Tough lesson for university
Irony can be delicious. Here’s one particularly tasty example: Hundreds of school children, ranging in age from pre-school through to high school, are censured each year for inappropriate sexual behaviour, harassment and abuse.
Punishments range from being stood down and excluded to expulsion. Some are prosecuted for particularly serious transgressions.
But in one of our highest centres of learning, students are the victims of alleged harassment and abuse, even stalking, and it appears their claims, supported by others, are practically ignored.
Many readers may roll their eyes at some of the extremes of the MeToo movement and its sister act, Time’s Up. There is a sense that, in shining a light on the wrongdoing of the past and present, we have sometimes been looking in the wrong places.
The notion and nuance of sexism can be confusing and lost in multiple folds of grey. But the actions of a tutor at Victoria University, if true, are neither grey nor confusing.
The university may be struggling with a campaign for a new name and identity but there is nothing ambiguous about the severity of the groping and harassment alleged: outside the capital city campus it would be regarded as potentially criminal and possibly prosecuted as such.
It is extraordinary that the alleged victims have no idea if their complaints were listened to, let alone considered. It is equally dumbfounding that the tutor remains in a position of power over people who made such complaints, and with apparently unfettered access to other female students. University bosses assure us there has been ‘‘remedial action’’, but the victims have no idea what that is and are struggling to see the evidence of it. At the very least, in this case, it appears justice has not been seen, which means justice has not been done.
Even more surprising and worrying is the realisation that the university has no formal protocols for dealing with sexual harassment and just one reference to sexual misconduct in its staff conduct policy.
Media firm Stuff, like so many other companies and institutions around the country and beyond, has clear guidelines on responsibilities around sexual harassment and misconduct; just as clear are the consequences for anyone who signs up to that agreement.
The unflinching focus of the MeToo and Time’s Up campaigns has provided extra force to those agreements and the culture it promotes. As the legal profession has discovered, as well as a large number of powerful, high-profile men, the time is up for excuses; the nudge and wink won’t work any more.
It appears that, as individuals, we are getting the message; each of us now has a much clearer idea of what is expected of us. Issues within the Catholic Church, our legal profession and now universities suggest that it is the institutions that are tone deaf. Especially, and ironically, those who would espouse the merits of tradition, values and culture. It is also ironic that one of the country’s premier universities should find itself so far behind the cultural curve, so short of the knowledge necessary to operate in a modern, professional world.
As the legal profession has discovered, as well as a large number of powerful, high-profile men, the time is up for excuses; the nudge and wink won’t work anymore.