Imagine if you will a City gent, an intern and a stripper

The recent sacking of a London lawyer for acting inappropriately with an intern on an evening off may extend an employer's jurisdiction too far, writes LUCY KELLAWAY

SEXUAL HARASSMENT is a good thing: the human race would die out without it.

This was the verdict of a judge in Russia last month, dismissing a case brought by a 22-year-old woman in advertising.

She had claimed that her boss had told all his female underlings to "signal with their eyes if they desperately wanted to be laid on the boardroom table". She hadn't realised that he meant this literally and her eyes may have given an inadvertent twitch at some point; when she refused his subsequent and most unwelcome advances, he locked her out of the office.

The judge did not dispute the evidence but told the woman that her boss had done nothing remiss: on the contrary, he was simply being gallant.

With that sobering story in mind, now consider this tale of drunkenness and alleged harassment that took place 2,000km west of St Petersburg in London. The story began on a July evening when a group of City lawyers from Shearman Sterling went out drinking, as City lawyers so often do.

After a few drinks, the group fragmented, and an associate peeled off to the Windmill strip club in Soho, taking with him the summer intern, a young female Oxford graduate.

It isn't clear what happened once inside but, as a result, the girl filed a complaint to the firm's HR department, claiming that the associate had made suggestive remarks and tried to touch her.

The firm looked into the matter, decided the associate had acted in a way that was "deeply inappropriate" and fired him.

However, it was also made clear that, as the event was a private one, the firm itself was not liable.

In the past 10 days, City lawyers have been jumping up and down with excitement, posting their comments on the websites of the Lawyer, Legal Week and Roll On Friday. Almost all of them are disgusted and angered by the story, yet their disgust and anger take two rather different forms.

Half think the story is a savage indictment of life in the City, and shows how wretched it still is for female lawyers, especially young ones.

The other half are angry with the stupid woman, and furious that, in a wildly PC world, a lawyer lost his job without having done anything wrong.

"Hope she is pleased with herself for destroying his life," went one post.

The intern, they said, was to blame for being naive. "Was this girl raised on an Amish farm or something?" asked one posting.

Which side is right? I don't think either is, but they share wrongness equally. The man was an idiot.

You don't need to be a lawyer to know that strip club, summer intern and clumsy pass all add up to trouble.

The intern was an idiot too. Once she realised she was being taken into what its website calls an "upmarket tableside dancing venue" she should have said: "Thanks for a pleasant evening but it's been a long day and I must go home now", and taken herself off.

In itself, this was a story of two silly people on a squalid little night out in London, and is of no particular interest.

What has kept lawyers slinging bricks at each other on the internet is not what happened that night but rage at each other's attitudes. "I can't believe these posts" and "Oh my crikey some of these comments are horrifying" the two sides bleated.

Yet before one concludes that nothing has really changed in the 15 years since sexual harassment became a big office issue, it is good to think of Russia. Not even the most rabid of the posts was on the scale of the chauvinism of the Russian judge.

In that country, only two women have ever won cases for sexual harassment and, in one survey, 100 per cent of women claimed to have been harassed at some point.

The West is not like that and, if people still disagree at the margin on what sort of behaviour is okay and have an open discussion about it, that seems quite civilised.

Indeed, in my role as agony aunt, I solicit readers' responses to assorted office dilemmas - I can confirm that it isn't just on harassment that violent disagreement exists.

I haven't come across a single issue - ethical, pragmatic, strategic - on which sensible-sounding people don't disagree entirely, and none of this seems to get in the way of office life rumbling along fairly satisfactorily most of the time.

Yet two other things still trouble me about this story. The first is the response of Shearman Sterling. At first sight, it was most skilful: it neatly exonerated itself from any liability but, at the same time, proved it had zero tolerance by sacking the guy.

It was fancy footwork - too fancy, perhaps. If the company was saying the incident was none of its business, on what basis did it fire the associate?

And does this mean that it is now possible to be fired for behaving like an idiot out of work hours? If so, that does not strike me as progress at all.

The second question is less momentous, but more baffling.

Why on earth would a man take a woman to a strip club if he were trying to get off with her? In the film The Graduate, Dustin Hoffman is made to take the young Elaine out on a date.

He takes her to a strip club because he wants to put her off him so he can get on with seducing her mother instead. When Elaine sees a stripper twirling tassels on her breasts she asks: "Do you dislike me for some reason?" and then bursts into tears. - ( Financial Times service)