Four out of 10 academics in Sweden have experienced threats, harassment or both, a new report has found, with students the most frequent perpetrators.
Almost 3,000 members of the Swedish Association of University Teachers and Researchers (SULF) responded to a survey conducted by the Swedish Secretariat for Gender Research at the University of Gothenburg. Of those who had been threatened or harassed in the past year, 49 per cent said the perpetrator of the most recent incident was a student, while 19 per cent said a colleague at the same institution was responsible.
Only 14 per cent of respondents said the perpetrator was not active at any university, although this figure rose to 19 per cent among academics conducting research on subjects “that have been the subject of debate in the media”, such as health, gender, migration and climate research.
“I didn’t expect this to be an internal problem to the extent that it seems to be,” said report author David Brax, a senior investigator at the gender research secretariat. The findings should influence universities’ approach to combating harassment, he said: “It won’t help locking doors if the source of the problem is inside the building already.”
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Women were more likely to be victimised, with 45 per cent reporting experiences of harassment or threats compared to 32 per cent of men. The most common forms of harassment were threatening emails, threatening statements made in person and threats made on social media.
Researchers working in certain fields were particularly vulnerable, with 47 per cent of respondents working in the humanities and 43 per cent of those in social sciences reporting they had been threatened or harassed. Still, levels remained high in other subject areas: 34 per cent of researchers in medicine and 32 per cent in “natural sciences, technology and agriculture” also reported exposure.
The survey further indicated that researchers with public profiles were at greater risk: 51 per cent of those who engaged widely in research communication reported exposure to threats or harassment, as did 57 per cent of those who were highly active on social media. A fifth of survey respondents said they had “refrained from speaking as a researcher” due to their experiences, while almost 30 per cent said they had “avoided engaging [with] a specific issue” and a sixth said they had considered leaving academia altogether.
Dr Brax told Times Higher Education that it was “dangerous for society as a whole” for scientists to be dissuaded from research communication, “in particular if there is unequal distribution in the types of perspectives and subject matters targeted”. Institutional responses to harassment, he said, should be designed with the understanding that “researchers making statements to the media and being active on social media is a very good thing”.
Encouraging readers of the report to “see [harassment] as connected to working conditions in academia in general”, Dr Brax added, “Overwork, stress and precariousness may be connected to this problem in various ways, and definitely to the ability of employees to cope with it.”
