**About the Editors**

**Heather Piper** Entering academic research following a career in Social Work, individually and with colleagues Heather Piper is responsible for over 40 refereed journal articles and a substantial number of monographs and edited collections. Her work is characterised by a contrarian perspective on mainstream approaches to a variety of issues, including citizenship education, animal abuse and human violence, women and violence, false allegations, intergenerational touch and *in loco parentis* relationships in the context of extreme concern around child abuse and protection, and ethical issues relating to such concerns.

**Else-Marie Buch Leander** is close to finishing a PhD on the unintended cultural, institutional, social, and discursive consequences of the current significant fear of child sexual abuse (CSA) in western societies. She particularly focuses on changes in practice in childcare institutions, the stigmatization of male childcare staff and the problematization of children's nudity and doctor games.

## **Preface to "Challenging Academia: A Critical Space for Controversial Social Issues"**

The call for papers for this Special Issue was intended to attract authors who may have been prevented from or are fearful of researching, speaking, or writing on certain topics. Increasingly in recent years (and perhaps in some societies more than others) there have been many instances of "no platforming" in academic arenas, often supported by social media campaigns against some alleged "offence". Such instances include individuals and groups with a particular commitment and/or self-interest who have sought to silence academics, and others who may seek to question their particular view of a controversial issue; this has been especially evident in matters concerning gender and transgender individuals. Examples of such silencing include: Rachel Ara, a feminist artist, was due to talk at Oxford Brookes University (UK) in 2019, but her talk was cancelled as she was condemned for being a Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist (TERF); Selina Todd, a Professor of Modern History, and others, have faced petitions for them to be sacked from Oxford University (UK) for being critical of gender self-identification, and were accused of being transphobic [1].

In some instances, journal referees and reviewers can exercise a form of censorship, as senior academics resist challenges to particular orthodoxies that they have a direct interest in protecting as the mainstream approach. Such cases of censoring have included the defence of concepts such as the cycle of abuse, i.e., the inevitability that those who harm animals when young will harm people when older, or that societal factors will always trump genetics—a contentious area, but one that is worth exploring, especially in relation to health issues. In some cases, powerful and well-resourced organisations with a particular self-interest exercise pressure on the academy and practitioners to ensure that certain behaviours prevail (e.g., some child care charities, unions etc who advocate that teachers, sport coaches, and child care workers must not touch children, even young ones in their care, or must touch them only in prescribed ways), this has been articulated in the US context by Johnson [2], and the UK by Piper et al. [3,4] and now by Buch-Leander et al. (see this Special Issue). Similarly, research applications frequently have to be reviewed by practitioners who hold particular views and who can prevent certain research from taking place by both negative reviews and/or the withholding of funds.

Beyond such actions based, at least in part, on personal, professional, or organisational self-interest, many restrictive trends have been explained as a consequence of identity politics, and the relatively new understanding that if someone says they experience something as true, or offensive, then this cannot be challenged. As a result, disagreements on secular issues are conceived in quasi-religious terms, with harsh outcomes for perceived "heretics." In response to such silencing, a group in the USA, the Heterodox Academy, has been established, with a focus on achieving viewpoint diversity, seeking to encourage academics to confront these issues. In the UK, *The Journal of Controversial Ideas* has been launched, which aims to publish papers submitted pseudonymously, "in order to protect [authors] from threats to their careers or physical safety". However, some regard such anonymity as a retrograde step which could become part of the problem rather than the solution.

We should acknowledge that this an arena of public perception and debate where certainty is hard to achieve, where grey areas proliferate, and in which participants will have very different perceptions and understandings. Further, we would not claim that the perceived problem derives from only one source, and there is certainly no basis for holding either "the left" or "the right" responsible. Some commentators who would place themselves in the latter category may complain that "woke warriors" are "snowflakes" who seek to restrict open debate and scholarship, but may engage or collude in restrictive behaviour of their own, for instance, against those who seek to explore and highlight the degree to which the prosperity of many western democracies is based on wealth derived from slavery and self-interested colonialism. However, we believe there is a difference between situations where the substantial majority of expert opinion judges a particular area of work and argumen<sup>t</sup> (e.g., climate change denial) to be wholly beyond the pale, and where particular contributions are silenced through the actions of relatively small interest and pressure groups who manage to punch above their weight through single-minded moral outrage or disproportionate media coverage. Against this challenging background, this edition aims to help expand debate in "silenced" areas, and tackle areas that have been subject to "no platforming" or biased reviewing, and to challenge and intervene in defensive academic and professional practices resulting from fear.

