Abuse of power, discrimination and sexual harassment in a university setting is not an isolated problem, but a hidden and pervasive form of discrimination – unfortunately, it is not the only form of discrimination. We would like to encourage students (but also doctoral candidates, researchers, fellows, or other members of the department) to report any incident of sexual, queerphobic, racist, religious or any other discrimination, harassment or violence. We will do our best to listen and decide together with you how to deal with the complaints carefully and with confidentiality.

If you experience or witness an incident of discrimination, harassment or violence, or have done so in the past, there are official contact points for you to turn to: you could either turn to one of the university’s centers against sexualised discrimination and violence (see links below) or for the MA Global History: Minu Haschemi Yekani or Franziska Exeler are the faculty members available. Do not hesitate to contact any of them. 

They will handle every conversation and report with absolute confidentiality and you will be treated with respect and compassion. If you wish, they will assist you in reporting the incident(s) and/or point you towards other resources in (or outside) the university. If you don’t want to make a report and just need someone to talk to, they are available as confidants to make sure you feel supported and heard.

There are the following official institutions at both universities that could help:

• Frauenbeauftragte FU (and their list of counselling services)

• Frauenbeauftragte HU

While we hope you will turn to someone at the university for support, we know that there might be reasons why you might decide not to. In this case, we encourage you to speak to a confidant and to get in touch with other counseling centers.

• Here you find an overview of non-university counseling points and external information centers in Berlin.

There are various facilities both on and off campus that offer important resources (with a focus on sexual discrimination :

• This flyer in German and English provides information about facilities on the FU Campus.

• This flyer in German provides information about facilities on the HU Campus.

*We try to keep the site as up-to-date as possible, but if the information is outdated, essential content is missing, or links do not work, we would be grateful if you could send a message to globalhistory@fu-berlin.de.