The presented scenario offers a rather conflicting situation which I would definitely like not to be a part of. However, I realize that situations like this commonly arise at the offices and that there is a risk that I will be involved in the incident like this. My behavior in this particular scenario will be determined by how comfortable and powerful I feel within the group as well as the position of the people who are the leaders in laughing and distributing the potentially offensive joke.
If I feel comfortable and powerful around my colleagues, I would walk up to them and ask them to look at this joke from the perspective of female colleagues, their wives, and their mothers who might have been in a situation where they were forced to breastfeed in public. In other words, I would try to stimulate some empathy toward the victims of this joke in my colleagues and then try to get them to take this offensive post down.
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If I feel more like an outsider in this group, I will ask the person who started the joke to talk privately and would point out to him that this is inappropriate, against the code of ethics, and would ask him to delete it. If he does not respond well to this request, I will approach a higher manager with this issue.
Ideally, it would be great to make the people stop distributing offensive jokes once and for all, while at the same time not hurting the professional relationships with them because of this incident. Yet, I realize that this is not likely to get resolved in an ideal way and in the best case scenario, I can get people to stop distributing the joke but with them being unhappy with me, while in the worst case scenario, my attempt to intervene will result in my colleagues being mad or annoyed with me and the joke will start to spread even faster because of the conflict associated with it which will fuel office rumors.
