Imagine you have seen or been told of sexual harassment in your department, or experienced it yourself, and that you reported it, and that nothing happened: no one was held accountable, nothing official was said about it, nothing was done to decrease the likelihood of it happening again.

And so it happened again. And again there was no official response. And so on.

(I understand that this imaginative task will not be much of a stretch for some readers; for some it may actually be a remembering.)

In cases like this, of institutional failure, it may be that the only reasonable attitude to have is to doubt that any official action will be taken in response to sexual harassment.

If that’s the only reasonable attitude to have, and you know this, what kind of advice or support should you offer to a victim of sexual harassment when they report their experiences to you? What should you tell a junior faculty member, for example, or a graduate student, to do, if following the proper procedures will not help them (or future victims), but instead will likely just expose them to the risk of retaliation?

The question is prompted by this remarkable account of sexual harassment, institutional failure, and retaliation in the Department of International History at the London School of Economics (LSE)—a series of events which culminated in the resignation of historian Taylor Sherman.

The article also states that repeated and repeatedly unaddressed sexual harassment has been a problem in “a different LSE department,” and while it’s not named, it’s implied that it’s the Department of Philosophy. (The Department of International History wasn’t mentioned by name, either; perhaps the author of the article was advised to refrain from explicitly identifying the departments.)

The article says that, according to a philosopher who left LSE last year,

several women in a different LSE department have alleged that they were subjected to sexual misconduct by a senior staff member, but have not felt comfortable formally reporting their allegations to LSE. A former master’s student in the department said that she did not report because she had “doubts about the process” and was “pessimistic that any meaningful action would be taken.” 

Returning to the question of how to advise victims in such a context, one issue that may be relevant is libel law. In the UK, it is much riskier for individuals to publicly accuse others of wrongdoing; in the US, the person suing for libel bears the burden to prove that the claims made about them are false, but in the UK the burden of proof is borne by the one who made the allegedly libelous claims to prove the claims true (and not merely reasonably believed). (See this article on UK libel law and its “chilling effect.”)

Even where the law isn’t stacked against victims who might speak up outside of their institutions and official processes, worries about retaliation and the effects on one’s reputation and career might be enough to significantly discourage going public.

What, then, constitutes good advice or support in situations like this? Your suggestions are welcome.

NOTE: This post asks for suggestions about how to advise or support victims of sexual harassment in academia in contexts of institutional failure, and I ask that comments be limited to that. I will moderate (and if need be, edit) comments on this post accordingly. I understand that some of you may feel very strongly that you need to comment on some other aspects of this post. I get that, and if that’s really how you feel, still do not do so. At least not here. You have the rest of the internet; do it somewhere else if you must. What about if you want to say something that, while itself isn’t a suggestion about how to advise or support victims of sexual harassment, is relevant to it? Well in that case, also no. No guessing about who is or who is not harassing people. No accusations. No complaints about false accusations. No uninformed speculations masquerading as innocent questions, etc. Thank you. This note is brought to you by experience.

The post Sexual Harassment, Advice, and Institutional Failure first appeared on Daily Nous.