The Evidentiary Victim and the Preventive Gap in Workplace Harassment: A Conceptual Analysis of Legal Proof, Pragmatic Harm, and Employee Protection

Harassment Analysis Series — Law, Institutions, and Employee ProtectionPreventive Gap / Evidentiary Victim / Recordable Protest This working paper offers a conceptual analysis of the temporal mismatch between post-hoc evidentiary remedies and early employee protection in workplace harassment, termed the preventive gap. Three subsidiary concepts—the evidentiary victim, pragmatic harassment, and recordable protest—are developed to explain how legal proof and employee protection logics diverge in employment relations. The paper presents no empirical data and offers no legal advice; it is an exploratory contribution to employee relations scholarship. Version 2.0 substantially revises and retitles the working paper. The focus is shifted from the institutional failure of harassment prevention to the preventive gap between post-hoc evidentiary remedies and early employee protection. The revised version introduces the concepts of the evidentiary victim, pragmatic harassment, and recordable protest as subsidiary concepts supporting the central concept of the preventive gap. The previous version (v1.0, focused on a five-factor analysis of prevention failure) remains available in the version history for reference. Developed with AI assistance (ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity) for argument organization and language refinement; all analysis and conclusions are the author's own.