The name Siouxsie Wiles may not be familiar to you at all, but it is very possible that she influenced your life almost five years ago. The work of this British scientist based in New Zealand was important for us to understand what to do in the early days of the pandemic, when she dedicated herself to creating cartoons together with the cartoonist Toby Morris. His comics, converted into animated GIFs that were published in the media The Spinoffthey helped us understand the idea of how to flatten the curve. Thanks to its Creative Commons license, they were disseminated in various languages, including Spanish (here the translation we did at the SINC agency, where I worked). They went viral on social networks and instant messaging — in just three days, in March 2020, they obtained more than 10 million impacts on Twitter. The then Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern used her comics to explain the first confinement measures to the public.
This is how this microbiologist and scientific communicator with fuchsia hair became a celebrity during the pandemic with her interventions on television, radio and newspapers in New Zealand. And, like other researchers around the world, she suffered harassment after appearing in the press.
“The abuse, harassment and threats began almost immediately after I began giving interviews to the media. “I have been suffering from them almost daily for almost two years,” Wiles wrote in Guardian in 2022—. They occur through my personal and work emails and phones, as well as on social media. My home address has been published several times on far-right websites and social media, along with calls for people to visit me. Some conspiracy theorists harassed me while I was having breakfast at a hotel. “They broadcast the meeting live.” His case, chilling, bears similarities to others that we have known and that have been reflected in international surveys carried out by magazines Nature and Science. However, its outcome is different.
The first difference is that, in 2023, Siouxsie Wiles went to labor litigation against her employers for failing to ensure her safety at work. According to her statement, she sought support from the University of Auckland in the face of the savage harassment she was experiencing and the institution’s response was inadequate.
In July 2024, a New Zealand court ruled that her university had breached its obligation to protect scientist Wiles from attacks she suffered while providing public information about the pandemic, and ordered her to be compensated with NZ$20,000.
The second difference is that, in July 2024, a New Zealand court ruled that the university had breached its obligation to protect Wiles while providing public information about the pandemic, and forced it to compensate her with 20,000 New Zealand dollars (about 11,000 euros) for damages and damages. The trial – which no media outlets reported in Spain – has had a wide international impact on the change that knowledge-producing institutions need to make in the protection of their staff.
Attacks like the ones she experienced, in addition to harming the people who suffer them—causing personal insecurity, psychological problems and loss of productivity—have consequences for science communication because they end up dissuading a good part of the sources that journalists we need to produce reliable information.
In Spain, 16.55% of scientists who have suffered attacks related to their public exposure in the last five years have stopped talking to the media. This is, in my opinion, one of the most interesting data extracted from a pioneering study in our country that we published a few days ago in the Science Media Center together with the Gureiker research group from the University of the Basque Country.
More data: 51.05% of the people we surveyed admit to having experienced an attack after communicating about science. The most frequent are insults, the main channel is X (formerly Twitter) and the topics that receive the most hate are those related to health and climate change. Women are the most affected: 56.86% of female scientists surveyed suffered attacks compared to 46.21% of male scientists.
The type of harassment that they experience is different. They are criticized more for their professional integrity, while more than one in three female researchers receive contempt for their scientific ability (it doesn’t matter if they are experts on a topic, they are told “you don’t know what you’re talking about”), with a percentage difference of more than 10 points compared to men.
“This study is a starting point to put on the table a problem that institutions would have to analyze in their own area and take measures,” stressed Maider Eizmendi, scientific director of the study, in a briefing that we organize. Surprisingly, the vast majority of people we surveyed chose not to inform their institutions of these experiences, and that is worrying. At the same time, among the testimonies we collected, the most frequent asked the institutions for training in science communication, protection mechanisms and greater involvement.
Our survey data adds to a global conversation that concerns research centers around the world. Wiles’ ruling has opened crucial debates at a time when misinformation has become a problem that is difficult to control: to what extent is the communication of knowledge one of the tasks of research personnel? If we consider that it is part of their job, then we need institutions to have adequate tools to protect their scientists from attacks.
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