Sexual harassment is an epidemic throughout global higher education systems and impact individuals, groups and entire organizations in profound ways. Precarious working conditions, hierarchical organizations, a normalization of gender-based violence, toxic academic masculinities, a culture of silence and a lack of active leadership are all key features enabling sexual harassment. The aim of this study is to review scientific knowledge on sexual harassment in higher education. A thematic focus is on (a) knowledge derived from top-ranked peer-reviewed articles in the research field, (b) the prevalence of sexual harassment among students and staff, (c) reported consequences of sexual harassment, (d) examples of primary, secondary and tertiary preventive measures, and (e) core challenges to research on sexual harassment in higher education. The published research evidence suggests several findings of importance, mainly: (a) prevalence of sexual harassment among students is reported by on average one out of four female students; (b) severe consequences of sexual harassment impacts individuals but the effects on the quality in research and education is unknown; (c) there is almost no evidence supporting the supposed effects of major preventive measures; and (d) research on sexual harassment in higher education lacks theoretical, longitudinal, qualitative and intersectional approaches and perspectives.
We started out this edited collection with an ambition to problematise how knowledge production on sexual harassment has been shaped by certain historical and structural conditions. We argued that these conditions have not been productive for a comprehensive understanding of the issue of sexual harassment because the phenomenon is not as limited as previous discourses have portrayed it, nor is it sufficient to present it as a neatly packaged subject. We need not only to continue to collect stories of sexual harassment, as the #MeToo movement called on us to do, but also to collect stories about what happens next, and to unpack this phenomenon that we call 'sexual harassment'. One part of this is to let the concepts used in the different chapters guide the conceptual understanding in this conclusion as well. One effect of this is that the terms sexual harassment, violence, and sexual violence may well be used in somewhat inconsistent, overlapping, and divergent ways.As a social imaginary, sexual harassment is most often constructed as a 'drama with two characters': the perpetrator and the victim. Sometimes there is a third actor, called the bystander. There is occasionally an administrator or a representative of the law standing in the background. The chapters of this book have underscored in a variety of ways that this understanding is far too limited. Therefore, in this concluding chapter, we want to try to bring together the different actors, voices and perspectives that the authors have placed on the stage of this drama. Here, we want to set the chapters in conversation with each other, because we believe that this will help us to broaden our understanding of sexual harassment. We have taken our cue from Paulina de los Reyes in Chapter 3, where she proposes a comprehensive approach. The doing of a comprehensive approach in our case is to set the different chapters in dialogue with each other, looking for common voices, but also for differences, the specificities of different contexts, the cutting-through of different intersecting power relations, and the use of new concepts, new imaginaries. Each chapter contributes new knowledge and engenders questions: theoretical, empirical and political. Relevant intersectional perspectives in particular nuance, challenge and develop our
MeToo happened. But we don't really want to start there, because #MeToo happened in 2017 while sexual harassment has been around for way longer than that.However, as a direct consequence of #MeToo we found ourselves engaged in an extensive demand for knowledge on sexual harassment. Since 2017, we have reviewed the majority of the research in this field from the Nordic region, and a great deal of the existing international literature, as well as examining policy making at the Nordic and European levels (Simonsson, 2021;Svensson, 2021; Lundqvist, 2018, 2020). These research reviews show how juridical definitions dominate the research field. While a juridical definition is important in legislative contexts, it also presents a risk: it limits our understanding of sexual harassment (Bondestam and Lundqvist, 2020).There are so many stories about sexual harassment out there. Not only in the way that #MeToo showed, through thousands and thousands of individual accounts of the experience and consequences of being exposed to sexual violence that share both similarities and differences, but also many different stories about what sexual harassment is and what it does in the world. As feminist theorist Donna Haraway suggests, we need to be aware of the demarcations and continuities that we create with our stories (Haraway, 1992). The stories about sexual harassment that we have come across and the stories that we create have made this clear (Franks, 2019).The juridical approach has influenced both policy and how we understand the phenomenon in some limited ways as something countable − something that lends itself well to a specific definition and understanding, and consequently as something that can be eradicated by means of legislation, policies, and education. We felt frustrated by this and felt a need for new ways to discuss and approach sexual harassment. And we wanted to do this as a part of a long-standing tradition in the Nordic countries: by facilitating dialogues between researchers, politicians, policy makers, practitioners, and nongovernmental organisations (NGOs). The infrastructure for these dialogues already exists, but we wanted to see the topic of the conversation
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