At a time when news of sexual harassment in science has come to the fore again, here are some reminders about what’s really important.
It’s the victim, stupid.
Pamela Gay explains how the abusers are coddled.
In our field, we have faculty grabbing panties through dresses and asking for sex in their house under the cameras. When the victim is part of an investigation, they are forced to relive what happened to them while going on the record with people they may not even know. When all that is over, as history has shown, the abuser isn’t asked to apologize and generally isn’t punished. They are simply sent off to sexual harassment training.
Think about that. A woman who is sexually violated in ways that could be classified as sexual assault first gets repeatedly emotionally harmed by having to tell her story to investigators, and then she has to watch as the person who assaulted her is simply asked to spend time taking anti-harrassment classes, but otherwise faces few or no penalties. Until recently (still?), abusers have consistently kept their tenure, kept their funding, and kept their power. The woman? She is told she can’t talk on penalty of lawsuit for breaking confidentiality.
For the next twenty years or more, that abuser may sidle up to their victim and say, “You know, if you speak, I’ll sue you,” or “If you say anything, I’ll make sure you never get a grant again or publish another paper.” The victims are often people in the same sub-field as the abuser (that’s how they met), and they are likely to land on committees together. Imagine this scenario – the victim is asked to do inordinate amounts of committee work by her past abuser, and when she tries to complain, she is reminded, “You can’t complain about me; I’ll sue and claim you are retaliating against me for your old complaint.”
Hope Jahren has advice for allies.
Remember That It’s About Her, Not Him. This is also known as “Don’t make the mistake of overfocusing on the harasser.” I’m not saying this to demonstrate munificence, because I looked it up and it turns out I don’t have any. I am descended from a Viking warrior who would slaughter you for looking at her wrong, throw your entrails to a Great Dane and then use your skull as a goblet. It’s just that when you hear a car slam into a pedestrian, you don’t go running over there and say, “Oh car! Are you okay? Has your driving record sustained any short-term or long-term ill effects? Where-oh-where will you park now? You had such high miles-per-gallon, how could this have happened? What does this really mean about the manufacturing processes at Kia?” and so forth. No. You stop traffic, and you go see how badly the pedestrian has been hit. You ask her if she wants any help or if she wants you to call the authorities. You wait around to make sure it gets dealt with. You take down the license plate and document the details. Your biggest priority is to get her through this. Now that we’ve arrived in familiar rhetorical territory where men are metaphoric cars, let me say a little more. Wide-eyed naiveté notwithstanding, Dr. Bozo is not going to change. He’s been saying stupid shit since before I was born. He’s probably saying stupid shit to some poor bastard right at this very moment. Nope, unfortunately we must simply “anticipate cohort mortality” with a lot of these guys, as my Epidemiologist colleague might put it. Feminist actuaries have modeled this projection and assure me that we should see marked improvements within the next two-to-four decades*. But you, as a self-professed Ally, have a responsibility now. Ask yourself, “What will ensure that the pedestrian survives – no thrives – through this?” Better yet, ask her what she needs in order to thrive through this. Then put your heads together and strategize. And go get it.
I chortled at the “anticipate cohort mortality” line until it sunk in that she’s talking about my cohort.
Interesting comparison, that.
Yes, people, even the driver (usually) will stop & see if you’re ok if you’ve been hit by a car. Fun experience! Can’t recommend it, tho. But once that’s taken care of, the perpetrators still get coddled. Even unto the cop on the scene coaching the driver about what he did, even if that makes you, the pedestrian (or cyclist in this case) a liar who ran a red light.
How often is the pedestrian questioned, to prove, they didn’t ‘ask for it’ by wearing enticing clothes that enticed the driver to run them over with their vehicle; or didn’t say NO,emphatically, when they saw the car approaching them?
odd [not] how the common portrayal of LEO response to victims is to spring into action to find the perp and to harass multiple suspects until the actual perp unwittingly reveals themselves by relating their motivation.
I guess I should have taken the clue, that these are portrayals in a _fiction_.
