A helicopter at Toolik Field Station in Alaska. There are many risks in working at such a remote location, a 10-hour drive from the nearest city. Sexual harassment and assault are among them.Todd Paris
Toolik Field Station is about a 10-hour drive north of Fairbanks, Alaska, the closest city. The only way there by car is on the Dalton Highway, a long, mostly gravel road that is used primarily by trucks going to and from Arctic oil fields. Most groups that go to Toolik for research use a specially outfitted one-ton truck. In summer the route is dusty, and in winter it’s covered with ice and snow.
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A helicopter at Toolik Field Station in Alaska. There are many risks in working at such a remote location, a 10-hour drive from the nearest city. Sexual harassment and assault are among them.Todd Paris
Toolik Field Station is about a 10-hour drive north of Fairbanks, Alaska, the closest city. The only way there by car is on the Dalton Highway, a long, mostly gravel road that is used primarily by trucks going to and from Arctic oil fields. Most groups that go to Toolik for research use a specially outfitted one-ton truck. In summer the route is dusty, and in winter it’s covered with ice and snow.
The field station sits on 40 acres of land that borders Toolik Lake. It’s funded mostly by the National Science Foundation and run by the Institute of Arctic Biology of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, but the scientists who do research there for a week to several months at a time come from all over. In the summer, the station can house as many as 150 people, but in the winter there are typically only five to 10 staff members, who rotate on and off the site for several weeks at a time.
For those who work there year-round, making sure everyone is safe is a crucial part of the job. A lot of risks are associated with working in such a harsh, remote environment. But among the most important to prevent, they’ve determined, are sexual harassment and assault.
“Respect and safety are a priority for us,” says Brie Van Dam, who recently left her position as manager of the environmental-data center at Toolik. After a study in 2014 found that sexual assault and harassment are common in the field, she led an effort at Toolik to put prevention front and center. To do that, she worked with management and other staff members to convey to the field station’s visitors how seriously the issue is taken there, and to ensure that everyone understands what kind of behavior is unacceptable.
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Sexual abuse in the field is a frequent problem, research shows. The norms and customs are different from a regular academic setting. Colleagues might spend whole days together for weeks at a time, sleep in close quarters, and socialize at night. Certain rules may be less clear or enforced to different degrees than they are back home. Many field sites are in remote places, making it difficult for victims to leave, report an incident, or talk with people in their regular support network. There are also built-in hierarchies. Sometimes only one person has access to a satellite phone or the vehicle connecting the group to the outside world.
Research also shows that clearly communicated and enforced rules improve the culture at a field site. Within the past few years, as the conversation about sexual harassment and assault in higher education has grown more intense, some researchers who lead expeditions are creating more-rigorous codes of conduct and having conversations with their colleagues about what kind of behavior they expect during those stays.
The practice is far from universal, researchers say, but increasingly scientists and other researchers who work in the field are sharing resources and exchanging ideas about what works.
“My hope is that we will have a broader societal response when we know about things that are wrong,” says Kathryn B.H. Clancy, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “We need to raise our awareness of what constitutes sexual harassment.”
A Wake-Up Call
The survey of sexual harassment in the field, which Clancy conducted in 2014 with Robin G. Nelson, Julienne N. Rutherford, and Katie Hinde, served as a wake-up call for a lot of scientists. It’s the report that Van Dam says gave her the data she needed to go to her colleagues and say, “This is something that we really need to deal with.”
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The report came out around the same time as an incident that Van Dam says helped illustrate to her the importance of having conversations about this topic and ensuring that antiharassment policies are in place. She declined to give details.
Of the more than 600 survey respondents, 72.4 percent said they’d seen or been told about colleagues’ making sexual comments at a field site. Women, who were much more likely to report having experienced sexual harassment or assault than men were, said that men in positions of authority were most often the perpetrators.
The problem is even worse for women of color. A 2017 study of astronomers and scientists in related fields, also conducted by Clancy, found that 40 percent of women of color felt unsafe at work. Many of them were skipping professional events in order to avoid uncomfortable or dangerous situations. (The study was not about fieldwork specifically.)
A follow-up study conducted by Clancy in 2017 found that when field sites had rules, and those rules were enforced, researchers were less likely to experience sexual harassment and assault. At sites where the rules and consequences were ambiguous or not enforced, respondents more often reported experiencing harassment or assault. Examples included “unwanted flirtation or verbal sexual advances,” field-site managers’ insisting on “conducting conversations while naked,” propositions, and “jokes about physical appearance or intelligence that were sexually motivated or gendered.” They also reported being subjected to “physical intimidation, forced kissing, pressing genitalia on the respondent’s body, attempted rape, and rape.”
