Anti-Harassment Training Is About More Than Avoiding Lawsuits

What may at first have seemed like a sexual harassment scandal confined to the entertainment industry has caused national and now global reverberations, forcing employers to rethink their approach to harassment prevention.

Training employees to avoid harassing behavior and to report cases of sexual harassment might seem like an obvious preventive measure, but critics say such training is usually an exercise in lawsuit prevention rather than harassment protection. ‘‘I think training is mostly something firms do as CYA,’’ Robert I. Sutton, professor of management science and engineering at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, told Bloomberg Law.

To avoid this perception, ...