Keywords

Introduction

A casually dressed 19-year-old woman boards a coach on the outskirts of a small city. Apart from the driver and two other passengers, the vehicle is empty. The young woman chooses a window seat. At the next stop, three people, including a man in his early sixties, enter. After having bought his ticket, the old man locks eyes with the 19-year-old. With his eyes wide open and licking his lips, the old man’s viol par le regardFootnote 1 sends cold chills down her spine. Anxiously the young woman gazes out of the window. The 60-year-old slowly makes his way through the coach and chooses the free seat right next to her. The woman is now trapped between the window and the old man. Still glancing at her, the 60-year-old tries to make a move on the 19-year-old. Shocked by his inappropriate behaviour, the woman pretends that she does not speak the local vernacular and ignores him. This does not prevent the old man from moving closer to the young woman and putting his hand on her knee. Realising that no one will help her, the 19-year-old looks at the old man and says in Russian: “What do you want from me? I do not understand you!” Not knowing Russian, the old man points at himself and says: “I am Peter” and then points at the young woman “and you?” “Elena” answers the woman. Peter removes his hand from her knee and takes her hand instead. “Are you married to a local man?” “Boyfriend” Elena replies in a broken English. Peter releases her hand and jokingly reprimands her that she needs to learn the local language to remain in the country. Peter finally ceases his advances. Pointing at herself and the door, Elena tries to explain to Peter that she has to get off at the next stop. He cordially lets her pass. Before leaving the coach, Elena turns around and angrily shouts at Peter in the local language: “You are a f** pervert! And everyone else here”, she points at the other passengers, “should feel ashamed for standing by and doing nothing”.

Many of my female interlocutors in Central Asia can sympathise with Elena’s story. Sexual harassment of teenage girls and women in public transport is pervasive in Central Asian societies. There are no laws criminalising sexual harassment (Abdullaeva, 2021; Dall’Agnola, 2022; Kulakhmetova & Zhailau, 2022) and men’s treatment of women in public spaces has not received much attention in the region until very recently. However, upon revealing that I am Elena and that I became the victim of sexual harassment in a small city in the countryside of Switzerland, my female respondents tend to be speechless. I decided to start this essay with my own personal experience of sexual harassment in Switzerland to show that this issue is not a Central Asian problem per se. A study of 4500 Swiss women carried out by the survey institute, GfS Bern for Amnesty International Switzerland in 2019 (Amnesty International Switzerland, 2019), revealed that one in five women has been a victim of sexual violence, and almost 60 per cent had been subjected to sexual harassment in the form of unwanted touching, close physical contact or kissing. I, therefore, do not regard Central Asia as any more dangerous for women than Switzerland; both societies exhibit unacceptably high levels of sexual harassment and violence against women. As such, in contrast to female researchers who experienced few incidents of sexual harassment in their life prior to their fieldwork overseas (Congdon, 2015), I was well aware of the possibility of sexual harassment when embarking on my second field trip to Central Asia in 2022.

While collecting data for my postdoctoral project in the region, I experienced various forms of sexual harassment, ranging from unwelcomed sexual verbal and physical advances, whistling, and catcalling to stalking both off- and online. In being honest and transparent about my personal experiences with unwanted sexual advances in the field, I neither wish to make totalising generalisations about Central Asian men, nor to discourage other female scholars from conducting fieldwork in the region. By contrast, I hope that my personal reflections presented here will help other researchers mitigate and avoid similar situations.

The remainder of this essay is organised as follows. In the first section, I show why my foreign femininity attracted much attention from male interlocutors and how I managed to ward off some of the unwanted sexual advances in the field. Then, I discuss how the popularisation of new technologies has transformed the strategies and tools that can be utilised by men to harass women while discussing my own experience with cyberstalking.

Navigating Unwanted Sexual Advances in the Field

When returning to Central Asia to conduct interviews for my postdoctoral project, I knew that it was impossible for me “to maintain a fiction of a genderless self” (Moreno, 1995, 246) vis-a-vis my interlocutors in the field. Indeed, the most significant aspects of my positionality, which determined both female and male respondents’ reactions towards me were my youth and white European femininity. While young women, in particular, would use the interview with me as an opportunity to engage in discourses of inclusion and gender equality, most young men in their twenties and thirties would misread my interest in their use of technologies as an attempt to flirt with them. In this context, the well-meant advice from established female researchers to wear an engagement ring turned out to be quite ineffective in my case.

For example, on one evening, a pot-bellied man in his early thirties squeezed himself into the lift with me. AzizFootnote 2 grinned at me. Hoping that I could recruit him for an interview, I smiled back politely. When the lift began moving upwards, he casually asked me if I had any plans for the evening. Caught off guard and flustered, I replied with a no and mentioned that I was looking to interview people for my research. Aziz replied that he was happy to answer all of my questions over dinner. Pointing at my engagement ring, I politely declined. Aziz smiled and argued that my fiancé was absent and therefore, would never find out about our rendezvous. Outraged by his indecent proposal, I tried to push past him to leave the lift one floor earlier. As I went by, Aziz leered and stated that if I ever wanted any company, I should just come to his apartment, as he had bought some nice red wine for the occasion.

