I have, for several years now, been an active part in the #MeToo in Academia movement, calling out sexual predators in academia and working with healing and preventive practices in academia in relation to sexual predators, sexual violence, and not the least silent complicity and the role of academic enablers.
#MeToo took off in social media, in 2017, as a hashtag after American sexual violence survivor Tarana Burke had started using it already in 2006.
When the social movement eventually reached academia few academics chose to call out their perpetrators. Sexual predators in academia are rarely called out, because they are in powerful positions or they have friends in powerful positions. They are in powerful positions because they are not called out. To call out perpetrators in academia – and elsewhere – has a price and for many victims that price is too high.
The #MeToo movement only barely scratched the surface, making some of the most apparent perpetrators in academia accountable for their actions, and pointing to prevalent problems of sexual misconduct in academia. Most perpetrators in academia remain, and they do so because they can – because they are enabled to do so.
To be clear, I don’t take responsibility for everything done in the name of #MeToo, nor do I welcome needy, often middle aged and above, men who feel offended by women speaking out against sexual violence and the enabling practices of it in academia and elsewhere. Perpetrators and friends have other fora in which to congregate and support each other: I’m not part of that, so if you are here to complaint about you feeling hurt by the #MeToo movement, you have arrived at the wrong venue.
There are some common denominators in cases of sexual misconduct and abuse in academia. In a series of six episodes the AlJazeera podcast Degrees of Abuse has spelled out in clarity which these are, and why academia – in this case UK academia – is particularly susceptible to hosting sexual predators. Through interviews with victims, and by following in the trails of academic predators who move from one university to the next, thereby avoiding accountability, the depressing state of the world of academia is made explicit: victims who dare to call out their perpetrators only very rarely – and only after lengthily and often abusive administrative processes at the academic institutions – manage to pursue their academic careers. Most leave academia with a sense of horror. The sexual abuse is one thing, but having to survive academic institutions who care little, do even less and, not the least, colleagues who both willingly and unwillingly enable predators to go on from one to their next victim, for years, is more than most can live with. No one should have to endure that. Perpetrators (as is apparent from the Comoraff case) often stay on. And when perpetrators are, as in the case of the KU Leuven professor, prosecuted and sentenced several years have often passed during which the perpetrators have been allowed to continue their positions without any restrictions from their universities.
Colleagues who report perpetrators – also when only passing on the information from the actual victims – are often themselves reported by the perpetrator: within the university systems those of us who insist on reporting sexual misconduct get reported by perpetrators and their enablers, and often end up being investigated for bullying the suspected perpetrators. It also happens that those of us who speak up – in academia and beyond – are sued in court for defamation. To attack those who report perpetrators in academia is a well known technique. Perpetrators use it, and academic institutions accept and sustain it.
To speak up against sexual violence in academia and to do so through research publications has become increasingly difficult – regardless of how well researched and scientifically sustained these publications are. Not wanting to risk law suits, academic publishers have withdrawn publications when facing threats from perpetrators (even when perpetrators are not named in the publications).
To call out perpetrators comes at a cost: the risk of being falsely blamed and reported for bullying the perpetrator, the risk of being excluded from academic positions, and the risk of losing ones job. But it also comes with sincerely valuable gains: It happens that perpetrators are held accountable – and things can change for the better. To call out perpetrators encourages others, who are more vulnerable and isolated.
By raising my voice it has become clear that I am not alone: I am one of many victims of sexual violence in academia. I am one of many who have reported sexual violence – and gotten reported for it by a perpetrator. I am not alone – we are not alone. We are strong in numbers and together we make a difference in academia and beyond.
In early June, 2024, I joined with colleagues from around to globe in Marmande, France, on the invitation by Immi Tallgren, to both discuss and practice Sisterhood in International Law. I headed the session entitled Sisterhood Collaboration in the wake of #MeToo in Academia: Formal and Informal Tactics for Academic Action and Inter-Generational and Inter-Institution Support Systems. A long and perhaps overdetermined title, the session aimed at setting off a sustained discussion of what formal and informal tactics are available to end sexual violence in academia, what alliances we can form, and what support we can give on an individual as well as an institutional level. While it is often said – at times with disdain – that women share information in bathrooms and conference back corridors (in other words: in safe spaces) about academic predators, the setting of the Sisterhood in International Law was different: we gathered outside of the different academic institutions where we usually work and gather (SOAS, NUY, and the University of Gothenburg, just to mention a few) to be together, cook together, eat together, and to sleep under the same roof. No one being above or below the other, each bringing something to the joint effort of speaking more freely, and to join forces to make academia a better place – also for those who suffer from violations in and as part of the academic system.
What has come out of it all? To speak up and to speak out is covering a lot of ground. To hear each other out. To be together, and to stay together.
You who is a victim of sexual violence in academia, hear me out: you are not alone, we are here for you, and we are powerful together. Reach out – we are here for you.
To you who support you friend, who stay silent because speaking up is too costly for you, to you – who willingly or unwillingly is an enabler of sexual violence – I say: you don’t have to stay silent, and supporting a perpetrator is not being friendly. It is called co-dependency. You don’t have to vow for what you do not know and you do not know what your friend do when he is not with you. You too need support to end your co-dependency. You are not alone. We are here for you.
You, perpetrator, and sexual predator in academia: know that your time has come. I will not be bullied into silence, and I will never let things just pass.
Dr Matilda Arvidsson 