My Personal Experience with Sexual Harassment [Only registered and activated users can see links. ]
In 2004 I was 21 and in my first year of PhD, still at Tel-Aviv University. My advisor at the time sent me to the US for a month-and-half “tour”. It was quite an experience for me. It influenced my life in many ways I did not expect. Some of those ways were quite unfortunate. I was too young, and it was very premature. I met many new people on this trip. Some of them were very nice to me. I stayed in people’s homes and got invited to dinners, parties and hikes.
Three years later, in 2007, I got an email from one of the people that I met during the 2004 trip. In 2007 I was a year away from finishing my PhD at the Weizmann Institute, and that person wanted to meet me regarding my post-doc. That person was a professor who was very nice to me back in 2004. In the few days that I spent where he was, he invited me to dinner with his family, asked me to join him and his colleagues on some near-by hike, explained mathematical stuff to me, introduced me to people, and so on. I had no connection with him since 2004.
Following his email in 2007, I met this man at some coffee shop near his parents’ house. He had arrived from the US just a few hours earlier. He had some presentation of his research that he showed me and he talked to me about the place he was at and the people there.
At some point he said that the coffee shop was too loud, and asked me if it would be ok to continue our conversation in his family’s house. I agreed [I was at his house in the US; I met his family].
When we got to the house, things started to become weird. He suggested a glass of wine. I told him I never drink. He suggested “just epsilon”. I refused.
I sat on the sofa, because I thought he would sit on the armchair. He came to sit on the sofa next to me. I sat as far as I could, on the very edge of the sofa. I was unsure what was going on.
He continued to show me the presentation, and that was ok. Then he started talking about 2004, telling me how much I impressed him.
He grabbed my hand. I took away my hand, telling him that I did not want that. I think that I was shivering and my voice trembled as well. At that point it was already clear what was going on, and I just could not believe it was actually happening.
He grabbed my hand for the second time, telling me that it was “ok”. It was not, but it was sort of weird, because it felt just like my father’s hand. I took my hand away again.
I looked at my watch and told him, in what I thought to be a somewhat theatrical gesture; that it was too late and I had to go, and I went out of there as fast as I could. My car was parked right next to his house, and I walked fast. He followed me outside, and then he stopped.
He told me that he was sorry, he misinterpreted my behavior.
I was quite stunned by this last remark. That man had invited me to a “job interview”. He had pretended it was a job interview for almost the entire meeting. I acted like a person in a job interview, which I thought I was, until I realized otherwise. This “I must have misinterpreted your behavior” is outrageous. [And it is a bad cliché.]
Each and every instinct I had told me to ignore this remark and just get away from there as fast as I could. But it was outside, and I was next to my car with my keys in my hand, so I figured he would not be able to harm me. So I asked him what exactly he could misinterpret in my behavior.
He told me that nothing; that it was something in 2004.
This only added to my astonishment. There could not have been anything to misinterpret in 2004, because I could never think of that man (married, father to children, twice my age, professor) in a romantic sense. More than that, the very thought that someone could attribute such intents to my 21 year old self simply frightened me.
It was quite a trauma for me, because this experience shook my very foundations: it undermined my trust in people. Fortunately for me, my family and friends reacted very well, and that helped preventing any poisonous thoughts that could have arose.
But this experience was interesting. It made me understand, immediately, what most people never understand: that sexual harassment is not about sex, and it is not about love. Sexual harassment is about hunting down. And both parties obey the rules of hunt. I felt trapped, I was terrified and I ran away. He had the patience and the sensitivity of a hunter. It was not the sensitivity of a lover, by the way. The difference is that a lover cares.
What are even more interesting than the general principle are the specifics of this concrete case: the man, and me, and the circumstances that led to this evening. Mostly I do not know, and I would not speculate. What is clear is that the man did a fundamental mistake: he had some impression of me, and he mistaken it with my-real-flash-and-blood-self. I would expect a person with several tens of years of life experience not to make such harmful “mistakes”.
But he did, and I got hurt, and I had to decide how I wanted to handle this. The first thing I did when I got home was to tell my family and my advisor. But then the question was what I wanted to do next.
First, there is the legal aspect. As far as I understand, and I do not have any sort of legal education, what that man did is against the Israeli law. The relevant law is called “the law for equality of opportunities in work” from 1988, with corrections from 1995 and 1998. The law references “the law for prevention of sexual harassment” from 1998. The law forbids a job giver, someone acting on behalf of the job giver, or any other employee, to perform “sexual harassment” in a person seeking a job. “Sexual harassment” is any one of several acts. One of these acts is making offers of a sexual nature when the person in question showed that he/she is not interested in such offers. I advise those that are interested to look up these laws and read them, as well as the legal work that was done around them. It is very interesting.
There is also the ethical aspect. Institutes, universities and large corporations usually have detailed ethic codes that address sexual harassment. While I did not check the ethics code of the particular place that man was at, I assume that his actions violate this code as well.
I strongly felt that this man should face what he did. This is morally true and this is simple common-sense. However, I did not feel that I should be the one directly confronting that man, nor was I interested in such a role.
What I decided to do was to write what happened to the people who were in the appropriate position at the place where this man was. I thought that they were the best people to handle this, both because of their position and because of their long acquaintance with the man. I also had some presumption about these people; I thought that they were “good people”. So, I asked for their intervention.
I decided not to file charges against that man, because I felt that this situation can still be judged in the realm of relationships between people and ethics, rather than that of law. I also wanted to avoid any sort of fuss around this, for my sake.
Shortly after I sent the email to those people, they sent me a brief response which I liked. It said that they were very concerned about what happened and they were looking into it. The email ended with “take care”. I found this response human and sensitive, as well as practical and to the point, and I was glad that I decided to handle things the way I did.
