Tuesday, April 14, 2015

Another Librarian Speaks Out About Being Sexually Harassed

Another librarian speaks out about being sexually harassed (and the recent Team Harpy debacle), namely, well-liked, well-respected Meredith Farkas:
I’m disturbed by the fact that, after all of the petitions, and Facebook drama, and blog posts, and tweets about this no one seems to be talking about this (other than right-wing feminist-hating nut-jobs) since the lawsuit was settled and Lisa and nina published retractions.
.... 
Still the greatest tragedy here, in my opinion is that so many women suffer sexual harassment and most of the time the perpetrators get away with it.  And this whole sordid affair [#TeamHarpy] did little to help the cause of encouraging women to come forward.  I’ve been sexually harassed and stalked and never reported any of it.  But it was when a faculty member at a former job who used to stand too close to me and would put his arm around my waist sometimes later escalated to grabbing a colleagues breasts that I realized my silence was hurting other women.  Because men who do things like this don’t just do it once.  If they get away with something that you consider too minor to report, they may escalate to doing something much worse to someone else.  We have to find more ways to help women feel safe reporting harassment.  I’m happy that more conferences now have codes of conduct and discernible methods of reporting inappropriate behavior, and that will help, but it’s not enough. 

Exactly.  

Note Team Harpy member/treasurer Sarah Houghton has not yet retracted anything—likely since she is ALA's public library Internet filtering expert and doesn't want to be connected further to one of the biggest hoaxes in American librarianship history.

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