“Policy is not what’s going to save us,” says Kathryn Clancy, an anthropologist at the U. of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign who has studied sexual harassment in the field. “If everyone has a code of conduct, I’m not trusting that all field sites are safe.”M. Scott Brauer for The Chronicle
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Simply having a set of rules is not enough, Clancy emphasizes. The leaders of these trips have to enforce them by making it culturally unacceptable to act badly.
“Policy is not what’s going to save us,” she says. “If everyone has a code of conduct, I’m not trusting that all field sites are safe.”
She pointed to Toolik as a field station that has been able to signal that preventing sexual harassment and assault is important. “They’re an example of culture change,” she says, “not just, We made more pieces of paper for you to sign.”
At Toolik there are, in fact, more pieces of paper to sign, but that requirement, staff members say, helps drive home how seriously the station treats the matter. All Toolik residents must take online sexual-misconduct training and pass an online quiz before they can reserve housing at the site.
“On its face, it demonstrates seriousness,” says Brett Biebuyck, associate director of operations and finance at Toolik. The training not only lays out expectations but also explains how to report incidents and what will happen if there is an investigation. The training must come across as a useful tool, not as something the staff does because the lawyers asked them to, Biebuyck says. “We want it to be a resource rather than a compliance effort.”
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As important as those tools are, he says, the ideas that they represent have to be constantly reinforced.
Keep the Conversation Going
Both Biebuyck and Van Dam are certified to give Green Dot training workshops for bystander intervention, which are meant to empower people to act when they see potentially violent situations. The two have given several optional workshops at Toolik, in which participants ask questions about what is acceptable behavior and how certain actions might be perceived by others, Biebuyck says.
Van Dam also looked for ways to generate informal discussions. She floated the idea of hosting a journal club in which participants would read the research by Clancy or others and talk about it. But the researchers there told her they had little free time. She did organize a couple of showings of the documentary The Hunting Ground, about sexual assault on college campuses, and held a discussion afterward.
One showing attracted about 40 people and another only three or four, but Van Dam says that’s OK. “You just have to try. Some things will work, and some won’t.”
Sometimes, when Van Dam would try to spark conversations, the discussion fell flat. But even when that happened, she noticed that later she would overhear people talking about sexual harassment at dinner, or someone would approach her to talk about it privately.
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Van Dam says it is important to engage people at all levels of the institution to make any changes work. She and and Biebuyck talked with the Title IX office and legal counsel on the Fairbanks campus to become more familiar with the process for filing a complaint, so that they could clearly communicate the procedure in the online training. They also invited to the field-station people from the victim-advocate office so that they would understand the environment that they were responding to if they got a call.
Van Dam emphasized that each field station and research site is different, calling for different tools. “There’s not a checklist of things you can do and say, ‘OK, we’ve fixed this problem,’ " she says. What’s important is to ensure that people are “constantly thinking about it and constantly talking about it.”
Clear Expectations
Scientists who lead field expeditions are thinking about how they can ensure that the students and colleagues they’re working with feel protected, whether at a field station like Toolik or camping in a small group in the wilderness.
Jacquelyn Gill, an assistant professor of paleoecology and plant ecology at the University of Maine at Orono, says that after Clancy’s 2014 study came out, she started having conversations about sexual harassment and assault with her colleagues. She says leaders should “set a really clear set of expectations about what won’t be tolerated. Have those conversations early and often.”
Sometimes students don’t know much about their university’s sexual-harassment policy or that it applies to work done in the field. Gill says it’s important to let them know that they can use their university’s resources if something happens.
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Paul G. Harnik, an assistant professor of geosciences at Franklin & Marshall College, says that when he created a code of conduct for trips he took with students he looked to a sexual-harassment guide used at field stations of the University of California at Irvine as a model. He wanted to be sure that his students had multiple ways to report an incident in case they didn’t feel comfortable going to him with a problem.
Harnik says he also conferred with Phoebe A. Cohen, an associate professor of geosciences at Williams College, who helped create a code of conduct for the Paleontological Society.
“I have never been on a fieldwork trip where there has been an explicit discussion beforehand of anything related to sexual harassment, and that includes trips that I’ve lead,” Cohen says.
This summer that will change. When she leads a small group to collect samples in Western New York, she will hold a conversation about the kind of behavior that is appropriate and what to do if something goes wrong. She always stresses the importance of letting students remain connected to the outside world. That can be as simple as setting up a schedule to determine when people get to use a satellite phone to make personal calls.
“If it’s the first time someone’s going into the field, there are so many unknowns, so many awkward questions,” Cohen says. “The person leading the trip, it’s on them to create an atmosphere where people feel comfortable asking questions.”
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Nell Gluckman writes about faculty issues and other topics in higher education. You can follow her on Twitter @nellgluckman, or email her at nell.gluckman@chronicle.com.
Nell Gluckman is a senior reporter who writes about research, ethics, funding issues, affirmative action, and other higher-education topics. You can follow her on Twitter @nellgluckman, or email her at nell.gluckman@chronicle.com.