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Science Has a Sexual Assault Problem
cold fjord writes: Phys.org reports, "The life sciences have come under fire recently with a study published in PLOS ONE that investigated the level of sexual harassment and sexual assault of trainees in academic fieldwork environments. The study found 71% of women and 41% of men respondents experienced sexual harassment, while 26% of women and 6% of men reported experiencing sexual assault. The research team also found that within the hierarchy of academic field sites surveyed, the majority of incidents were perpetrated by peers and supervisors. The New York Times notes, "Most of these women encountered this abuse very early in their careers, as trainees. The travel inherent to scientific fieldwork increases vulnerability as one struggles to work within unfamiliar and unpredictable conditions."
It tells me that the definitions are too broad to be useful. Oh, crap, I said "broad". Now I'm guilty too!
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
The study the level of sexual assault of trainees in academic fieldwork environments... was 26% of women and 6% of men reported experiencing sexual assault. According to a study by the CDC, 51.9 percent of surveyed women and 66.4 percent of surveyed men said they were physically assaulted as a child by an adult caretaker and/or as an adult by any type of attacker. More than half (54 percent) of the female rape victims identified by the survey were younger than age 18 when they experienced their first attempted or completed rape. Violence against women is primarily intimate partner violence: 64.0 percent of the women who reported being raped, physically assaulted, and/or stalked since age 18 were victimized by a current or former husband, cohabiting partner, boyfriend, or date. In comparison, only 16.2 percent of the men who reported being raped and/or physically assaulted since age 18 were victimized by such a perpetrator. Study: https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles...
I can't think of a single profession which doesn't seem to have a "problem." Makes one wonder.
Makes you wonder what, exactly? That this is not a "problem", because "everybody's doing it?" WTF? Look pal, the "problem" is narrow-minded, clueless misogynist views like that.
Wow! Just wow! I was thinking the same thing myself, except I put "this is a societal problem, not one just in the academic community," after 'Makes one wonder'. Way to go in projecting your fears and negativity on others.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
Oh, crap, I said "broad". Now I'm guilty too!
you joke but you are probably correct here. The issue is not that 71% of all women are being sexually assaulted. Its that 71% of all women "feel assaulted" Somehow in the past 40 years what someones feelings are trump what the actual actions are.
Saying something sexual, is NOT sexual assault.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
No, because if that is what the poster was referencing, "going on a tear" was actually saying "guys, don't do that", with the context being: sexual propositioning a stranger in an enclosed space in a foreign country at 4 AM after having just listened to the person you're propositioning give a presentation that included discussion on how the constant sexual propositions she received at these conferences made her uncomfortable.
THAT in turn led to her receiving a never-ending wave of abuse, including rape and death threats, and including having one of the most prominent male voices in the movement insultingly state that women in the west shouldn't complain about sexism because women in Islamic countries have it a lot worse.
It was after all THAT, that she, quite rightly, started going on a tear.
Phrasing of the questions in a survey is important to fully understanding the problem that is being examined. Here are the study questions. Two of the most relevant questions are these:
32. Have you ever personally experienced inappropriate or sexual remarks, comments about physical beauty, cognitive sex differences, or other jokes, at an anthropological field site?
39. Have you ever experienced physical sexual harassment, unwanted sexual contact, or sexual contact in which you could not or did not give consent or felt it would be unsafe to fight back or not give your consent at an anthropological field site?
The PLOS ONE document itself is very thorough, and worth reading through to more fully understand the issue.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Well, here's the actual questions:
The section is entitled Sexual harassment and assault so you would hope people would be contextually aware that "or other jokes" means of a sexual nature. But it's still a badly worded question. I further assume the reader is supposed to parse "inappropriate or sexual" as prefixes for the other items, but we live in a tightly wound panties world when comments about physical beauty are harassment.
The problem, again, is a terribly worded question. Are we to again assume physical should extend through the commas? Or is unwanted sexual contact just a fat girl asking a handsome dude to get a date after the working day is done. Is all physical contact unwanted sexual contact now?
The math for their statistical distributions is fine.
Their questions suck, lack good wording, and lack examples. [Not limited to but including... ...excluding FOO, but not limited to BAR.]
