Issue of Sex Harassment Vividly Personified by Hill : Rights: Accuser has provided a face to help public fix the problem in its mind. But will the impact be lasting?

Anita Faye Hill, Clarence Thomas, sexual harassment.

For a week, those two names, and that one issue, elements in a riveting real-life drama, have dominated Americans’ newspapers, their airwaves and, in many cases, their conversations.

When the current drama ends, however, what lasting impact will it have had?

By vividly personifying the issue of harassment in the eyes of millions of Americans, Hill may well have raised its profile and given it a place on the nation’s agenda that no amount of rhetoric or political lobbying could have achieved.

Much may yet depend on how the hearings scheduled to begin today are conducted and how the charges ultimately are resolved. But, according to pollsters, political scientists and others who study the way events shape public attitudes, the confrontation between President Bush’s Supreme Court nominee and a previously obscure Oklahoma law professor may be one of those rare defining moments in American social history.

“Our images about things are often formed by catalytic events that fix in our minds,” and affect how we view, an issue ever after, said Martin Linsky of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

And the images that tend to fix best are those involving specific individuals. “Personification is very important in this society,” said Andrew Kohut of Princeton Survey Research. By giving allegations of sexual harassment a face, Hill has “made the issue more visible” in a way that could last long after both her name and Thomas’ have faded from the headlines.

But the impact of major events often cannot be judged until long after they have disappeared from the headlines. The usual pattern is that “there is a short-term impact but no lasting consequences,” said UC Berkeley political scientist Laura Stoker. “There are exceptions, but they are exceptions for a reason.”

Those events that do have lasting consequences become icons in the collective memory of the nation. The attack on civil rights demonstrators by “Bull” Connor’s police department in Birmingham, Ala., for example, has for a generation shaped the way many Americans view civil rights issues. The death of actor Rock Hudson altered the way many perceived the AIDS issue.

On the other hand, the Iran-Contra scandal, although it caused a temporary drop in Ronald Reagan’s presidential standing, had almost no lasting impact on Reagan’s personal popularity. Nor has it changed how Americans view such underlying issues as the use of covert action to achieve national security goals or the balance of power between Congress and the executive branch in the field of foreign policy.

Several variables appear to determine whether a symbolic event has lasting power to alter the way an issue is perceived. One factor is the degree to which organized groups can seize on the event and use it to mobilize political force around an issue, American University Prof. Rita Simon said.

“Public opinion has to get mobilized by something,” she said. “It doesn’t happen all by itself.”

Two other key factors have to do with the issue itself: “whether it is readily grasped, and whether it has an emotional charge to it,” said Carole Uhlaner, an associate professor of political science at UC Irvine. In the case of Iran-Contra, for example, few in the public could quickly grasp what actually had taken place; nor could people easily identify emotionally with the activities of secret agents in faraway lands.

In the Thomas-Hill case, Uhlaner notes, there is a clear emotional connection, particularly for women. Whether the story turns out to be readily grasped is likely to depend on how the event plays out, whether the public accepts Hill’s charges as a clear example of unacceptable behavior or decides that Thomas is the party who has been wronged.

There is a high possibility, Kohut points out, that there will never be a “smoking gun” that will force those with strong views about either these specific charges or the underlying issue to change how they feel. Instead, the case may, in the end, merely reinforce what people already think, making those who are skeptical about sexual harassment more skeptical, making those who are concerned about it more concerned.

So far, there is little evidence that the fight over the Thomas nomination has changed the way people think about sexual harassment--few events ever have the power to actually change public attitudes--but it has clearly changed how much Americans, and particularly American men, think about it.

“What it does is it raises consciousness,” in the view of William Schneider, an expert on public opinion and politics at the American Enterprise Institute here. “Millions of women said, ‘Yes, this happens all the time, and you had better take it seriously,’ ” Schneider said. In response, millions of men were made aware of an issue that most had spent little time thinking about.

Although there is a widespread impression that men and women have drastically different views about sexual harassment, public opinion polling tends to contradict that view. Sharp differences do exist on how older people and younger people view the issue, with both older men and older women far more likely to reject sexual harassment accusations or to suggest that if a problem occurred the woman brought it on herself by the way she acted or dressed.

Among men and women, however, the available evidence tends to suggest that their views are quite similar, at least in the abstract. For example, an extensive 1986 poll done for Time magazine showed similar majorities of both sexes--roughly three in five--feeling that a man found to have committed sexual harassment should be fired.

And, when asked about the definition of harassment, 81% of women and 86% of men said a boss commits sexual harassment if he “pressures the woman to go out to dinner with him.” Similarly, 60% of women and 70% of men said that it was sexual harassment if a boss “insists on telling a woman sexual jokes.”

When asked if “women who complain about sexual harassment have often asked for trouble by the way they dress or behave,” 49% of women and 53% of men said yes, but 44% of women and 40% of men disagreed. Given the poll’s margin of error, those responses are statistically identical.

At least one litigator who has handled numerous sexual harassment cases expects that the Thomas controversy will make courts more receptive to women.

“I think the next judge that I appear before with a sexual harassment lawsuit may take this a little more seriously now,” said New York lawyer Judith Vladeck. “He will no longer believe he is being required to deal with some frivolous women’s case.”

Staff writer Marlene Cimons contributed to this story.