Harassed? Intimidated? Guidebook offers help to scientists under attack
Scholars provide tactics for responding to threats and abuse, but emphasize that institutions must defend their researchers.
Nature | Jeff Tollefson | September 20, 2024
Intimidation and harassment have become an occupational hazard for scholars studying phenomena linked to politics, including climate change, disinformation and virology. Now, researchers have united to create a defence playbook that offers tactics for dealing with this reality. Their message is clear: scientists can take steps to protect themselves, but their institutions also need to have a support plan in place.
“It’s universities and the academic institutions that have the primary responsibility to act,” says Rebekah Tromble, who leads the Institute for Data, Democracy and Politics at George Washington University in Washington DC, and has herself experienced harassment because of her professional work. “They are the employers, and frankly it’s the type of public-interest scholarship that they are incentivizing that puts scholars at risk.”…
… Experts contacted by Nature say these are useful guidelines and will help if they are followed. “Unfortunately, I don’t think it will stop researchers from needing their own lawyers when things get dire,” says Lauren Kurtz, executive director of the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund, a non-profit organization in New York City that was created in 2011 to provide free legal aid to climate scientists. The fundamental problem, Kurtz says, is that institutions are often more focused on protecting themselves than their faculty members and frequently decline to provide legal counsel to their employees.