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Concept
Harassment
Summary
Harassment covers a wide range of behaviors of offensive nature. It is commonly understood as behavior that demeans, humiliates, and intimidates a person, and it is characteristically identified by its unlikelihood in terms of social and moral reasonableness. In the legal sense, these are behaviors that appear to be disturbing, upsetting or threatening. Traditional forms evolve from discriminatory grounds, and have an effect of nullifying a person's rights or impairing a person from benefiting from their rights. When these behaviors become repetitive, it is defined as bullying. The continuity or repetitiveness and the aspect of distressing, alarming or threatening may distinguish it from insult.
Attested in English from 1753, harassment derives from the English verb harass plus the suffix -ment. The verb harass, in turn, is a loan word from the French, which was already attested in 1572 meaning torment, annoyance, bother, trouble and later as of 1609 was also referred to the condition of being exhausted, overtired. Of the French verb harasser itself there are the first records in a Latin to French translation of 1527 of Thucydides' History of the war that was between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians both in the countries of the Greeks and the Romans and the neighboring places wherein the translator writes harasser allegedly meaning harceler (to exhaust the enemy by repeated raids); and in the military chant Chanson du franc archer of 1562, where the term is referred to a gaunt jument (de poil fauveau, tant maigre et harassée: of fawn horsehair, so meagre and ...) where it is supposed that the verb is used meaning overtired.
A hypothesis about the origin of the verb harasser is harace/harache, which was used in the 14th century in expressions like courre à la harache (to pursue) and prendre aucun par la harache (to take somebody under constraint). The Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch, a German etymological dictionary of the French language (1922–2002) compares phonetically and syntactically both harace and harache to the interjection hare and haro by alleging a pejorative and augmentative form.
Official source
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