointing the way to common ground. Drawing on the core principles of civil rights law, and the personal experiences of victims and the accused, Alexandra Brodsky details how schools, workplaces, and other institutions can—indeed, must—address sexual harassment in ways fair to all. She shows why sexual harms cannot be treated solely as a criminal matter, but require a response from the organization where the abuse occurred. She outlines the key principles of fair proceedings, in which both parties get to present their side of the story to unbiased decision-makers. And she explains how to resist the anti-feminist backlash, which hijacks the rhetoric of due process to protect male impunity.

Vivid and eye-opening, at once legally rigorous and profoundly empathetic, Sexual Justice clears up common misunderstandings about sexual harassment, traces the forgotten histories that underlie our current predicament, and illuminates the way to a more just world.