(cw: sexual harassment) Since I tweeted this, dozens of victims have come forward to share their stories with me through DMs. Thank you so much! Sharing helps everyone. A few well-known and infuriating patterns emerged that I want to highlight here … 1/n https://twitter.com/Prokaryota/status/1305480326458880000

1) Conferences are cesspools of predatory behaviour. Some perpetrators feel safer when their victims are not close to their workplace, so meeting a young, likely insecure, student at an international conference is a dream come true for them. Typical incidents: following people..

... to their hotel room after conference parties, harassment during poster sessions, harassment via email/social media after meeting briefly at a conference, etc.

2) Academic structures prevent consequences for bad behaviour. Power imbalances (junior people being dependent on supervisors for visa, letters of recommendations, salary etc.) are combined with lack of external oversight over PIs. This leads to entrenched patterns ...

... where PIs can get away with despicable behaviour for decades w/o consequences, because victims are afraid to report and the PI is not monitored by anyone else.

3) Broken trust. When positive attention from a senior person turns into (sexual) harassment, the victim questions whether they/their research was ever worth anything, or whether the senior person was only after "something else" and that’s why they hired them or came to their ...

... poster/talk. From then on, most positive attention from senior people will be questioned as to their ulterior motives, and confidence in one’s abilities takes a huge hit.

4) Unis being mostly interested in protecting their faculty and their reputation and not in helping victims. Reporting is made hard or impossible, especially when no “hard evidence” is present. Victims are often discouraged from speaking up because "no one will believe ...

... them anyway". Unis also mostly focussed on helping their own staff & students (if at all), but not “external” victims.

5) The false belief that perpetrators are likely to be the socially-inept type. Most repeat perpetrators in academia I know of are charming, confident, and have a ton of friends, especially among other faculty. These strong bonds are near impossible to break, meaning that the ...

... perpetrator can easily and pre-emptively smear the victim's reputation even before they report (“she’s always been difficult”, “what a liar” etc.), and has a lot of power over the victim's career progression if the victim doesn’t skip town/country.

6) Whisper networks. Members of vulnerable groups often warn each other to prevent joining a group w/ a known harasser. This is often done quietly, over a cup of coffee or thru an e-mail quickly deleted, fuelled by anger and the hope that one can protect at least 1 other victim.

TL;DR: It's bad, y'all. Please please please watch out for each other, if you're in power check in on people who aren't, and hold powerful people accountable even (and especially) if they're your friends. Thanks for reading.