Article 2
The Casting Couch of Research Groups
Profiling Abusers and Victims in an Enabling Environment

When the Weinstein allegations broke in 2017 and #MeToo went global, most people received the news as the result of an accumulated misconduct in the entertainment industry: powerful men, vulnerable young female actors, and a culture that protected the former at the expense of the latter. Even though it rapidly spread to other sectors concerning the public sphere like media and politics, fewer people connected the same dynamic to a place that looks nothing like a film set, the research group. 

Research institutions run on a remarkably similar machine to the one that fostered the abuse in Hollywood, albeit minus the glamour. A small number Continue Reading

Article 1
No Incident Is Isolated
Rethinking How Academia Hears a Single Complaint 

A few years ago, the world watched an industry built on charisma, gatekeeping, and closed doors come apart in public. #MeToo did not begin as a movement. The term has existed since 2006 but was popularized after the Weinstein allegations broke in 2017, revealing over three decades of sexual crimes which led to his immediate firing and eventual conviction. Throughout the years, the list of victims grew one private settlement at a time. Treated at first the way institutions always treat these things: as unfortunate, as unusual, as an isolated incident, as a matter between two people destined to be settled quietly behind closed doors and kept out of the trade press. What eventually broke that pattern was not Continue Reading