The first report presents a quantitative analysis of the Survey Concerning Sexual Violence and Harassment in Fieldwork Situations. It is available in PDF format at the link below.
HiF_report1_20250223 (7.9MB First published on 28 February 2025)
Please note that the medium of this report is mostly Japanese. English translations appear only in the figures and tables.
Although we initially planned to publish the report bilingually, it was soon realized as an unrealistic venture to pursue. We thus provide the English version of the abstract (see below) in order to reciprocate the efforts made by participants who provided their valuable input in English and to attract a wider readership.
Abstract:
Since the 1990s, sexual violence, including sexual harassment, has come to be recognized as a serious problem in universities and research institutions. However, there has been little qualitative and quantitative research on sexual violence involved in fieldwork, impeding the design of effective measures to prevent such violence. As fieldworkers visit a variety of locations to conduct research, they are susceptible to sexual violence arising from the social space of individual fieldsite and from the complex human relationships that they build therein. Thus, in order to ensure a safe environment for fieldworkers conducting academic research, designing measures to prevent sexual violence in fieldwork is an important issue. As a first step to reach this goal, a large-scale online questionnaire was conducted in 2022 to understand the reality of sexual violence experienced by fieldworkers. We asked for cooperation from almost all academic societies in Japan, and received responses from 2,490 people who knew about the survey through a total of 272 academic societies. Of the 2,487 valid responses, 1,895 (76.2%) responded that they had conducted fieldwork, and of these, 290 (15.3%) responded that they had experienced sexual violence during fieldwork. Of these 290 fieldworkers who had experienced sexual violence, 87.2% were female. We also obtained detailed information on 352 cases of sexual violence from 242 fieldworkers who had experienced sexual violence. Of these 352 cases, the largest number (35.2%) had occurred during the last 10 years (2013–2022), while some cases had occurred more than 30 years before the time of the survey (2022).
This report, the first to be released on the results of the survey, presents the quantitative analysis of the responses to select questions (e.g., multiple-choice questions, Yes/No questions, drop-down survey questions). Analysis of the 352 cases of sexual violence showed that 94.3% of the abusers were male and that the most prevalent victims were graduate students (57.4%) and undergraduate students (14.8%). In addition, 88.6% of the 1,895 respondents who had fieldwork experience had received no guidance on preventing or addressing the risks of sexual violence prior to their fieldwork. Most of the responses to the open-ended questions have not yet been analyzed, and we plan to report on them in the future. This report presents a quantitative picture of the sexual violence experienced by fieldworkers.