Response from Charles Taliaferro on April 26, 2012

Great question. I suppose that if the person does not know she can easily and effectively extricate, then her not removing herself has no bearing on the gravity of the harassment (she may feel trapped and has no means of breaking a contract). Also, if the person can easily and effectively extricate herself and knows she can do so, but imagine that once she does she would be unemployed and perhaps face great hardship, then there would also be no bearing on the seriousness of the harassment. It also might be that if the person knows she can do the extraction and an alternative job exists, she suffers from a profoundly low self-image or she thinks (falsely) that she deserves the harassment. For all these reasons, I think the best way to assess the harassment would be to describe the case itself (e.g. does she have to put up with crude, relentless sexist jokes, uninvited sexual passes, has she been given unfair humiliating tasks when male colleagues are not, does her boss spill hot coffee on her "by accident" on a daily basis which appears premeditated, etc), rather than measure the seriousness of the harassment in light of whether workers can "easily and effectively extricate themselves from the situation."

It's still a great question, though, for sometimes we do assume that if someone remains at a job (imagine that it is a job making weapons) that she claims to think is unjust and yet she can easily quit and do some other line of work, we may well tend to think that her claim that her work is unjust is not too serious or deep.