Women working in Antarctica say they were left to fend for themselves against sexual harassers
Many women who work at McMurdo Station, the main United States research base in Antarctica, say the isolated environment and macho culture have allowed sexual harassment and assault to flourish.
Yeah this headline and even bot summary downplay all of this. Rape allegations were being automatically changed to "harassment" and one woman felt it necessary to carry a hammer in her sports bar or on her person to defend against rape...
They won't stop serving alcohol because it would make the jobs unappealing... Maybe they shouldn't want the kind of employees that find deployment appealing only if alcohol is available, but that might just be me 🤷
I mean, alcohol is something I like, regardless of where I live. Why should Antarctica suddenly make me stop liking beer?
Because they have the proof that allowing people isolated in a small group for extended periods of time to drink alcohol leads to issues including violence and sexual crimes.
If you like alcohol so much that you wouldn't consider going to work in a "dry town" then chances are that you will end up being exactly the kind of person they don't need to have living at the research station.
Who else would like to live in Antarctica tho?
I'm sure they're able to find tons of sober candidates and from what we can read in that story, they would probably have more women candidates if it became a "dry town", especially for a second round living there as I'm sure none of them want to go twice unless it's as a couple.
This reads as a story from 15 years ago. Scientists, among all us, should be able to design a safe working environment, with proper oversight. For fucks sake. Even the HR in Antarctica is broken.
"HR" isn't broken, it's people that are broken. We shouldn't need specific departments to keep people from sexually assaulting each other.
Just like we shouldn't need police and laws against murder.
Unfortunately, that's not the world we live in. We do need these things. Expecting people to do the right thing out of the goodness of their hearts is naive.
True, thank you for this
This is the best summary I could come up with:
CHRISTCHURCH, New Zealand (AP) — The howling winds and perpetual darkness of the Antarctic winter were easing to a frozen spring when mechanic Liz Monahon at McMurdo Station grabbed a hammer.
In reviewing court records and internal communications, and in interviews with more than a dozen current and former employees, the AP uncovered a pattern of women who said their claims of harassment or assault were minimized by their employers, often leading to them or others being put in further danger.
Five months after its release, a woman at McMurdo told a deputy U.S. marshal that colleague Stephen Bieneman pinned her down and put his shin over her throat for about a minute while she desperately tried to communicate she couldn’t breathe.
Kathleen Naeher, the chief operating officer of the civil group at Leidos, told a congressional committee in December that they would install peepholes on dorm room doors, limit access to master keys that could open multiple bedrooms, and give teams in the field an extra satellite phone.
Monahon claims Izzi discouraged her from reporting what happened to the deputy U.S. marshal, in part because it would create jurisdictional headaches and even an international problem, as Buckingham was a New Zealand citizen.
Britt Barquist, who worked as foreperson of the fuel department, told the AP she was attending a safety briefing with co-workers in 2017 when a man in a senior role reached under the table and squeezed her upper leg.
The original article contains 2,837 words, the summary contains 242 words. Saved 91%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Doesn't surprise me.
