In the Dark

I hardly know what to say about the harassment case involving Christopher Backhouse, a former researcher at University College London covered in today’s Guardian, except that everyone should be aware of just what a shocking case it is. The opening paragraph of the Guardian story gives a taste:

A former academic at University College London must pay almost £50,000 in damages to a former colleague after falsely portraying her as a sex worker on social media as part of a months-long campaign of harassment.

I don’t know Backhouse personally, but he is (or was) apparently a Royal Society Research Fellow working on the DUNE experiment, an underground neutrino physics experiment.

The whole story is very disturbing, not least because the harassment went on for so long. One strange aspect of this case is that the victim of Backhouse’s campaign of harassment, Erica Smith, had to pursue a civil action against him to put an end to his behaviour. One would have imagined that a criminal case would have been more appropriate. I for one think he should be in prison; the description presented in the Guardian article seems to constitute harassment as defined under the Public Order Act 1986 and the Protection from Harassment Act 1997. If such an offence is committed with intent to cause harassment, alarm or distress, the offender can be given 6 months’ imprisonment or a hefty fine. Why has Backhouse not been prosecuted?

The article ends with

A UCL spokesperson said Backhouse was no longer employed by the university.

I’m glad at least of that, but I wonder what UCL did during the “campaign of harassment” carried out by Christopher Backhouse and whether he left voluntarily or was sacked. I wonder what they have done to help Erica Smith put her life back together after this horrific episode. Does UCL have a vicarious liability?

This case on its own raises grave questions about the way harassment cases are handled in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at UCL but this is far from the first such case there that has gone public; see e.g. here.

UCL clearly has a lot of work to do to put its house in order.

In more general terms, I’ll repeat what I have said in earlier posts on this issue:

Failure to act strongly when such behaviour is proven just sends out the message that the institution doesn’t take sexual harassment seriously. In my view, confidentiality is needed during an investigation – to protect both sides and indeed the person doing the investigation – but if the conclusion is that misconduct has taken place, it should be acknowledged publicly. Justice has to be seen to be done. Sexual assault, of course, is another matter entirely – that should go straight to the police to deal with.

I’ve talked about protocols and procedures, but these can only ever apply a sticking-plaster solution to a problem which is extremely deeply rooted in the culture of many science departments and research teams across the world. These tend to be very hierarchical, with power and influence concentrated in the hands of relatively few, usually male, individuals. A complaint about harassment generally has to go up through the management structure and therefore risks being blocked at a number of stages for a number of reasons. This sort of structure reinforces the idea that students and postdocs are at the bottom of the heap and discourages them from even attempting to pursue a case against someone at the top.

We are obviously very far indeed from eliminating harassment or the conditions that allow it to continue but although cases like this are very painful, I think they at least demonstrate that we are beginning to see the extent of the problem, and how the measures taken to deal with it are inadequate. We have to work much harder to stop this sort of thing from happening in the first place.