Determining how best to respond to reports of discrimination, bias and sexual harassment is an important human rights issue in the United States and around the world today. One approach is to adopt a social justice framework.
Maurianne Adams and Lee Anne Bell state that the goal of social justice is the “full and equitable participation of people from all social identity groups in a society that is mutually shaped to meet their needs. The process for attaining the goal of social justice should also be democratic and participatory, respectful of human diversity and group differences, and inclusive and affirming of human agency and capacity for working collaboratively with others to create change.”
In response to calls for truth and reporting mechanisms to deal with gender discrimination and sexual harassment, new institutions have been created in Hollywood, the corporate world and now academia.
In particular, professional academic associations like the American Political Science Association (APSA) are taking meaningful steps to create mechanisms and institutions through which individuals can seek resources and information to help them deal with various forms of harassment and other violations of professional ethics.
Diversity and ethics professionals in the world of professional associations like Dr. Kimberly Mealy from APSA are designing (for the first time in many instances) institutional mechanisms for reporting violations of codes of conduct that take place at professional conferences and meetings.
Three such mechanisms are discussed in this article: an ombuds resource, an incident reporting system and the APSA RESPECT Campaign.
In 2017, after a series of thoughtful and deliberative discussions, APSA leaders updated the annual meeting anti-harassment policy and asked the APSA Committee on Professional Ethics, Rights and Freedoms to survey annual meeting attendees who had attended a meeting in the last four years. The survey sought to ascertain the degree to which attendees had experienced harassment.
