I hardly know what to say in regards to the harassment case involving Christopher Backhouse, a former researcher at College Faculty London lined in right this moment’s Guardian, besides that everybody ought to concentrate on simply what a stunning case it’s. The opening paragraph of the Guardian story provides a style:
A former educational at College Faculty London should pay virtually £50,000 in damages to a former colleague after falsely portraying her as a intercourse employee on social media as a part of a months-long marketing campaign of harassment.
I don’t know Backhouse personally, however he’s (or was) apparently a Royal Society Analysis Fellow engaged on the DUNE experiment, an underground neutrino physics experiment.
The entire story could be very disturbing, not least as a result of the harassment went on for thus lengthy. One unusual side of this case is that the sufferer of Backhouse’s marketing campaign of harassment, Erica Smith, needed to pursue a civil motion towards him to place an finish to his behaviour. One would have imagined {that a} prison case would have been extra acceptable. I for one suppose he ought to be in jail; the outline introduced within the Guardian article appears to represent harassment as outlined beneath the Public Order Act 1986. If such an offence is dedicated with intent to trigger harassment, alarm or misery, the offender might be given 6 months’ imprisonment or a hefty fantastic. Why has Backhouse not been prosecuted?
The article ends with
A UCL spokesperson mentioned Backhouse was now not employed by the college.
I’m glad at the least of that, however I’m wondering what UCL did through the “marketing campaign of harassment” carried out by Christopher Backhouse and whether or not he left voluntarily or was sacked. I’m wondering what they’ve carried out to assist Erica Smith put her life again collectively after this horrific episode. Does UCL have a vicarious legal responsibility?
This case by itself raises grave questions on the way in which harassment circumstances are dealt with within the Division of Physics & Astronomy at UCL however that is removed from the primary such case there that has gone public; see e.g. right here.
UCL clearly has quite a lot of work to do to place its home so as.
In additional basic phrases, I’ll repeat what I’ve mentioned in earlier posts on this challenge:
Failure to behave strongly when such behaviour is confirmed simply sends out the message that the establishment doesn’t take sexual harassment severely. For my part, confidentiality is required throughout an investigation – to guard either side and certainly the particular person doing the investigation – but when the conclusion is that misconduct has taken place, it ought to be acknowledged publicly. Justice needs to be seen to be carried out. Sexual assault, after all, is one other matter totally – that ought to go straight to the police to cope with.
I’ve talked about protocols and procedures, however these can solely ever apply a sticking-plaster resolution to an issue which is extraordinarily deeply rooted within the tradition of many science departments and analysis groups the world over. These are usually very hierarchical, with energy and affect concentrated within the fingers of comparatively few, often male, people. A criticism about harassment typically has to go up by means of the administration construction and due to this fact dangers being blocked at a lot of phases for a lot of causes. This kind of construction reinforces the concept that college students and postdocs are on the backside of the heap and discourages them from even making an attempt to pursue a case towards somebody on the high.
We’re clearly very far certainly from eliminating harassment or the circumstances that permit it to proceed however though circumstances like this are very painful, I feel they at the least show that we’re starting to see the extent of the issue, and the way the measures taken to cope with it are insufficient. We have now to work a lot tougher to cease this kind of factor from occurring within the first place.