Aoibhinn Ní Shúilleabháin has admitted she regrets not making a formal harassment complaint against her colleague at UCD sooner.
Aoibhinn told The Irish Times that her UCD colleague Prof Hans-Benjamin Braun began “repeatedly harassing” her in 2015, and it continued for two years before she decided to officially report the harassment to the Gardaí.
Speaking to RTÉ’s Today with Claire Byrne, the academic opened up about the frightening experience – which began with Prod Braun initiating a “conversation that just didn’t seem appropriate”.
“It really kind of started properly when he arrived at my office and asked me for a date and it took me a couple of minutes to realise why he was in my office because I was like maybe he wants a conversation about public engagement,” she explained.
“I was really trying to wrack my brains because we wouldn’t have worked together in a professional capacity at all.
“He came back again the next day and that was quite frightening because he was in a very frantic state, accusing me of lying to him of not being honest with his feelings, saying that he wouldn’t ordinarily ask a person out, and I had to go with him, basically, on a date.
“I was quite worried because there was no way out of my office without him leaving first. He was blocking the door, basically,” she revealed.
“I just eventually tried to make my body language really strong and clear and I kept my hands on the table and I just said, ‘I’m not going to go on a date with you. I want you to leave my office now.’ And I just left it at that and he left.”
After informing a colleague about what had happened, Aoibhinn was advised to contact UCD’s Human Resources Department.
“I was like, okay, I will, but you know what, it’s Friday evening, I’m going away with my friends, I’m just going to call them on Monday. That was the weekend then where I was down in a hotel with three of my girlfriends.
“We were just having a nice weekend away, we do it once a year,” Aoibhinn explained, but said that the next morning she got a call from reception telling her that Prof Braun was there with flowers for her.
“She was relaying the conversation then between himself and myself in that he had said I was expecting him and it was our weekend away, and I asked her to tell him that we’d already gone for the day.
“She came back to say he knows your car is outside. That was petrifying because I didn’t know how he knew my car.”
Hotel management called the guards for Aoibhinn, before Prof Braun returned the next day – with Gardaí being called for the second time.
“In the interim, I had called members of UCD to inform them that this was happening and arranged to have a meeting with HR that morning,” she said.
“On Monday, I had a meeting with two people and reported all those incidents, and they suggested if I wanted to that I should work from home or I could work from home for a couple of days until they communicated with him.
“They had eventually got in touch with him and I could return to work if I wanted to because they didn’t believe he would be back on campus for a while.”
“I wasn’t told actually when he would be coming back to work or when he was back on campus. And I think I saw him in the distance and, obviously, try and keep away from wherever his office was,” she continued.
“He sent me an email, then, to see if I would take over lecturing one of his modules which isn’t in my field and I wouldn’t be able to. It was a completely inappropriate conversation.
“I knew he had been told not to contact me so I contacted HR directly to say he’s contacted me, can you address this because he shouldn’t have.
“I was assured afterwards that he had been told not to, it was an error of judgement on his part, and I was told then he’ll be out of the country until January.”
In January 2016, Aoibhinn began receiving calls from Prof Braun again – followed by returning visits to her office.
“I can’t remember the exact date but he did again come back to my office. Repeatedly, he would come in, I would either see him and tell him immediately, ‘You’re not allowed to be here. Go away.’ And, he often would go away.
“Sometimes he wouldn’t go away. One time I rang a colleague who had their office next door, and again it was a little bit embarrassing because I wanted to keep this quiet, I was on a temporary contract at the time and this was a senior professor.”
Aoibhinn told a small number of colleagues what was going on: “I had to expand that as I felt more and more unsafe, I guess. That colleague came out and told him he wasn’t allowed to be there.”
1.Sexual harassment in academia is a serious and systemic issue that is too often left unchecked. I spoke with @IrishTimes about my experience of sexual harassment by a colleague @ucddublin
1/n https://t.co/SOryHh47sY— Aoibhinn Ní Shúilleabháin (@aoibhinn_ni_s) September 5, 2020
“It just didn’t stop. Eventually, I just was working in my office locked because I couldn’t afford him barging in because it would just take it over the whole day because after an incident would happen it took me so long to try and get my headspace back into actually doing my work again. It was just too much.
“I didn’t come in at weekends. I didn’t stay late, because I didn’t want to be walking across campus either to the bus or to my car late at night. I had my phone ready to call the emergency numbers, keys in hand in case anyone would attack you.”
In April 2017, Aoibhinn reported Prof Braun to the Gardaí in Donnybrook: “It kind of started to ramp up, and it felt like it was really getting out of hand. And at that point, I was so afraid, my nerves were just gone I couldn’t deal with it anymore.
“I’d also just got engaged, and I really was having such a lovely time being engaged, it’s such a happy time. To have my work really bring me down, I just couldn’t take it anymore.”
Professor Braun was barred from having any contact with Aoibhinn for five years following a court case last year.
“It was so nice to hear that, that it had gone through a process, and that at the other end division was an outcome that couldn’t be denied,” she said.
While on maternity leave in 2018, Aoibhinn decided to make a formal complaint about Prof Braun to UCD: “I asked myself continuously why didn’t I make that formal complaint sooner.
“It was only one day where I realised, ‘Hold on, I have made a complaint to the guards about this but I haven’t actually made a complaint formally to my university’.
“And then I realised how ridiculous it was. So I reported that. Because the court case was going on at that time where it hadn’t concluded, that formal complaint had to be paused until I came back.
“This was all part of the process, that when I came back to UCD from my maternity leave in December last year I really wanted to make sure that there would be changes made so that nobody else would have to go through the same thing.”
Everyone deserves to study or work in a safe environment & we need to have conversations and cultural change in order to properly address this problem 2/n
— Aoibhinn Ní Shúilleabháin (@aoibhinn_ni_s) September 5, 2020
Aoibhinn said that UCD’s policy put emphasis on informal mediation: “That is just not appropriate for harassment. Harassment is all about power. He wanted to be in a room with me. I couldn’t be in a room with him because I felt unsafe.”
Higher Education Minister Simon Harris called for all institutions to review their policies currently in place relating to harassment following Aoibhinn’s bravery speaking out.
“But I want to say to that, though, is you can have bright shiny new policies and procedures, but unless everyone knows what they are, and unless the cultures are changed to help people actually first of all, disclose what is happening to them, so that they can get support, and then maybe complain if they wish to.”
While 3rd level institutions are now working to review and revise their policies & procedures, these should be trauma-informed and person-centred with the wellbeing and safety of the individuals involved of paramount consideration. 10/n
— Aoibhinn Ní Shúilleabháin (@aoibhinn_ni_s) September 5, 2020
After opening up about her experience, Aoibhinn received an apology from UCD president Professor Andrew Deeks – who said in a statement: “I am greatly saddened that one of our colleagues experienced such traumatic events over an extended period, and I apologise to Aoibhinn on behalf of UCD.
“I also apologise to other colleagues and students who have suffered such experiences while in our care.
“Bullying, harassment, sexual harassment or sexual misconduct have no place in UCD, and we are already working to strengthen our current policies with a number of measures.
“We are proposing a core procedural shift in how such matters are dealt with, which is to establish the option for the university to instigate an investigation in the absence of a formal complaint (currently the university can only investigate where there is a formal complaint).”
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