Following public complaints of moral and sexual harassment that allegedly occurred at the Centre for Social Studies ath the University of Coimbra, Portugal, the Board of Directors and the Presidency of the Scientific Board of the Centre of Social Studies (CES) decided to set up an Independent Commission to clarify possible situations of harassment, be those mentioned in public complaints or others that may arise, as well as to identify possible institutional failures.
This Independent Commission included two ENOHE board members, Jorge A. Ribeiro Pereira from Portugal and Michaela Antonín Malaníková from the Czech Republic, who worked along with Catarina Reis Neves (psychologist), Cristina Ayoub Riche (former RIdDU president) and Eduarda Proença de Carvalho (lawyer) on the report.
Jorge and Michaela were also the coordinators of the Independent Commission.
On March 13th the final report was launched and a presentation was made for the CES community.
In an open letter the CES stated that,
“The broader context of this report, harassment in higher education and research, is strongly underpinned by the precariousness of academic careers and is a growing concern internationally.
We hope that, as a result of this process, this issue will gain greater visibility at national level. To this end, we will seek to stimulate collective reflection on this issue and support research that allows us to identify its incidence and form.
We will seek synergies with other centres, laboratories and research and higher education institutions, contributing with our experience to improving prevention practices, so that no researcher or student ever experiences similar situations again.”
Last October Jorge and Michaela were invited by the Erasmus+ UniSAFE project in the framework of the Spanish Presidency of the Council of European Union to talk about gender-based violence from the perspective of ombuds in an international conference about “Ending Gender-Based Violence in Academia“ that took place in Bilbao, Spain.
Both Jorge and Michaela are members of the newly formed ENOHE International Relations Committee (IRC) and also contribute to the goals and tasks in this forum.
“ENOHE is proud of having board members who are so active in analyzing everyday problems in HEI relationship management and looking for improvements where needed”, says Josef Leidenfrost, the coordinator of the IRC group.