Sexual misconduct helpline offers support for NSF community

From ScienceMag:

In their latest intervention to address sexual misconduct in the sciences, the National Science Foundation (NSF) earlier this week launched a crisis helpline for researchers who have experienced sexual harassment, sexual assault, or stalking. The NSF Safer Science Helpline will provide people in the NSF community with 24/7 one-on-one crisis intervention support and can be accessed via text, phone, or online chat. It’s an expansion of a helpline launched in 2023—the first of its kind for a U.S. science agency or institution—for members of the U.S. Antarctic Program, which has been plagued by harassment.

Providing such resources is an important step, says C.K. Gunsalus, a research ethics expert at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Still, “It doesn’t prevent future issues or recurrence.”

The helpline comes 8 years after the sexual harassment allegations of a Boston University professor at NSF-funded Antarctic research programs brought the #MeToo movement to the sciences. A 2022 external report commissioned by NSF highlighted that sexual harassment was widespread in the U.S. Antarctic Program—59% of women who participated in focus groups had personally experienced or witnessed sexual harassment or assault and 95% knew of someone else who had experienced sexual harassment or assault while in the program.

In response to the report, NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan established the Sexual Assault and Harassment Prevention and Response (SAHPR) program, which led the creation of the Antarctica hotline—in collaboration with the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN), an antisexual violence nonprofit. The current expansion replaces the Antarctica helpline and extends those services to all people in the NSF research community.

The resource “helps to advance NSF’s efforts to prevent and effectively respond to sexual assault, sexual harassment and/or stalking,” says Renée Ferranti, special assistant to the director at SAHPR. The service will be operated by RAINN through a contract with NSF.

Visitors to the helpline will receive resources “tailored to the NSF research community,” says Jessica St. Germaine, director of consulting services at RAINN. This differentiates the NSF helpline from RAINN’s National Sexual Assault Helpline. NSF won’t be involved in the distribution of resources when visitors call the line, and the support they receive will be fully confidential. “RAINN will provide NSF aggregate usage data only,” Ferranti says, though she didn’t go into detail about how those data would be used. “No information about the communication will be shared with NSF and the helpline does not collect any personally identifiable information.”

Still, Gunsalus notes people may be hesitant to use the helpline under the current political climate. “Building sufficient trust that it gets used may be a challenge in our current environment, as will assuring its continued availability.”

Vicki Magley, a psychologist at the University of Connecticut who co-authored a 2018 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report about sexual harassment says the hotline could help people work through possible incidents of gender harassment, a form of harassment that involves sexist and sexualized insults meant to degrade people; the NASEM report highlighted this as the most ubiquitous but least understood form of sexual harassment. Because gender harassment can lead to more egregious forms of harassment, intervening early could have a substantial impact, Magley says. “Any kind of empowerment that encourages people to articulate what’s happening to them is helpful.”

At the same time, Magley wonders about the future of the helpline, given the cuts underway at NSF. “My primary concern would be that the current administration won’t allow such a hotline to continue and won’t continue funding efforts that would support such a hotline,” she says.

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