It appears that college athletes are not the only ones who sometimes suffer at the hands of higher ups.
![Abuse Faced By Students Doing Anthropological Fieldwork Reported By Survey Abuse Faced By Students Doing Anthropological Fieldwork Reported By Survey](https://www.medindia.net/afp/images/Denmark-Greenland-child-sex-abuse-64045.jpg)
This is a first attempt to systematically document the harassment, abuse or assaults young researchers sometimes face in the course of doing anthropological fieldwork at remote sites, said University of Illinois anthropology professor Kathryn Clancy, one of four researchers to present the new findings at the 2013 meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropology.
Most students and postdoctoral researchers consider field research a stepping stone to a better career, Clancy said.
"This is something that most biological anthropologists, cultural anthropologists and archeologists see as a fairly necessary experience," she said. "Some people can do an entirely lab-based project or a computer modeling project or a local project, but most of us need to go into the field."
The team recruited subjects through outreach on social media and websites devoted to researchers in biological anthropology. They heard from 122 men and women, more than half of whom had experienced or witnessed sexual harassment, physical abuse or sexual assault at the hands of site managers, project directors or peers living and working at field research sites. The researchers defined sexual assault as "any kind of inappropriate physical contact, unwanted physical touching, assault, all the way up to rape," Clancy said.
"Overwhelmingly, we're seeing junior women being targeted by senior men," Clancy said. "59 percent of respondents have experienced sexual harassment. Women are 3 times more likely to experience harassment than men. And 19 percent of respondents have been sexually assaulted."
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The researchers did not directly ask the respondents if they had been raped, but some of the respondents volunteered that they had been raped by research leaders or peers at fieldwork sites. Others reported that they had witnessed the systematic targeting of junior members of the research team for harassment or assault.
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"The larger a field site, the more organized you have to be, so you're more likely to actually have ground rules or a code of conduct, or a chain of command that prevents people from feeling they can get away with bad behavior," Clancy said.
The researchers are proposing that funding agencies like the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health require the same kinds of protocols and oversight of researcher safety in the field that are routine in the laboratory.
"If we want to fund a postdoctoral researcher, we have to write a postdoc mentoring plan so that we prove that this postdoc isn't just going to be a lackey for us and that we're actually going to mentor them and train them and help them get a job," Clancy said. "I have to make sure my students have access to certain kinds of vaccines if they're working with blood. We have to go through Institutional Review Boards to protect our research subjects. We have to go through animal protocols to protect our animals. But we don't have to protect our researchers in the field."
Source-Eurekalert