Many young men like Aziz, made it quite clear what they wanted in return for their participation. Some made physical sexual advances, others were verbally explicit, and yet, others restricted themselves to hints and allusions. So, yes, “I had men’s attention” (Thibault, 2021, 13), but this had its price. In contrast to Central Asian women who were there for serious courtship and marriage, foreign women, like me, were seen as sexually promiscuous and therefore were there “for fun” (Peinhopf, 2023, 28). My meetings with local men were not regulated by local gender behaviour rules. As such, I was neither protected by these norms nor did men feel obliged to respect my personal boundaries. That for some men, I seemed to resemble Maria Sharapova, the Russian tennis star, made the situation no better. Among the more “bearable” unwanted romantic advances were compliments on my looks, explicit flirting, being asked out and inquiries about the whereabouts of my fiancé. More unbearable and therefore, more difficult to navigate and ward off were the nightly phone calls, indecent proposals to become someone’s second wife, sexualised threats and physical sexual advances by men in power.

The repeated sexual advances from gatekeepers and other men in power proved especially challenging. I needed their support to access the field and my respondents. Outright rejections of their proposals, therefore, could have harmed both my safety and my research. On one occasion, I had to visit a local registration office to secure permission for my stay. On arrival, I was asked by a senior male administrative official to leave my passport with him overnight. I remember feeling anxious and naked without my passport. Yet, this was the only way to obtain the necessary permission for my stay. The following day, I therefore eagerly returned to the office to relocate my documents. I approached the same officer and asked him whether my registration had been done. Holding my passport in his hand, the official stared at me from head to toe. To his seeming despair, I had covered my hair and I was wearing a long wide grey dress. Licking his lips, he insisted on continuing our talk in the back of his office. We could speed up my registration with trachat (a vulgar Russian term for “sexual intercourse”). I managed to wriggle out of this situation by playing extremely “dumb”, pretending that I did not understand what he wanted and feigning another appointment in the city. Upon returning to my apartment, my self-confident façade crumbled, and I sobbed out of fear and relief that I had gotten my passport back without being raped by a male official. Since, I evidently had little to give in terms of power and wealth, men in power were demanding sexual favours from me in exchange for their help. However, succumbing to the sexual advances of these men was never an option for me.

Two months after the incident at the registration office, I was again forced to keep my opinion to myself to avoid offending one of my main gatekeepers in another city. Akmat kept on calling me at night. He was concerned about my personal safety: “Oh my dear Jasmin, you are a smart girl, but you are also a beautiful girl. So, one of our boys might kidnap you. You know we have this tradition to abduct our women for marriage”. Even after explaining to him that I was already engaged to a man in Switzerland, Akmat insisted, “but you know my beloved Jasmin, your father will receive good money for you. Don’t you think, he would be happy about this?” Akmat kept on repeating these sexualised threats, even when he introduced me to potential interviewees. He would jokingly introduce me to his friends as “Jasmin, the researcher from Switzerland who soon will be abducted because of her exotic beauty”. To remain in his good books, it was only on our last meeting that I summoned the courage to counter him: “Akmat, I know my dear father. He will only accept a bride-price of more than one million USD for me. If any man dares to disrespect my father, well, my father will introduce him to his friends from the mafia”. Given my Italian surname, it was clear which mafia I meant. My response had the intended effect. Akmat ceased calling me at night and I never saw him again during my stay in the country. However, some Central Asian men continued their unwanted sexual advances online long after I had left the field, as the following section shows.

Cyber Harassment and Stalking

Upon agreeing to talk with me, my gatekeepers would usually connect me with their friends, colleagues and/or acquaintances on WhatsApp, Instagram or Telegram. While I had some concerns about this practice, sharing personal contact information with strangers is often unavoidable to acquire respondents in any field site. Luckily, apart from one male interviewee, who I had to block after he threatened to turn me into his princess when I returned to his city, none of the Central Asian men with whom I had willingly exchanged my contact details harassed me online.

I did, however, have one encounter with a Central Asian man, Amir, whom I had not given my private phone number to, but who used his personal links to the authorities to obtain it against my will. Amir interrupted my business lunch with a local female academic. He wanted to invite me for dinner in one of the most expensive restaurants in the city. According to him, I reminded him of a French actress he used to admire when he was a young boy. My friend, seemingly intimidated by Amir’s presence, whispered that Amir resembled a local politician and therefore, could be an interesting respondent for my study. I gave Amir my business card with the clear message that I was only interested in meeting him for business purposes. We shook hands and parted. Not thinking further about Amir, I went on to other meetings that day. Around nine o’clock in the evening, I checked my phone and noticed that there were several missed calls from an unknown local phone number as well as a message on WhatsApp from the same number. Reading the text, I froze: “Jasmin. Good evening. I am very sorry for calling and texting you without further notice. Amir”. I was shocked. How had Amir succeeded in getting my Swiss number? My Swiss phone number was neither printed on my business card nor was it publicly available on social media or the Internet. I found it intimidating and deeply disturbing that Amir would use his ties to the local authorities to obtain my number. I felt horrified, threatened and angry at the same time. Suddenly Akmat’s threat that I might be abducted by a Central Asian man during my fieldwork felt real. The fact that during the last 48 hours of my stay, Amir continued to call and text me on WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, left me in a constant state of fear that Amir would find and abduct me. After inquiring with my female colleagues in the city about their experiences with stalking, I decided to set up a safety protocol with my partner in Switzerland and two local women who agreed to stay up late and wait for my text message that I had arrived at the airport. Luckily, everything went well, and I made it safely back to Switzerland. Even long after I had left the country, Amir kept on calling and texting me, so that I felt forced to block his phone number. Unfortunately, this did not ward off Amir.