The brief was necessarily eclectic and inclusive, but we were specifically hoping to attract papers addressing issues including "no platforming" (how can this be challenged and discouraged in so-called democracies?); transgender issues (e.g., should young children be encouraged to seek medical interventions? Should teachers and care workers be instructed to call young children "they"?); #metoo (has this movement had any negative consequences for women? Does it encourage vulnerability and victimhood and, if so, is this a price worth paying? Despite some good this movement has brought, has it also damaged men and the process of justice? Has it frozen sexual relations between the sexes?); national narratives (critical and/or revisionist accounts of, e.g., colonialism; is it appropriate to rename historic buildings and remove "offensive" public monuments?). Many of these issues have gathered publicity and pace in recent years.

To some extent, we were unsuccessful in attracting papers addressing such controversies, in spite of some direct targeting of authors we knew had raised and debated these issues, to their detriment. The fear factor was perhaps even greater even than we had expected. While preparing this preface, we noticed a timely and powerful article [5] which problematised the trend in some jurisdictions towards conflating sex and 'gender identity', thus removing sex as a discrete political and legal concept. It has profound consequences; when words change meaning or are conflated, concepts vanish. The anti-science denial of the difference between sex and 'gender identity' raises many problems. Women's oppression has been 'on the basis of sex', prompting the fight for sex-based rights which become harder to defend if permitted terminology erases women's material reality. Gender neutral terms cannot erase biology, but they can remove the analytical tools to understand and address it. In the UK cases of sexual abuse against children by women doubled between 2015 and 2019, from 1.5% to 3% of all cases, but around 38% of sexual offenders in women's prisons are transwomen. There are surely some fertile research areas here!

We did, however, attract a range of papers covering a number of areas (see below), and characterised by a broad international focus. While, on the face of it, many of these papers were less controversial than we had anticipated, nevertheless, a key theme emerged in many: there is often a clear and identifiable (yet unacknowledged) contradiction between key practices in various professional and institutional settings and what is either normally expected, formally required or endorsed by the relevant professions or institutions, or even legal in the relevant national context. For example, it is an expectation that graduate and post-graduate study will include an element of criticality in order to reach the required level of scholarship, ye<sup>t</sup> there are certain topics and perspectives being excluded from such academic scrutiny (see the published papers for examples).

With some submitted papers which did attempt to address controversial areas, we had our own difficulties at the reviewing stage. At least one excellent paper was rejected; it challenged Sweden's

response to the Covid virus and was clearly deemed heretical by one reviewer who considered it in mid-2020. However, the early, low-key response to the pandemic in Sweden is now acknowledged as flawed even at the governmental level. A paper that was eventually published attracted diametrically opposed reviewer's comments, ranging from "the project [was] poorly conceived and executed" (and this reviewer additionally raised confidential ethical concerns) to "I would like to express my appreciation . . . in which critical thinking is applied to both the training and the method of the proper discipline of [named discipline]". Another paper, also eventually published, attracted two very positive sets of reviewers' comments, including one who stated that the paper was addressing a previously taboo area, but a third which claimed "the insufficiency of the text is of such a degree and nature that no revision will make it fit for a publication in an academic context". While differing reviewer's opinions are always to be expected, the extent and severity of the gatekeeping for this Special Issue was greater than any experienced previously by the editors.

These difficulties, when viewed in retrospect and with the aid of the analytic overview proffered by Laurent Dubreuil in his post-scriptum, become easier to understand. The extent to which questions of identity now pervade understanding and debates within and beyond the academy can hardly be over-stated. Indeed, as he demonstrates, the consequences of the narrowing politics of identity can be discerned even in areas of research, policy, and practice where issues of identity are not immediately obvious. In combination with longer-standing restrictive practices, based on inflexibility, defensiveness, and sometimes self-interest, this reality suggests a difficult future experience for academics and researchers determined to swim against the tide of mainstream assumptions and opinions.

However, to end on a more optimistic note, it has been widely noted that, over time, things that seem set in stone do change as, in the words of Plato, "All is flux: nothing stays still". Similarly, Leonard Cohen keeps us cheerful with his reminder that 'There is a crack, a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in. . . " We hope that change and illumination is not too slow in coming to many contested areas, and that academic debate from all perspectives is encouraged for the good of us all.