I had nearly the same reaction – I laughed like mad at first. But though from what I gather we’re about half a cohort apart, that’s not enough to give me a joyfully long and productive life post-harassing cohort even if it was only your cohort that was the problem.
Sadly, your cohort is the problem now because your cohort are old enough to be senior tenured faculty now. The first candidates of the Milo Yiannopoulos generation of PhD’s are just being hooded now. Quite a number aren’t through undergrad yet. I’d rather create powerful incentives for institutional accountability sufficient to overwhelm any incentives for institutional cover-up, avoidance or silence. And it would be so easy! All we have to do is…figure out something that institutions want more than avoiding being seen as a place where bad things happen.
I’ll get right on that.
Okay, it’s off-topic, but once after an SUV driver cost me a thousand bucks (eventually reimbursed by their insurance, but it was bizarrely difficult b/c it took a while to identify the driver), the driver claimed that the accident was my fault for leaving unattended a small, easily overlooked (and yet valuable!) object sitting on the parking-lot asphalt.
The small, easily overlooked object was a Honda Insight, which Wikipedia tells me has the following stats which may be relevant:
Wheelbase 2,400 mm (94 in)
Length 3,945 mm (155.3 in)
Width 1,695 mm (66.7 in)
Height 1,355 mm (53.3 in)
Curb weight [Manual w/o AC]: 838 kg (1,847 lb)
I pointed out that many-if-not-all human children have a smaller wheelbase, are not painted a flashy New Formula Red, and yet are more valuable.
The offending driver did not reply.
The analogy fails with bicycles vs car (“not wearing a helmet, not being visible enough, did something unexpected…” there is such a thing as car privilege) but is otherwise enlightening, and yes, WTF is the focus always on the perpetrator?
The analogy works only insofar as people generally don’t assume you faked getting run over.
The analogy also fails if it’s a police car: they get out, shoot the pedestrian a few times and then they claim they feared for their lives.
Y’no, there’s something interesting here. PZ is SO lilywhite – maybe lilyblack? – Is he protesting too much? He’s actually sounding like Donald Trump!
wcorvi, what are you trying to say, exactly?
@timgueguen
“PZ is SO lilywhite – maybe lilyblack – Is he protesting too much?” is not just one but two loaded questions with no reference to what in the text was worth questioning. The rest was just and assertion attempting a simple connection with Donald Trump.
I’m hoping it’s some sort of Poe but, I’ve seen the more authoritarian minded parts pf the atheist/skeptic community this sad in what they think is persuasive for real.
Well, okay, not for every cop car.
But if the cop is inclined to blame the pedestrian for running into his motionless cop car @ 65kph, you know the odds that the dash cam “malfunctioned” are ~80%, and of the remaining ~20% of cases, well more than half of those don’t bother to delete because the corrupt cop has been given reason to believe that there’s no real accountability in the department and the footage doesn’t need to be kept secret from superiors to make blaming the pedestrian stick.
Despite deleting video supposedly being a firing offense in many jurisdictions (because it’s frequently done to destroy evidence and because it always violates public records laws), even the few boneheads that are both corrupt enough to blame the victim(s) of their blatant lawbreaking and brazen enough to delete the evidence and careless enough to leave video (from other sources) around by accident, you never hear the chiefs involved fire them right away for deleting the video. They never say, “I don’t have to investigate to determine whether this cockamamie story might have been plausible from the point of view of the officer. The officer deleted video. That officer’s career is over.”
The chiefs are always “relieved” or “surprised” or “happy” to find other video and “concerned” or “mystified” or “uncertain” or at most “disturbed” by the video deletion.
Unless and until the destruction of evidence is an instant firing offense, the corrupt officers are going to mostly escape the accountability that is supposed to come with dash and body cams.
Grrrrr. CD Smash.
Hope’s ancestor must not have realized that skulls make terrible goblets.
This reminds me – when that US military jet cut that funicular cable in the alps (killing several people), didn’t they catch the aviators trying to delete their camera footage after they returned to base?