I'm been thinking about this for a bit, especially since the NFL "issue" came up a few weeks back with certain players being investigated/charged with domestic violence an abuse and the subsequent punishment (or not) by said organization. Not so much discussion about the punishment by law as I would've thought. More about the comparison between "how harsh a punishment for smoking pot vs hitting a significant other". I have a lot of feelings about this, both the dual punishment system and the "how many games is it worth" as well as the law investigations and media hype where everyone seems to oscillate between "do nothing" and "off with their heads".
However, last week the discussion at the lab took another turn since we talked more about abuse in a general context and then it spread into talking about lab culture and abuse by or with PI permission..... A lot of it was between some of us older* in the game compared to the graduates/MD fellows/other ppl who might not have seen and experienced as much. I recalled talking to a few of them earlier this year when a technician left their job and ended it on a bad note by lying about "what really had happened" and me explaining that you can't always presume that people tell the truth (especially not when the person in question has been breaking regulations, being warned, helped etc for many months) and that there is always more beneath the surface and what people let on. Ah well, I digress.
About the idea of abuse, that it is by a person you are depending on (or love) that makes it difficult to act on. That you aren't just "leaving because they are passing a line" but staying around "so how bad can it really be"? It's a fairly common** thing after all, I would say that the difference is in the severity (and possibly if it is physical or not). After all, it surely seems like the physical abuse is something that make people take it more serious, not to mention actually seeing the physical (point in case; when the first video surfaced people seemed upset that a man dragged his unconscious girlfriend out of an elevator. He admitted to hitting her, thus rendering her unconscious. However, it was only after people SAW him hitting that they really claimed outrageous upset and said "it's horrible". I could mention similar things about the movie of the school bus incidents ("Bully") and what people really feel after they HEAR all the degrading comments to one person on the bus although "it's just words so it's not that bad"..... but after hearing it in context something might click?)
A person piped up the other day that they are not allowed to wear t-shirts in the lab ("it's not professional clothing") but are encouraged to wear nice looking open toe shoes (hello regulations?). Same person tells the technicians how useless they are and not as great as the former tech in a place far-far away, they see if as "encouragement"... Another person wrote on their blog about a PI who required their post-docs to wear frames (glasses without glasses) for presentations (only the female ones though). Another example would be the post-doc who worked in the lab where the PI slept with another post-doc but people thought post-doc A rather than B and started acting on it. The list goes on....
Again, a lot of it is probably not technically*** abuse but I would think it falls under bullying or more likely unprofessional conduct. It also links these things together since there seems to be a few assumptions and correlations without explicitly stating them. One such thing would be "a great athlete is also a great person" or "great at their sports=good person" and the whole "role model spiel" (for the kids! always for the kids to look up to). Similar thing with highly successful scientists, "they are successful = surely their lab is a great place to work" and "strive to become as great as them". Or "surely they wouldn't do anything like that, they are successful so there is no need to act petty/mean/etc".
I personally would really love if it could be ok to state "they are great at what they do" and keep it separate from "they are great as a person/role model overall" or implying that if you are great at what you work with, you somehow have been a great person to become that good working person. I mean, John McEnroe was a great tennis player but maybe not a "super-nice-and-wonderful-person-all-the-time" and back in the day I don't remember anyone saying that it was a problem distinguishing between them.
I honestly don't remember where I was going with this, it's been a while since I wrote blog posts so I would need to get back on track with "point to make". Maybe I just wanted to rant a little about the annoyment I feel when people state "they should just leave their partner" without seemingly understand that it is not as easy as just getting up and leaving. Nor is it to leave a lab when things are bad since "you need their recommendation for future jobs". And most of all, people are great at denial. "It's probably me, I shouldn't take it like that. After all, they are probably trying to help me realize that I really need to change".
I'm hoping that we can move the discussion back to more reasonable grounds and avoid the black-white ("never play/do science again" vs "snow white and a perfect person"). After all, we are all humans with more or less flaws and the likelihood that new problem situations will be discovered increases if the discussion is more levelheaded than chopping the head off, and also that there will be help to give and awareness for new people.
*being a post-doc or technician for more than 5 years, in more than one lab/institute
** my own definition of common... "not that unheard of"or there is at least one lab in a department that people tend to avoid due to issues in the lab
***technically=punishable by law
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