Women are more likely to be the subject of a sexual advance because men are expected to initiate courtship. Differing social expectations and indoctrination will dictate that women find any advances more objectionable then would men regardless of the level of genuine menace the represent.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
The article looks at field work, not science as a whole. The results are self-reported, not verified or verifiable. And "harassment" and "assault" are defined so broadly that many normal day-to-day interactions can fall under them. In short, there is no evidence that "science has a sexual assault problem" in any standard meaning of those words.
Much as feminists and other progressives like to establish such a principle, in reality, just because you feel uncomfortable or believe that something was inappropriate doesn't mean anybody has actually done anything wrong.
Well yes, you are, guilty of deflecting criticism by claiming the definitions are too broad.
That's a common defensive reaction.
Problems should be well-defined. Someone can take that position whether they're doing it defensively or not and still be making a legitimate point. Calling it defensive, notably on a topic where there is moral stigma associated with being defensive about it, is just an ad hominem attack.
There are plenty of legitimate critiques of Parent's message--he appears to be dismissing out-of-hand an issue that affects hundreds of millions of people a year. He also failed to state what definitions he thinks are too broad to be useful. Responding with a question about one or more of those that might make people think about the issue is the difference between trolling and dialogue.
Actually Slashdot is like that about everything. What really gets to some on Slashdot is how people like you act all sanctimonious and incredulous when people disagree about something, and only when it comes to feminism.
Same goes for women.
Why is it always the men that get singled out here? That 6% figure for men ought to be far more eye opening than the figure for women. Basically 1, it's definitely underrported and 2, the focus is still on the women. The focus is always on the women.
Few men bother to report sexual assault or rape because there's little point in doing so. Most people are under the belief that women don't do that and even if they were to try, it's not technically possible. But, it does happen, even if most cases get swept under the rug.
As far as the figures for women go, most of the time it's 3rd parties defining it as sexual assault even in cases where the "victim" wouldn't consider it to be sexual assault.
Also, whether a woman finds an advance to be "harassment" or not depends on whether or not she's interested in the man.
So let that be a lesson to you. If you want to avoid harassment:
1) Be handsome
2) Be attractive
3) Don't be unattractive
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
an example or 2 please?
Ive known someone personally getting in trouble for sexual harassment for simply saying that the woman was wearing a nice shirt today. to her, that was sexual assault, to anyone with common sense, it was a complement
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
No, what they're talking about is, according to the article:
“Have you ever personally experienced inappropriate or sexual remarks, comments about physical beauty, cognitive sex differences, or other jokes, at a field site? (If you have had more than one experience, the most notable to you).”
That's not sexual assault. I'm not even sure it rises to the level of sexual harassment.
Flirtation isn't sexual harassment. I'm sure every woman in the country must have been the subject of welcome and unwelcome flirtations.
At a recent professional meeting, a woman made suggestive sexual remarks to me about a computer program. If I had said the same thing to another woman, the second woman could have interpreted it as harassment under that definition.
There's a lot of grey areas and political correctness. If you want to look at it with publications in the scientific literature, fine. Let's use rigorous scientific methods to find out what the magnitude of sexual assault is. The first step is get your definitions right.
You should read the study, not the article about the study, if you are going to criticize it. The thing you quoted was about harassment, not assault.
http://www.plosone.org/article...
"Have you ever experienced physical sexual harassment, unwanted sexual contact, or sexual contact in which you could not or did not give consent or felt it would be unsafe to fight back or not give your consent at an anthropological field site? (If you have had more than one experience, the most notable to you.)"
Is the question about sexual assault.
The grey areas are overwhelmed by the black and white areas. If you feel there are too many grey areas, talk to your manager about getting on a course to help you.
If you don't want to look like a creep - ask the girl to your room around witnesses (they don't have to hear, just as long as you make it feel safe for her to refuse). Waiting until your alone in a confined space, if not harassing, is very bad manners to the point of being ungentlemanly. Don't do that, guys.
Dawkins has realized that he was using a logical fallacy and has since apologized for that tweet so everyone in this thread that is trying to defend him looks pretty silly.
She never accused the guy of harassment or assault. She was just pointing out behavior that she found to be creepy and used it as an example of what not to do. The whole video in question had to do with things that make women feel uncomfortable and thus not attend certain conferences. Yes, people have to deal with that from time to time in the larger society but if a specific group of people want to be more inclusive than they certainly shouldn't issue death threats just because someone had the nerve to point out some of those "awkward and uncomfortable" things.