On March 8, 2023, I was awoken by a text message from Amir, who had gotten himself a Swiss phone number to send me an image of flowers for international women’s day on WhatsApp. I was terrified. Why and how did he obtain a Swiss number? Was he looking for me in Switzerland? What could he, as a married man with two kids, possibly want from me? A female Central Asian colleague who I contacted for help, was outraged by Amir’s behaviour. She argued that, as a woman of the same ethnic group, she could make Amir’s stalking public and shame him on Twitter so that his wife and family learned about his shameful demeanour. According to her, “Central Asian men tend to be scared of such kind of publicity”. However, we both came to the conclusion that, unfortunately, public “shaming” would not have the intended effect, because I was a foreign woman. Thus, I was not protected by the Central Asian regulative framework of shame (Thibault & Caron, 2022). I decided to turn to my own authorities for help. Unlike in some neighbouring countries, cyberstalking does not constitute a criminal offence in its own right in Switzerland (Stadt Zürich, 2023). Instead, victims are asked to tell the stalker in front of witnesses that they wish to have no contact and to inform their friends and loved ones about the stalker. If the stalking does not cease or worsens, the victim may contact the police. All this is problematic because it suggests that only after Amir attacks me physically, will I be able to get help from my own authorities in Switzerland. Until then, he can continue to follow me around and stalk me online as it pleases him.

While the scholarly literature focussing on sexual harassment of women scholars is growing, little attention has been paid to the implications of cyber harassment on female researchers (Veletsianos et al., 2018). What I found most distressing was the fact that Amir continued to harass me through the Internet and on social media long after I had returned to Switzerland. His call and message from a Swiss number made me realise that I could delete and block his number, but that this would not prevent him or any other person from using another phone number or from creating a new profile to follow my travel and research updates on my public social media accounts in the future. While we as scholars are regularly encouraged to engage in public and in networked scholarship on social media, cyberstalking highlights the potential and far-reaching consequences that any researcher, but especially women, experience when they have a public social media profile.

In the light of the recurrent online harassment, I am wondering if and when I will be able to safely travel to the region in the near future. Due to Amir’s ruthless advances, I have had to postpone my planned field trips and to turn down invitations to speak at conference venues in Central Asia. Cyberstalking does not only have a negative impact on a researcher’s emotional and physical safety, it also harms their professional career in academia. Early-career female scholars, in particular, are confronted with the paradox of hiding themselves in situations where they are professionally assessed according to their on- and offline visibility as well as the impact factor of their publications. Any form of harassment acts to silence and marginalise female scholars’ voices and adversely impacts not just their personal and professional life but also the wider public’s access to female scholarship.

Conclusion

As I have tried to show in this essay, even when we, as young foreign female researchers, decide to wear an engagement ring and to dress modestly, unwanted sexual advances by men in the field cannot be precluded. We may belong to a so-called “third sex” (Schwedler, 2006, 425) that grants us easy access to both female and male social circles, but this category does not protect us from sexual harassment. In contrast to local women, neither are our encounters with men regulated by local gender behaviour rules, nor can we make use of the Central Asian cultural mentality of “shame” to ward off potential harassers. Moreover, harassment does not necessarily stop with the end of fieldwork. It can continue in the form of cyberstalking and can take an emotional toll on the researcher. In this context, writing about my encounters with sexual harassment both on- and offline, certainly helped me to cope with the symptoms of “post-traumatic stress disorder” (Pollard, 2009, 3). In addition, I decided to speak out against my stalker and talk about my personal experience with cyberstalking on Twitter:

Today I woke up by text from my stalker who got himself a new number to send me flowers for #WomensDay on WhatsApp. So thoughtful of him, right? #AcademicTwitter, we need to talk about the consequences of #cyberstalking for women scholars doing #fieldwork! (@jazzdallagnola, March 8, 2023).

To avoid any lawsuit, I did not make my stalker’s real name public. Nevertheless, my tweet seems to have struck a chord. It was widely shared and encouraged other female academics to share their own experiences of sexual and cyber harassment. The commentors uniformly agreed that any form of harassment, whether on- or offline should never be tolerated, and therefore, the existing laws need to be toughened. In contrast to previous scholarships’ assumption that women who dare to speak out online against misogyny are bullied and silenced (Are, 2020), I did not receive any negative feedback or comments about my tweet. Not even from Amir, who of course, continues to follow my updates on Twitter.