I never heard from those people again.
A few months later I learned that the man was “promoted” to an influential position. In retrospect, I guess that everyone, but me, already knew about this “promotion” at the time that everything happened.
I find it extremely strange, though, that it did not truly alert anyone that one of the first things that that man did with the power that was placed in his hands was what he did that evening in Israel.
I had no connection with that man or with those people since 2007. In the two years that passed since, I happened to see the man, unexpectedly and from distance, two or three times.
Why do I write this essay now? Because I can.
There was some prosaic trigger: someone said to me – in a completely neutral setting - this awful word “epsilon” [it’s awful only when used to neglect something that is non negligible], for the second time in my life, and I almost choked. I was amazed that I almost choked, that it still bears such influence on me.
But the deeper reason is that now is the first time that I can write this text in this form.
It took time, it took a change of scenery, and it took independence.
I already had all the ideas that appear in this text a few days after this whole thing happened. But I could never write this text in this form then; just like I probably would not have written this text in this form if I had written it in a later point of my life.
I dedicated a lot of thought to what would be the “right” way to handle this.
I do not know whether this text is this “right” way, but I do not know what else I can do. I believe that I exhausted the direct ways to handle this.
And I believe that it should be handled, and it should be handled properly.
In my opinion, any sort of “proper handling” must consist of:
(1) Acknowledgement:
Acknowledgment of my position and my viewpoint as reflected in this essay, and -- much more importantly -- acceptance of the probable truth of this essay.
I made efforts to tell the story exactly the way it happened.
Some people, like my parents, who witnessed me coming back home upset and distracted after this happened, or my advisor to whom I sent an email right away and who had a long conversation with me on the phone about the incident, have no problem accepting what I told them as truth. They saw the immediate outcome, and they know me very closely and are very well aware of my reliability.
For other people, especially people who do not know me, accepting this essay might be difficult. From those people I only hope for kindness and good judgment.
(2) Reaction:
When I wrote this essay I decided that I was willing to risk my privacy if I can use my case to help myself and others.
I figured out that what happened already had some unfortunate practical implications on my life, as I tried to keep my distance both from the man and from the people who chose not to handle the incident properly: I missed lectures that I wanted to hear (when that man was the speaker), turned down invitations to give talks (I did not want to be that man’s guest again), I did not apply to certain post-doc positions (I did not want that man or those people to be my bosses).
Basically, what happened was that I was forced into this traumatic, undesirable incident. Then, instead of this matter being handled immediately, letting me move on with my life, I had to move on with my life knowing that I have to be careful of certain people. That’s no way to live. And I expect that living like this in the future will lead to even more undesired practical implications on my life. That’s unfortunate. I care a lot about my life.
I think that some action must be taken. What happened indicates a severe ethical failure of a person who is in an influential position. It indicates bad judgment, and it indicates abuse of power. This sort of things is dangerous, and I do not think that we should underestimate them.
I do not think that we should overestimate them either. I do not know whether this man had ever done something like this before, whether he thought of doing something like this before, or what happened to his “thought process” following this incident. All I know is what happened in 2007.
I think that the people in the appropriate position should react exactly to what happened, and do so effectively. And any sort of reaction must take appropriate measures against something like this ever happening again.
In addition, I think that we, as a community, must do something in the broader sense (more on this is in the “reflections” section below).
Some Reflections
I was “sexually harassed”. “It happened to me.”
Of course, to use this term “sexual harassment” and say that “it happened to me” is artificial. There was never an “it” that happened to me. There was just one man who did something that he should not have done.
But I think that there is an “it” such as “sexual harassment”. I think so because I felt it, strongly. I experienced “sexual harassment”.
I also think that there is an “it” as “sexual harassment” because there should be an “it” here. This is something that we, mathematicians, do: we invent imaginary concepts if they help us explain the world better. I think that there is “sexual harassment” because the horrifying feeling that you walked right into a dangerous “trap”, is something that is not captured by the definition of “courtship”, because the feeling that someone misused the trust that you put in him/her because of his/her position, is not part of normal relationships between a young person and an older, influential person.
I think that it is a good mental exercise to try putting yourself in the shoes of someone who experiences sexual harassment, to try to understand. Of course, if you did not experience something, even if you try real hard to imagine how it is like, you are bound to miss the most trivial things. But, I still think that this is an important exercise. I also recommend the following intellectual exercises: What would you do if your child/close-family-member-you-feel-responsibility-to/ told you something like what I wrote? What would you do if your student told you something like this? Your friend? What would you do instead of those people who got the letter from me in 2007? What do you do as a bystander?
First of all, it is my strong conviction that each and every one of us, male or female, and all of us as a community, has to understand sexual harassment. In particular, we have to understand sexual harassment in academia. Keep in mind that academia is based on strong authority/mentorship relations (e.g. professor-student) among people who are [typically] adults [though usually there is a significant age difference].
Like with every concept we encounter, we should look at “sexual harassment”, we should wonder what it means, [and in this case, since we are talking about an inherently-social problem] we should talk about it.
And we should root it out. We must.
It should have been clear to this man that he should not do what he did, and it should have been clear to him, even if he lacked the wisdom to understand it by himself.
It would have been clear to him if this was the “status quo”, if this was “common knowledge”.
I thought that it was, and I think that it is for most of the people that I know. But what this evening, and the conversations that I had with people because of it, taught me, is that it is not sufficiently clear.
It is not sufficiently clear even to highly intelligent people, and even to people that I care a lot about their opinion.
And it could have been clearer to almost all the people I know.
Dana Moshkovitz [Only registered and activated users can see links. ]
Sexual Harassment in Academia 
