The Procedural Justice Project, within the Action Collaborative’s Prevention Working Group, will develop a perspective paper to explore how the principles of procedural justice could be applied to sexual harassment policies and practices. Literature from the social sciences has investigated how people view the fairness associated with policies and practices, a term called procedural justice (Thibaut & Walker, 1975). A system with high procedural justice, or increased fairness, is shown to result in several positive outcomes such as organizational commitment, trust in the supervisor and organization, perceived supervisor support, job performance, and increased tolerability of undesirable negative outcomes in varying situations (Colquitt et al., 2013; Brockner & Weisenfeld, 1996). Thus the Structures and Policies Subgroup will explore what can be learned from the procedural justice literature to improve sexual harassment policies and practices. The paper will:

1. Outline how the principles of procedural justice could apply to sexual harassment policies within universities;

2. Examine how taking this principled approach might be beneficial (i.e. lead to better support for those who have experienced sexual harassment; create more trust of the system; or contribute to creating organizational climates where sexual harassment does not thrive); and

3. Identify examples of policies or practices that align with the principles