Crowdsourcing Preventing Abuse in the Workplace

Collectively, we must have some words of wisdom for this male Pinner?

I’m editing a blog post written by my editor, and it’s about a recent study that found that a seriously disgraceful and disgusting number of anthropologists, most of them female, have reported being sexually harassed or abused while doing fieldwork, most often by their colleagues. My editor’s post discusses the findings and links to a story our publication did a few years ago wherein someone who experienced sexual abuse gives her advice on how to avoid it. I told my editor that I wished we could include some further commentary making the case that as much as advice can be useful for women, it’s equally important to emphasize the fact that men need to take responsibility for NOT abusing, harassing, and raping their colleagues. He said that while he agreed with the sentiment, it’s a little too glib to just say “Men, also, don’t rape people.” Which, yeah.

And the conversations with my editor are good, and he is truly a good guy and we both want to help dismantle a grossly rapey culture in academia, but neither of us is particularly known for his ability to expertly phrase feminist opinions.

Do you have any thoughts on how one could articulate this desire to shift the abuse/harassment/rape discourse to include men in the responsibility (both for preventing it and for being held accountable for it), but also to say something meaningful and useful about it, not just state something obvious?? This is hard. Thank you.

Hey, this is really pretty fascinating! And depressing, let’s not forget depressing. So, then, if you were these two men, trying to say something non-glib but true and important about this issue, what would you do? Let’s draft an exact response, and then we can Google it in a week and find out where the male Pinner works. Hm. That sounds inappropriate. Let’s just have a discussion about rape culture and preventing it in the workplace, instead.