Outdoor Retailer - Winter 2019 - 26

IDEAS / Industry Survey

TOUGH QUESTIONS
With the numbers now
public, perhaps change will
come to the community.

RESEARCH

#SafeOutside

Over the summer of 2018, researchers conducted an unprecedented
survey on sexual harassment and assault in the climbing
community. Over 5,000 climbers from around the world
participated. The results may be the first step toward the industry
doing somthing to change this toxic culture. by Carol Kauder
CHARLIE LIEU DIDN'T THINK SEXUAL HARASSMENT AND ASSAULT WAS AN ISSUE IN THE
climbing community. "I thought that climbing was so much better than the rest of society," she
says. "I really believed that."
But there were red flags. As a board member of the Access Fund, Lieu learned of allegations
against a prominent climber. She saw one woman who was willing to speak about it publicly become ostracized, while others told her they were afraid and refused to come forward. Becoming
introspective during this process, Lieu acknowledged an interaction that would add her name to
the list of those with grievances against this same climber.
"It's weird that you can compartmentalize these things, how you can have negative experiences
but fail to put them into context because they go against your world view," she says. "As I'm doing
this work, I'm getting more aware, learning about this issue and learning what to do about it."
What to do about it? That was a question that Lieu, a biotech operational strategist, could not
ignore. So she partnered with Katie Ives, editor-in-chief at Alpinist, to create the #SafeOutside
initiative. They were soon joined by Callie Rennison, a professor of criminology at the University
of Colorado Denver.

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/ Winter 2019

CAPTURING THE DATA
As a first step, Lieu saw it as essential to document the prevalence of sexual harassment and
sexual assault by conducting a large scale survey of climbers. She didn't know whether her
own experience, and those of many she spoke
with, were in line with what was going on in the
larger climbing population. "As a data scientist,
these personal stories didn't feel like a sufficient amount of data to form a conclusion," she
says. "I wanted to see if this is a pervasive issue."
Of the survey's more than 5,000 respondents, 40 percent of women and 9 percent of
men reported having experienced SHSA during a climbing related activity.
The numbers, which mirror results from
general population SHSA studies, did not
come as a surprise to Lieu. "The part I was surprised by was how surprised other people were
at how pervasive this is," she said. "The question this data raised for me was: What are we
doing wrong that our community isn't talking
about this problem or worse, didn't even realize it's a problem?"
The numbers go up-to 47 percent of women and 16 percent of men-when asked more
directly about specific behaviors including catcalling and unwanted touching, which people
may be conditioned to downplay when they
experience them.
"This kind of methodology exposes our
storytelling in society to make victims silent,"
said Rennison, who applied her experience
in studying violent victimization including
sexual violence and misconduct to designing the survey. Rennison wanted the survey
short, simple, and to the point, with questions
phrased to avoid setting off traumatic triggers,
while leaving open-ended opportunities for
respondents who wanted to share more. "The
20 percent response rate to the open-ends was
itself an indication of the tremendous engagement around this issue," Rennison says.
The study also showed how SHSA has an
impact on the sport itself. Fifty-eight percent
of women and 21 percent of men who expe-

Andrew Kornylak

"Our goal is to understand the extent of
sexual harassment and assault (SHSA) in the
climbing community, then develop tools to address it if we discover a problem," Lieu says.

Outdoor Retailer - Winter 2019

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